CHAPTER SIX

CHINA, PERCEIVED POWER

ANTÓNIO MARQUES BESSA

1

Introduction

In the opinion of several analysts in the West, China has become a
dangerous foe, while for some others is seen as a potential ally. Only a few
geopolitical analysts and strategists have been dedicating serious and due
attention to the fact that China is still an emerging power that is trying to
obtain recognition from the other greatest world powers. The People’s
Republic is not yet a great global power. Its huge population is not
urbanized (51% are still organized in small agglomerations) and if China
has a favorable ratio (75%) in terms of its population between 16 and 65
years of age, this only supports those who consider this as a possibility for
the rise of an immense and cheap labor force.
Those who understand China as the next superpower, like William
Overholt (1993),^2 were rushed in assuming that what they were seeing was
some kind of skewed stage of economic growth. As the American
economist Walter W. Rostow explained in his historical model of
economic growth, political power cannot break the mandatory stages of
growth.^3 Even Peter Arkadevich Stolypin (1862-1911), in order to
modernize the dominant agrarian structure of the Russian production had
begun, as the chief of government of Imperial Russia, by reforming land

(^1) Doc. Antonio Marques Bessa, PhD., is currently a Full Professor at the
University of Lisbon, teaching both Geopolitics and Foreign Policies of Great
Powers. Doc. Bessa is the Vice-President of the research center Orient Institute,
and he is now developing a study about the State of India.
(^2) Overholt, The Rise of China. How Economic Reform is creating a New
Superpower.
(^3) Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non Communist Manifesto.