Emergence as a Global Economic Power } 675
many of which had high birth rates and therefore large young populations
that needed to be employed, proved to be good customers for Chinese in-
frastructure and development projects. Many developing countries that had
struggled for decades to industrialize (e.g., Brazil, Argentina, India, Egypt)
began to fear that their domestic industrial base was being “hollowed out”
by cheap Chinese imports.^1 Sometimes those countries were exporters of raw
materials to China while importing Chinese manufactured goods, thereby
producing a classic pattern of “dependency” that troubled many in the de-
veloping countries. China’s trade boomed, especially with its neighbors. By
the second decade of the twenty-first century, China was the leading trading
partner with virtually all its neighbors. Countries neighboring China were
increasingly drawn into its economic orbit.
Millions of young Chinese began to go abroad to seek fortune, in Africa,
the Middle East, or Latin America, where modest capital might go some way.
Countries around the world offered commercial opportunities to young, am-
bitious Chinese with a degree of commercial acumen and capital. In China,
competition was often intense and profit margins low. Foreign markets some-
times offered greater opportunity. Adventuresome Chinese entrepreneurs
often bore great hardship and risk, but sometimes their efforts succeeded and
they prospered. Some writers have suggested that this sort of raw commercial
drive was once possessed by young Americans or British in earlier eras when
those nations opened commercial networks around the world.^2
As China expanded its imports and exports, protection of the sea lines
of communication (SLOC) over which that trade flowed gained importance.
Greater emphasis was given to improving China’s naval capability to safe-
guard China’s SLOCs. The Indian Ocean, plagued by piracy in both its west-
ern and its eastern flanks and with a potentially hostile India square in its
middle, was a primary area of Chinese concern in this regard. The presence
of larger numbers of Chinese citizens and firms operating in unstable areas
of the world also created new interests for China. Chinese nationals needed
to be evacuated in times of crisis, and Chinese-owned property sometimes
had to be protected.
The most abstract but also important way in which China’s economic rise
impacted its international relations was in terms of its ranking in the power
hierarchy among states. The power capabilities of a state—what Chinese ana-
lysts call “comprehensive national power”—is, partially, a function of overall
economic size, usually measured by gross domestic product; level of indus-
trialization and technology; financial resources; and other economic factors.
At the end of the Mao era, China ranked far below a dozen other countries
in terms of comprehensive national power. That is now no longer the case.
In 2010, China’s GDP surpassed Japan in parity purchasing power (PPP) to
become the number two economy.^3 While China is still far behind Japan
and the European countries in many levels of industrial technology, it has