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By Root 1236 0

economies—Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Portugal—have weathered the political changes that followed and emerged with greater stability and legitimacy. Beijing has faced challenges before and adapted. And even if the regime mismanages this transition, political upheaval and turmoil will not necessarily stop China from growing. Whatever the future of its politics, it is unlikely that China’s emergence onto the world stage will be reversed. The forces fueling its rise will not disappear even if the current regime collapses—or, more likely, splits into factions. After its revolution, France went through two centuries of political crisis, running through two empires, one quasi-fascist dictatorship, and four republics. Yet through the political tumult, it thrived economically, remaining one of the richest countries in the world.

China is hungry for success and this might well be a key reason for its enduring rise. In the twentieth century, after hundreds of years of poverty, the country went through imperial collapse, civil war, and revolution only to find itself in Mao’s hellish version of communism. It lost 38 million people in the Great Leap Forward, a brutal experiment in collectivization. Then it burrowed itself deeper in isolation and destroyed its entire professional and academic class during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike India, which could be proud of its democracy despite slow economic growth, China by the 1970s was bereft of any reason to raise its head high. Then came Deng’s reforms. Today, China’s leaders, businessmen, and people in general have one desire in common: they want to keep moving ahead. They are unlikely to cast aside casually three decades of relative stability and prosperity.

Hiding Its Light

Whatever happens to China internally is likely to complicate life internationally. Its range of strengths—economic, political, military—ensure that its influence extends well beyond its borders. Countries with this capacity are not born every day. The list of current ones—the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia—has gone mostly unchanged for two centuries. Great powers are like divas: they enter and exit the international stage with great tumult. Think of the rise of Germany and Japan in the early twentieth century, or the decline of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in that same period, which produced multiple crises in the Balkans and the messy modern Middle East.

In recent years, that pattern has not quite held. Modern-day Japan and Germany became the world’s second- and third-largest economies but stayed remarkably inactive politically and militarily. And, so far, China has come into its own with little disruption. For the first decade of its development, the 1980s, China did not really have a foreign policy. Or, more accurately, its growth strategy was its grand strategy. Beijing saw good relations with America as key to its development, in part because it wanted access to the world’s largest market and most advanced technology. In the UN Security Council, China usually voted for, or at least abstained from vetoing, American-sponsored resolutions. More broadly, it kept its head down in an effort, as Deng put it, to “hide its light under a bushel.” This policy of noninterference and nonconfrontation mostly persists. With the exception of anything related to Taiwan, Beijing tends to avoid picking a fight with other governments. The focus remains on growth. In his two-and-a-half-hour address to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007, President Hu Jintao addressed economic, financial, industrial, social, and environmental issues in great detail—but neglected foreign policy almost entirely.

Many veteran Chinese diplomats get nervous talking about their country’s rise to power. “It frightens me,” said Wu Jianmin, the president of China’s Foreign Affairs University and a former ambassador to the United Nations. “We are still a poor country, a developing country. I don’t want people to think of us in . . . exaggerated terms.” Xinghai Fang, the deputy CEO of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, spoke in the