China's Pursuit of Peaceful Power Transition

Abstract

Since the beginning of the new millennium, China's rise has been a key phenomenon in the international relations community. Many scholars, pundits, and policy makers have tended to analyze the issue of China's rise by the application of the power transition theory. Given the theoretical proposition that war is most likely when a dissatisfied challenger increases its power as strong as the dominant power and begins to overtake it, the power transition theory is worth applying to the current situation between the US and China. The major objective of this paper is to analyze the possibility of power transition from the US to China. In particular, two sub-issues, including whether China has strategic intention to overtake the US, and whether China's power transition would be peaceful. As a way to prove it, this paper takes a case that China wants to promote its own created the 3rdgeneration Information and Communication Technology standard, TD-SCDMA, into a global standard. Although China initiated to create its own ICT standard mostly for reducing the royalties paid to foreign companies, it has later utilized TD-SCDMA as a symbol that China wants to participate in the global standard making. As a conclusion, this paper proved that China has an intention to the power transition from the US, but that China's power transition will be peaceful, in contrast to the proposition of the power transition theorists that the challenger tend to be violent in the process of power transition.