I noted with interest that, soon after taking power at the 18th Party Congress, China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, ceremoniously led the new Politburo Standing Committee to view a museum exhibit in Beijing entitled, The Road to Renewal (复兴之路). It chronicled China’s descent into the “Century of Humiliation” following the Opium War and, since 1949,its subsequent revival and rise to power under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. Perhaps this visit was Xi Jinping’s symbolic pledge to the Chinese people to rectify past injustices and return China to the unchallenged primacy it once had in Asia before the arrival of Western imperialism.
However, in the past few years China’s effort to reclaim a place of honor and leadership in Asia has led it into quarrels and conflict with neighbors. Why? It is not because China’s neighbors oppose China’s peaceful rise. On the contrary, they have welcomed China’s rise up to now because it has brought prosperity to all. The reason for tension between China and its neighbors today is that new zero-sum territorial and security competitions are coming to the fore and beginning to outweigh the win-win game of regional economic development in the minds of Asian leaders. We can point to four rising concerns, and four possible remedies.
First, the rapid growth of China’s naval, air, and rocket forces may be a source of national pride for China, but they make China’s neighbors feel nervous. Hu Jintao’s final report to the 18th Party Congress was not reassuring when he said that China should prepare to “win local wars in an information age.” But local wars would necessarily involve neighbors.