Peaceful Rise of China: Myth or Reality?

Abstract

The ‘rise of China’ discourse involves two critical issues: whether China is rising or has risen? If the answer is yes, will China be a status quo power or a revisionist power? The sustained rapid economic growth in the last three decades seemed to have confirmed the rising trend of China as a potential global power. There is definitely little suspicion about a rising China nowadays and attention is predominantly focused on whether China will be rising peacefully. I doubted the oversimplified assertion on the ‘China rising’ issue. The remarkable economic growth did provide the foundations of China’s rise, but the growth itself was problematic. I would argue from international political economy perspective that the way in which China was integrated into the global economic system enabled its economic ‘success’ in growth terms but blocked its industrialization which was the real foundation of the rise of any great power in modern world history. China’s rhetoric on ‘peaceful rise’ precisely revealed its deepening dependence on the international system dominated by the US, whereby its intentions to sustain current neo-liberalist economic development model for the purpose of legitimation of the authoritarian regime. The paradox is, though China has neither the intention nor the capability to challenge the order of existing international system and does hope to seek a peaceful rise within the international framework, the maintaining of an unprofitable economic growth model, or one of a ‘technologyless industrialization’, will inevitably exacerbate the constraints of market and resource bottlenecks and thus make China’s economic growth hard to sustain. This would heighten tensions and even increase the likelihood of conflicts between China and the developed world which would in turn be destabilizing to the international system within which the US intends to transform China into a responsible stakeholder that will play by the rules. Thus, the so-called ‘peaceful rise’ is nothing but a wishful illusion.