IV - China

Summary

Singapore, the United States, and India agree only partially on the implications of the rise of China.

AMERICA

In an essay that goes against much of conventional wisdom, William J. Dobson argues that, rather than treating 11 September 2001 as the iconic inauguration of a new world order, it was New Year's Eve, 1991 that changed the world forever. “It was on that day, far away from any cameras, that the Soviet Union finally threw in the towel, dissolving itself and officially bringing an end to the Cold War.” Comparisons between momentous events are controversial, but there is no doubt that the end of the Cold War was a defining moment for America's place in the world.

That moment was also a defining moment for China because it could unravel Beijing's relationship with Washington, which now, as the sole remaining superpower, was best positioned to either facilitate or constrain China's emergence as a global power. The Sino-American relationship, based on a common opposition to the growth of Moscow's power, had been established in the closing two decades of the Cold War. America's overtures to China — beginning with Kissinger's secret trips there in July and October 1971, and culminating in President Richard Nixon's visit in February 1972 — had signified the difference that China could make in a world situation marked by the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve a stable balance of power through détente. Beijing's estrangement from Moscow had made it a natural partner for a Washington that had been seeking to reverse the strategic defensive into which Soviet advances had pushed it. The Sino-American rapprochement, which had received a tremendous boost with China's decision in 1978 to modernize and open up its economy to the world, had set the tone for a new era in international, and particularly Asian, affairs that had affected the outcome of conflicts such as the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and Beijing's punitive expedition against Hanoi the following year. Perhaps more than any other country, China had benefited from American choices made in those two decades.