Here's a post of mine from an alternative forum:

Will China upset the apple cart?

There are two ways of looking at the impact of China on the world's geopolitics. The first is to look at China's economic strengths and weaknesses - it is rich in labour but poor in natural resources - and conclude that it is in Beijing's interests for the status quo to continue. If you are reliant on the rest of the world to supply your oil, the raw materials for your factories and - increasingly - the food to feed your population - the argument is that it makes absolutely no sense to upset the global apple cart. Peace and stability create the only conditions in which strong economic growth can be guaranteed.

China, in other words, will pursue the same sort of strategy followed by Germany and - an even closer parallel - Japan in the years after the Second world War.

But that is a bit of a glib parallel. Germany and Japan were both traumatised by crushing military defeat; China is re-merging as a global power after two centuries in which it has punched well below its weight on the international stage. China's economic emergence, coupled with the relative economic decline of Europe, means that we may be going through a re-run of the late 19th and early 20th Century when the European balance of power was disrupted by Germany.

In the public sessions in Davos, China's leaders have been at pains to argue that their country is not an economic superpower and that China's foreign policy - Taiwan apart - will remain low profile. Privately, though, there is evidence of muscles being flexed. China, for example, is not prepared to cede military hegemony in space to the US, and on the economic front occasionally hints that it may diversify its huge foreign currency reserves out of dollars. At present, it is not in China's interests to blow the US economy out of the water, but once China has, say, 20 more years of export-led growth it may be a differrent story.

So, in the short-term, China is not going to upset the apple cart. In the longer run, as Zhou Enlai replied when asked to assess the impact of the French Revolution - it's too early to say.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/larry_elliott/2007/01/china.html

Larry,
I like your analysis __and in particular your comparison of China's strategic situation now with that of Germany or Japan EITHER BEFORE OR AFTER WWII depending on how you look at it!
In the absence of an empire AS ENJOYED BY THE ANGLOPHONES THEN AS NOW the Germans and the Japanese were BOTH dependent on the outside world for both energy (read 'oil') and raw materials to keep the wheels of production moving. Just as it is with China now!
In the interim, that is until the balance of power in trade shifts decisively away from an already floundering US economy, China clearly can't afford to pull the plug on the Americans being too dependent for now on them for markets. A grab for empire in the mode of 1930's Germany and Japan, while understandable given the above, would be ill-advised. The Americans with their consumer-led 'bubble economics' are doing the job for them: let them spend themselves into into a state of having mortgaged their entire economy and ultimately into bankruptcy!

What China DOES NEED TO DO NOW is start flexing its muscles with the aim of disrupting ongoing angloamerican attempts to rejig the composition of the UNSC with the intention of setting in place a new security architecture intended to stabilise the position of this latter joined-at-the-hip couple into the coming years. Specifically it needs to veto any suggestion of UNSC membership for Japan (as a newly validated 'island power' alongside Australia and of course USUK) or India.

This action will have the advantage of rendering the extant UNSC-based security architecture increasingly anachronistic and dysfunctional over an interim period of maybe 15 to 20 years AT WHICH POINT China should then be able to move decisively into a radically trasformed international arena and start asserting itself on terms in accord with its own strategic interests!!
A more immediate area of strategic concern for China (over the next four or five years say) will be the Middle East and in particular the implications of the tensions currently playing out among the three parties to the 'fatal triangle' of USUK, Israel and Iran over Tehran's enrichment ambitions. If for example __and as has already been endorsed by the American Senate__ India, and of course the Israelis, are allowed entry as fully paid-up and validated members of the nuclear club (with UNSC membership for the former already pencilled in as alluded to above!), then the Chinese will have to be vigilant and resolute: no new members on USUK terms UNLESS balanced in a newly conceived grand bargain encompassing the balancing entry of countervailing powers as part of a 21st century 'multipolar world order'.

The logic of this being that in a 21st century multilateral environment the only system of 'checks and balances' the US could conceivably be held in check by __as well as held accountable before__ would be one predicated upon the weight of competing hegemonic forces!!

I have spoken already of my concern with the issue of the IDEOLOGICAL FIT between Kantianism (as in 'perpetual peace' and the telos of ethical universalism) and the current ongoing the angloamerican drive to LEGITIMATE the newly consolidating globalising-cum-homogenising world order on terms compatible with the economic imperatives of THEIR PREDATORY VERSION of capitalism. One front in delegitimating this latter thrust is exposing the lack of credibility in their efforts given the compromised nature of angloamerican motivations in tandem with their extremely dubious track record in observing international law in such matters as preemptive unilateralism, the long history of the CIA's extra-legal interventions in Latin America , ongoing defiance of any UN resolutions not seen as conducive to their interests, recent US assertions of a 'right' to monopolise the militarisation of space etc etc .

For present purposes once it is established that they (USUK) are not capable of observing the RULE OF LAW in the international arena, the theme highlighted here is what are the alternatives available as far as putting in place a WORKABLE SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES is concerned. Also if US-led globalisation as currently constituted is seen as irredeemably a force for the levelling and homogenisation of __indeed for the obliteration of__ cultural difference (the precedent having been set in the 19th century US program of herrenvolk democracy cum persistent BREACHING OF TREATIES entered into with the indigenous 'Indian' population; with in addition long-standing allegations by respected cultural commentators and historians of a de facto policy amounting to systematic extermination having been implemented - see Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for example) then the challenge is posed of how to arrange for a trans-national cultural-cum-institutional order that allows for the co-existence of alternate horizons as to what it amounts to to be human.

Theoretically the increasingly visible tendency towards a moralisation of politics is correlated with what some theorists are calling the eclipse of the political. Chantal Mouffe summarises her explorations of the issue over a long academic career in a recent little pocket book of hers On The Political (Routledge 2005) in which she cites her indebtedness to thinkers of the so-called POST POLITICAL CONDITION of postmodernity. This is something I will return to.

And if, as economist Robert Brenner maintains, the determinate parameters shaping globalisation in its current articulation are largely the product of panicked reactions on the part of the US and Britain (read 'Ronnie and Maggie') to the surprisingly quick reemergence of Germany and Japan as industrial and economic power-houses less than thirty years after WWII __and if further these said panicked reactions were corrrelated with what critics of the neoliberal order term race to the bottom in the area of standards of all kinds__ then clearly we are in a scenario where the hegemony of such fast-encroaching (non!) standards must not be allowed to consolidate themselves under the guise of
moralistically-conceived politico-legal norms.

The USUK project is to get us to internalise an only recently established and largely economically-driven normative framework achieved via their post-war quasi-monopolisation of the multilateral Bretton Woods-cum-UN nexus of institutions; and further to have us subjected to police actions if we __instead seeing jostling great power interests cum competing visions of the Cultural to be at stake__ demur at such internalisation!