The good old daysFor years, many Asian scholars have painstakingly sought to explain the complexities of China’s inexorable rise, and how its ascent doesn’t necessarily equate to regional hegemony and territorial aggression. Similar to the Clinton administration, which vigorously espoused the integration of China into the global networks of production, many academics presumed that an isolated, poor China would always be more dangerous than a fully integrated one.
Subjecting China to the forces of economic globalisation, many liberal scholars argued, would “tame†its excessive passions, redress its historical grievances, and re-integrate one of the world’s greatest civilisations into the global economy as a legitimate stakeholder. Arguably, this formula worked – at least for some time.
In a span of three decades, China, beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power in the late-1970s, transformed from a pariah state into a pivot of economic dynamism and regional stability in East Asia. To the delight of its troubled neighbours, China played an extremely constructive role during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, refusing to opportunistically revalue its currency to attract Western capital. To the bemusement of almost everyone, communist China soon became history’s most phenomenal model of capitalist expansion, catapulting the country to the pinnacle of the global economic hierarchy.
Beijing’s astute utilisation of low-interest loans and cultural diplomacy, coupled with its low-key foreign policy and calibrated official rhetoric, vastly enhanced China’s cachet of soft power, especially among smaller countries in Southeast Asia as well as developing countries in Africa and Latin America. Neighbouring countries, including Japan and the Philippines, welcomed China’s rise as a positive contribution to the expansion and deepening of trade and investment networks in East Asia.
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