Expert answer:China’s Rise to Power, sociology homework help
Answer & Explanation:China vs.docxAfter reading, “China vs. the U.S.: The case for second place”, examine how China’s rise to power compares to other cases in which a rising nation has challenged an existing superpower, such as the American challenge to British hegemony a century ago. Describe the political obstacles that China may face in integrating with an international order that has been dominated by western democracies. Evaluate whether the U.S. should attempt to contain China’s rise through containment or engagement. Your initial post should be at least 250 words in length. Support your claims with examples from required material(s) and/or other scholarly resources, and properly cite any references
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China vs. the U.S.: The Case for Second Place
By Charles Kenny October 13, 2011
It is now a foregone conclusion that China’s economy will become the biggest in the world
sometime very soon. According to the World Bank, the size of China’s economy is $10.1 trillion,
compared with $14.6 trillion for the U.S., based on purchasing power parity (which adjusts
exchange rates to account for the different prices people pay for goods and services across
countries). But China is narrowing the gap in a hurry. Over the past 10 years, the annual real
growth of China’s gross domestic product averaged 10.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent in
the U.S. The Chinese economy increased at an annual rate of 9.6 percent in the first half of 2011,
vs. a rate of less than 1 percent in the U.S. America’s days as top dog of global output are
numbered, at best.
Should we care? People from Thomas Friedman to Niall Ferguson cite the looming change at the
top of the world economic rankings as a bellwether of broader American decline. “We are the
United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification.
They save, invest, and build. We spend, borrow, and patch,” complained Friedman in a recent
New York Times column. And yet having the world’s largest economy isn’t all it’s cracked up to
be—and you need look no further than the history of China and the U.S. to see that. The swelling
size of China’s economy may be a source of pride to the Chinese people, but America is still by
far the better place to live—and will remain so for a long time.
Although economists are skeptical about China’s ability to sustain its current levels of growth,
most agree it is only a matter of a few years before the Middle Kingdom’s 1.3 billion or so
people produce more than the 310 million living in the U.S. That means history is repeating
itself. The U.S.’s reign as the largest world economic power began a little before 1890, when it
supplanted the previous global giant: China. According to data from the late Angus Maddison, an
economic historian at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, China boasted the largest
economy in the world all the way back to 1500. Prior to the 20th century, its run at No. 1 was
interrupted only for a brief period around 1700, when India took a turn at the top.
And yet during those five centuries when its economy was the world’s biggest, China was never
even close to being the world’s wealthiest country. Italy was almost twice as rich in 1500, the
Netherlands almost three times as rich in 1700, and the U.K. six times as rich by 1870. Today,
though the GDPs of the U.S. and China are roughly equal, the average person in China lives on
an income that can buy only 16 percent of the goods and services of the average person in the
U.S., and it will take decades for that gap to close. If you’re an American feeling down about
losing top economy status, go take a holiday in Guizhou, a poor western Chinese province where
incomes are about one-fortieth as high as the U.S. average. You’ll feel a lot better.
Nevertheless, pessimists warn that being knocked off the top spot could still have all sorts of ill
effects for the U.S. Being the biggest economy, they argue, has been vital to American prosperity
because, since the close of World War II, the dollar has been predominant in international
financial reserve holdings, allowing the U.S. to borrow and trade in its own currency. Arvind
Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicts that as China’s
economy overtakes the U.S.’s, so too will the relative importance of the renminbi. He argues that
within 10 years, the renminbi could replace the dollar as the world’s largest reserve currency.
But the impact of that change might be less than dramatic. It’s probably true that if the dollar
loses its dominance, American companies will have to start hedging against exchange rate risk,
and government borrowing might become a little more expensive. But foreign companies already
have to hedge currency risk and yet still manage to compete, while less borrowing would surely
be a good thing for the U.S. in the medium run. And a renminbi whose value rises—as it will
have to if it is to become a reserve currency—should help even up the U.S.-China trade balance.
What China will soon discover is that being the world’s biggest economy and holding its favored
reserve currency have little bearing on a country’s actual economic performance. For proof, just
look at the U.S. Between 1890, when America became the world’s largest economy, and 2008,
the U.S.’s annualized per capita income growth was about a quarter of a percentage point lower
than China’s. America’s growth performance during those 118 years ranked just 15th out of 37
countries for which the University of Groningen’s Maddison has data—behind economies
including Denmark, Canada, Sweden, and (wait for it) Greece. Even a number of really small
countries have done better than America. Luxembourg has a GDP four-tenths of a percent the
size of the U.S. economy, about the same output as the state of Delaware. And yet it is more than
twice as rich per person as the U.S.
For a while in the 1940s, the U.S. showed that the combination of being the biggest and richest
power can yield dividends—it was decisive in defeating two other world powers in war and
making a global peace largely of America’s own design. And yet being the planet’s largest
economy encouraged, or perhaps obliged, the U.S. to try to act as the world’s policeman, which
even the most unrepentant neoliberal would acknowledge has been a burden as much as a
blessing. Not least, it meant that more American soldiers died abroad last year than troops from
any other nation, according to data from Sweden’s Uppsala University. Meanwhile, U.S. military
spending now accounts for more than two-fifths of the world total, and it sucks up a larger
percentage of GDP than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development.
If anything, supremacy confers even fewer benefits on the world’s dominant power than it did a
century ago. Thanks in large part to the postwar international system the U.S. drove to create,
any country’s ability to use size to strike unfair trading arrangements is considerably constrained
by the requirements of the World Trade Organization. And China will likely be even more
limited—because its economy is so reliant on exports, it needs the multilateral provisions of the
WTO even more than does the U.S.
Of course, it must be nice for President Barack Obama to still be the guy at the Group of 20
afterparty who everyone wants to talk to. And it’s surely a boost to the ego for the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations to sit behind a country nameplate that is permanently screwed
to the table in the Security Council. At the same time, being No. 1 makes you a target of abuse
and criticism. Perhaps an America that is No. 2 would be more popular. Country polls conducted
for the BBC suggest that America’s image abroad has improved markedly since 2007, when it
came out only marginally ahead of North Korea and Iran, though it’s still way behind less
powerful countries such as Canada and Germany. Meanwhile, China’s popularity ratings have
been falling since 2005, perhaps in part a reflection of its growing economic muscle.
Ultimately, the best argument for Americans to let go of the idea of being No. 1 is that in the
areas that really matter, we aren’t. When it comes to measures of the broader quality of life, the
U.S. ranks in the bottom half of the OECD club of rich countries on such health indicators as life
expectancy. It ranks around 15th worldwide in terms of the proportion of people who say they
are happy, according to Jaime Díez Medrano, director of the World Values Survey archive. That
puts the U.S. behind a bunch of small economies, including Norway, Ireland, Singapore,
Switzerland, and (once again) Luxembourg.
On the bright side, the U.S. still outperforms China on almost every conceivable quality-of-life
indicator, including happiness polls (where China is in 70th place). The average American lives
five years longer than the average Chinese person, while under-five mortality rates are less than
half the Chinese levels. And though you may take a dim view of the abilities of Congress and the
President to manage the economy—or even manage their way out of a paper bag—they remain
the voters’ to throw out. The same cannot yet be said of the leadership of the Communist Party
of China. So rather than wring their hands over the decline of the U.S.’s relative economic
weight, Americans should remember the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and focus on
preserving the country’s advantages in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness instead.
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