Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [150]
Only tolerance can achieve that result. As we return to the twenty-first century in the next chapter, we will see that the three most discussed challengers to U.S. hegemony today—including China and the European Union—are learning this lesson. Can any of these societies gain sufficient wealth and power to bring America's unipolar world dominance to an end?
ELEVEN
China, the European Union, and India
in the Twenty-first Century
We've had a couple hundred bad years, but now we're back.
— SHANGHAI RESIDENT
[The United States] can bribe, bully, or impose its will almost anywhere in the world, but when its back is turned, its potency wanes. The strength of the EU, conversely, is broad and deep: once sucked into its sphere of influence, countries are changed forever.
— MARK LEONARD, Why Europe Will Run the
Twenty-first Century
If international public opinion polls are correct, the majority of world citizenry would prefer to see the end of American world dominance and the restoration of a more balanced constellation of global power.1 This chapter considers the three most frequently mentioned challengers to U.S. dominance: China, the European Union, and India. Interestingly, each of these powers has already been pursuing its own distinctive version of strategic tolerance. Although their models of tolerance are very different from that of the United States—and, in China's case, at first glance barely recognizable as tolerance at all—they go a surprisingly long way toward explaining the enormous successes of these rising powers.
CHINA ASCENDANT
In the January 22, 2007, issue of Time magazine, the journalist Michael Elliott concluded his cover story on “the world's next great power” as follows: “[I]n this century, the relative power of the U.S. is going to decline, and that of China is going to rise. That cake was baked long ago.” Elliott also reported on a 2006 survey conducted in China, in which 87 percent of the Chinese respondents felt that China “should take a greater role in world affairs” and more than 50 percent “believed China's global influence would match that of the U.S. within a decade.” According to Kenneth Lieberthal, senior director at the National Security Council's Asia desk under President Bill Clinton, “The Chinese wouldn't put it this way themselves. But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China's century.”2
Can China become the world's next hyperpower? Any way you look at it, China's economic transformation over the last quarter century has been breathtaking. In 1978, China's per capita income was $230, among the world's lowest, and its growth was stagnant. In terms of development, China was comparable to Indonesia and Tanzania. For the last thirty years, however, China's economy has been expanding at the phenomenal rate of 9.5 percent annually, and today no other country is shaking up the global economy like China.
In 2003, China overtook the United States as the most popular destination for foreign direct investment. No longer is China dominant merely in labor-intensive sectors like toy, shoe, and clothing manufacturing. Today, China is the number-one producer of cell phones, television sets, and DVD players. Significantly, China is now moving into the manufacture of computer chips, automobiles, jet engines, and military weaponry—sectors typically dominated by advanced economies. It is also the number-one consumer of cell phones and consumer electronics and will probably be the number-one consumer of automobiles in the not-distant future. By 2030, according to some experts, China's economy will be three times larger than that of the United States.3
What's more, on the international trade front, China is already giving the current hyperpower a run for its money. While the United States continues to battle increasing global hostility, China has quietly