" Assessing China's rapidly changing role on the international stage China is again undergoing a period of significant transition. Internally, China's leaders are addressing challenges to the economy and other domestic issues after three decades of dramatic growth and reforms. President Xi Jinping and other leaders also are refashioning foreign policy to better fit what they see as China's place in the world. This has included a more proactive approach to trade and related international economic affairs, a more vigorous approach to security matters, and a more focused engagement on international cultural and educational affairs. In this volume, China specialists from around the world explore key issues raised by a changing China’s interaction with a changing world. They chronicle China’s emergence as a more capable actor whose engagement is reshaping international affairs in many dimensions. These include: global currency and trading systems; patterns of cooperation and competition in technological innovation; economic and political trends in the developing world; the American-led security order in the Asia-Pacific region; the practice of international military and humanitarian intervention; the use of naval power; the role of international law in persistent territorial and maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas; the international human rights regime; the circulation of Chinese talent trained abroad; a more globalized film industry; and programs to reshape global cultural awareness about China through educational initiatives. Across these diverse areas, China’s capacity—and desire—to influence events and outcomes have risen markedly. The results so far are mixed, and the future trajectory remains uncertain. But across the wide range of issues addressed in this book, China has become a major and likely an enduring participant. "

" From cooperation to a new cold war: is this the future for today's two great powers? U.S. policy toward China is at an inflection point. For more than a generation, since the 1970s, a near-consensus view in the United States supported engagement with China, with the aim of integrating China into the U.S.-led international order. By the latter part of the 2010s, that consensus had collapsed as a much more powerful and increasingly assertive China was seen as a strategic rival to theUnited States. How the two countries tackle issues affecting the most important bilateral relationship in the world will significantly shape overall international relations for years to come. In this timely book, leading scholars of U.S.-China relations and China's foreign policy address recent changes in American assessments of China's capabilities and intentions and consider potential risks to international security, the significance of a shifting international distribution of power, problems of misperception, and the risk of conflicts. China's military modernization, its advancing technology, and its Belt and Road Initiative, as well as regional concerns, such as the South China Sea disputes, relations with Japan, and tensions on the Korean Peninsula, receive special focus. "

The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.

The Internet and digital media have become conduits and locales where millions of Chinese share information and engage in creative expression and social participation. This book takes a cutting-edge look at the impacts and implications of an increasingly networked China. Eleven chapters cover the terrain of a complex social and political environment, revealing how modern China deals with digital media and issues of censorship, online activism, civic life, and global networks. The authors in this collection come from diverse geographical backgrounds and employ methods including ethnography, interview, survey, and digital trace data to reveal the networks that provide the critical components for civic engagement in Chinese society. The Chinese state is a changing, multi-faceted entity, as is the Chinese public that interacts with the new landscape of digital media in adaptive and novel ways. Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement situates Chinese internet in its complex, generational context to provide a full and dynamic understanding of contemporary digital media use in China. This volume gives readers new agendas for this study and creates vital new signposts on the way for future research. .

In Middle Class Shanghai, Cheng Li, who grew up in Shanghai during the oppressive years of Mao's Cultural Revolution, argues that American policymakers must not lose sight of the expansive dynamism and diversity in present-day China. The caricature of China as a monolithic Communist apparatus set on exporting its ideology and development model is simplistic and misguided. Drawing on empirical research in the realms of higher education, avant-garde art, architecture, and law, Li's unique study highlights the strong, constructive impact of bilateral exchanges. Combining eclectic human stories with striking new data analysis, Li's book addresses the possibility that the development of China's class structure and cosmopolitan culture--exemplified and led by Shanghai--could provide a force for reshaping U.S.-China engagement. Both countries should build upon the deep cultural and educational exchanges that have bound them together for decades. Li concludes that U.S. .

From a Western point of view, the policy of economic engagement with China has failed. A rapid rise in living standards in China has helped legitimize and strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s power. How did Western, market-orientated, property-owning, liberal democracies go from being in a position of complete global hegemony in the early 1990s to the current crisis of confidence and loss of moral foundation? This book tells the story of the most successful trading nation of the early twenty-first century. It looks at how the Communist Party of China has retained and cemented its monopoly on political power since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. It is the most extraordinary economic success story of our time and it has reshaped the geopolitics not just of Asia but of the world. As China has come to dominate global manufacturing, its economic power has been translated into political power, and the West now has a global rival that is politically antithetical to liberal values. The supply-side deflation from allowing 750 million low-cost workers into the global trading system combined with the policy of inflation targeting by Western central banks has led to falling real incomes for many in the West and rising asset prices that have benefited the few. Worse still, China’s mercantilist model is now held up as a viable economic alternative. To have a fighting chance of protecting the freedoms of liberal democracies, it is of the utmost importance that we understand how the policy of indulgent engagement with China has affected Western society in recent years. Only then can the global trading system be reoriented for the mutual benefit of all nations.

This book explores China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean as a case study of its broader effort to use commercial tools and instruments of state to create a global economic order that functions to its benefit, while neutralizing challenges from institutions, states, and others that would oppose it. Unlike the common representation of the Cold War as a political-military struggle, this work uniquely examines China’s current efforts as primarily seeking to dominate global value chains, with supporting political, technological, and military components. In this regard, it both leverages and goes beyond works based on dependency theory, which has played a key role in the academic and popular discourse in the region. The book examines evidence for China’s economically-focused strategy within Latin America and the Caribbean, including the interrelationships and coordination between China’s activities in different sectors, and between commercial, political, and other dimensions in the region. It further looks at the supporting role played by a diverse range of Chinese initiatives, from China’s Belt and Road initiative, to people-to-people diplomacy, soft power, security engagement, and the PRC struggle with Taiwan for diplomatic recognition in the region, among others. The book highlights the implications for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the U.S. whose prosperity and security is intimately tied to the region.