China’s rise, the USA and global order: Contested perspectives and an alternative approach

Abstract

China’s recent economic ascendance and its probable impact on the post-war global order have divided China watchers or sinologists into two broad opposing camps – the school of alarmists and the school of deniers. While the alarmist school exaggerates China’s rise as the beginning of a new Sino-centric world order, the denial school rejects the potential of a rising China to challenge and replace the post-war global order shaped and led by the USA. This review essay maps out the major arguments of both camps, critiques their conceptual and methodological shortcomings, highlights the missing points in the debates on China’s projected economic preeminence and emphasizes an alternative approach to account for the rise of Chinese power. It argues that the differing scholarly views on the impacts of China’s economic rise leave us nowhere close to having definitive ideas about China’s actual power status and impacts. Furthermore, the debates are marked by a general lack of comparative analyses on the global socio-economic and political conditions of China’s rise in the modern context and that of imperial Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany in the late 19th century and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is where more research is required to clearly understand the rise of China in the contemporary world.