China Joins The World

Each chapter in this volume explores the record of Chinese participation in a specific international issue area. These in-depth and timely studies reveal considerable success--more than most forecasts expected--but the road ahead may prove tougher than the terrain already covered.

For many years, political leaders and analysts have debated the impacts of China’s rise on the stability of the existing international system. International observers have also debated whether China would be a status quo power or a revisionist power, and whether China would observe the rules and regulations of international institutions and regimes. China Joins Global Governance: Cooperation and Contentions, edited by Mingjiang Li, provides an insightful contribution to our understanding of these issues through a specific angle: China’s role in global governance. The contributors to this volume address such questions as, how has China dealt with major global institutions and regimes? How has China helped address various global challenges? How is China’s rise changing the international approach to global governance? The contributors cover a broad range of issues, including China’s vision and strategy in global multilateralism, China’s role in global economic/financial/trade governance, China’s policy towards the global environment and international development, and China’s approaches to various global security issues such as nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. China Joins Global Governance is an essential text in understanding the future trajectory of China’s international policy.

An economic and military superpower with 20 percent of the world’s population, China has the wherewithal to transform the international system. Xi Jinping’s bold calls for China to “lead in the reform of the global governance system” suggest that he has just such an ambition. But how does he plan to realize it? And what does it mean for the rest of the world? In this compelling book, Elizabeth Economy reveals China’s ambitious new strategy to reclaim the country’s past glory and reshape the geostrategic landscape in dramatic new ways. Xi’s vision is one of Chinese centrality on the global stage, in which the mainland has realized its sovereignty claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, deepened its global political, economic, and security reach through its grand-scale Belt and Road Initiative, and used its leadership in the United Nations and other institutions to align international norms and values, particularly around human rights, with those of China. It is a world radically different from that of today. The international community needs to understand and respond to the great risks, as well as the potential opportunities, of a world rebuilt by China.

This work analyses the implications for world trade of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. It has taken fifteen long years of dialogue and heated debate and it will take its place among the other members at the end of 2001. This momentous event is relayed by the next WTO Chairman.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, China stood out as the world''s star performer in economic growth, thanks to the market-oriented reform that started in 1978. At the turn of the century, the Chinese economy faces a series of challenges to sustain its growth and stability. The two-decade-long rapid growth has effectively strengthened China''s economic power and raised its people''s standard of living. It has also transformed China from a centrally planned command economy into a OC socialist market economyOCO, which operates increasingly in line with capitalist norms. Major structural problems, however, remain and are growing acute. Weakness in the fiscal system breeds rent seeking at the local level and causes tension in the state budget. The flawed financial institutions and the biased ownership structure continue to distort resource allocation and cause huge efficiency losses. Inter-provincial and inter-regional disparity is reaching a level that threatens national unity and social stability. As China joins the World Trade Organization and becomes more integrated into the world economy, it urgently needs to improve the domestic business environment and to beef up indigenous industries for foreign competition.This volume is a collection of papers written by scholars at the East Asian Institute to address those problems during the period 1999OCo2001. The authors, with their knowledge and experience in China studies, provide in-depth observations and professional analyses of some of the most important issues for the Chinese economy at the turn of the century. Some of the observations and analyses lead to enlightening policy recommendations. The solid scholarship combined with the policy orientation of these papers will appeal greatly to researchers in academia, governments and other institutions. The policy-oriented and fact-based analyses will also be of interest to practitioners in business, including business consultants."

The book shows how the Chinese are now confident of their capacity to learn all they need from the developed world and are keen to know which parts of the past they would need to build a modern Chinese civilization. They are very conscious of the challenges coming from the United States, and are looking for ways and means to respond to a superpower that wants to preserve its dominant position in the international status quo.The book seeks to explain what China is doing and what its immediate and long-term interests are. It is not to defend or judge China. It does not employ theoretical frameworks that are not appropriate for describing Chinese conditions. It calls for understanding why history is particularly relevant to the Chinese state and most of its people. That way, we also see how the present and hopes for the future changes our perspectives of the past. Related Link(s)

China's spectacular economic growth over the past two decades has dramatically depleted the country's natural resources and produced skyrocketing rates of pollution. Environmental degradation in China has also contributed to significant public health problems, mass migration, economic loss, and social unrest. In The River Runs Black, Elizabeth C. Economy examines China's growing environmental crisis and its implications for the country's future development. Drawing on historical research, case studies, and interviews with officials, scholars, and activists in China, the author traces the economic and political roots of China's environmental challenge and the evolution of the leadership's response. She argues that China's current approach to environmental protection mirrors the one embraced for economic development: devolving authority to local officials, opening the door to private actors, and inviting participation from the international community, while retaining only weak central control. The result has been a patchwork of environmental protection in which a few wealthy regions with strong leaders and international ties improve their local environments, while most of the country continues to deteriorate, sometimes suffering irrevocable damage. Economy compares China's response with the experience of other societies and sketches out several possible futures for the country. This second edition is updated with information about events during the past five years, covering China's tumultuous transformation of its economy and its landscape as it deals with the political implications of this behavior as viewed by an international community ever more concerned about climate change and dwindling energy resources.

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.