19China under current president Xi Jinping
is a global superpower. With the world’s
second-largest economy, a permanent seat
in the United Nations Security Council, a
modernised armed force and an ambitious
space programme, China has the potential
to replace the United States as the greatest
superpower in the future.
China’s quest for great power status had
its origins in Mao Zedong’s era, from the 1950s. By fighting
the US to a standstill during the Korean War (1950–53) and
helping the Vietnamese communists to defeat the French in
1954 and then the Americans, China became a regional power
to be reckoned with. Recognising China’s strategic signifi-
cance, the United States pursued rapprochement with its
former adversary from 1969 onwards, culminating in the
establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979.
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao as China’s
paramount leader, adopted a policy of reform and opening up.
Embracing market forces, Deng opened China to foreign trade
and investment. Notwithstanding the 1989 Tiananmen
Square student protests, which were forcibly suppressed, and
the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc in 1989–91,
which created a siege mentality in Deng, China’s economic
opening continued unabated. The acceleration of globalisation
since the 1990s facilitated China’s integration into the world
economy, particularly after its admission to the World Trade
Organisation in late 2001.
If Deng’s China was an economic superpower in the
making, China under Xi Jinping possesses the attributes of a
global superpower. China is more confident, more ambitious
and more proactive than ever. Xi thinks and acts globally by
seeking to build a “community of shared destiny for mankind”.
The Belt and Road Initiative is an ambitious infrastructure and
investment project that aims to establish trading links across
Eurasia, effectively reviving the old Silk Roads. Though some
western critics see the initiative as China’s ‘debt trap’ – part of
plans to dominate the world – Xi regards it as win-win cooper-
ation that should become the norm of a new world order. How
the reigning superpower, the United States, responds to the
rising China will shape the future of world history.Chi-kwan Mark is senior lecturer in international history at Royal
Holloway, University of London, and author of The Everyday Cold War:
Britain and China 1950–1972 (Bloomsbury, 2017)Chi-kwan Mark“The acceleration of globali-
sation since the 1990s facili-
tated China’s integration
into the world economy”
Pamela Kyle Crossley is professor of Asian and Middle Eastern
studies at Dartmouth College, New HampshireChina has returned to its historical status
as the world’s most influential economy,
but it has never before been anything like a
superpower. Until the 18th century, China
and south Asia accounted for about half of
global GDP, having developed large-scale
unmechanised manufactures that were
exported overland across Eurasia and by
sea throughout the Indian Ocean. China’s
exports of silk, porcelain and tea brought it foreign silver and also
shaped global patterns of transport on land and sea, along with
the new European industries of shipping, insurance and finance.
In the Qing era (1636–1912), China was also one of the
largest land empires of the early modern period, established
through military conquest of Manchuria, Taiwan, Mongolia,
Tibet and eastern Turkestan (now the Xinjiang Uyghur Auton-
omous Region). However, many of these territories were under
indirect rule, as was much of south-west China. This period is
sometimes seen as the height of the ‘Chinese World Order’ or
the ‘tributary system’, believed by many to have given China
central and superior status in a voluntary transnational system
of harmony and prosperity. Yet this was a mirage: for the most
part, China did not insist upon hegemony over these regions,
and purported emissary states often did not fulfil that role.
Qing preferences for indirect rule of its own territories and
a complete lack of regularity in its relationships with ostensible
tributaries were related to the fact that, while Chinese rulers
were content to collect the profits from international trade based
on their goods, they never attempted to construct or control
networks for the transport of those goods. Instead, European
charter companies – especially the British East India Company- built and profited from the shipping and finance networks
generated by Chinese manufactures and wealth. Unlike Britain
after 1815, imperial China never achieved superpower status
because it never – not in Qing times, nor before – put a priority
on a state large and expensive enough to take the initiative in
social, cultural or industrial transformation.
Only since 1949 has China pursued a scale of government of
society that permits it to compete seriously with Europe, Japan
and the United States, and only in the 21st century will it
credibly claim superpower status. Nothing in Chinese history
indicates how China will conduct itself in such a role.
Pamela Kyle Crossley“Imperial China never
prioritised a state large
enough to effect social or
industrial transformation”
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