ABSTRACT
If the United States and the Soviet Union (until its replacement by the less significant Russia) may be described as global powers with a regional interest in the Asia-Pacific, China may be understood as a regional power with global influence.1
China’s principal security interests are largely concentrated in the Asia-Pacific, and its capacity to project power is limited in the main to that region. But the most important threats to its security as perceived by successive Chinese leaders came from one or other of the superpowers, and for the first forty years of its existence the PRC treated its security problems within the region as a function of its relations with the two superpowers. The predominance of the superpowers in the Chinese perspective necessarily gave China’s regional concerns a global orientation. Indeed, in the 1980s it was persuasively argued that China did not even have a regional policy as such.2 It is only since the end of the Cold War that China’s leaders have developed policies that recognize that the future security and prosperity of their country requires the cultivation of close relations with the AsiaPacific as a whole and with its neighbours in particular. This regional orientation does not mean that China’s leaders have ceased to think of their country in global terms, but it is a recognition of the centrality of the region to the Chinese economy and of the importance of the fast-growing Chinese economy to the region itself. Despite the continuing economic troubles that began in July 1997, the AsiaPacific region is still regarded as a major economic centre alongside those of Europe and North America, and China’s growing weight within the region serves to enhance its global significance too. However, China’s emergence as a rising power has raised new problems as it challenges the existing distribution of power based on American predominance, and it poses new problems for its smaller neighbours who seek to engage their giant neighbour in multilateral institutions in the hope of mitigating its potentially destabilizing policies. In addition to the strategic factors, China’s claims to be considered as a power
of global significance arise perhaps most strongly from its historical legacy of centrality. But these have also been enhanced by the international recognition they have received. China is the only Third World country to be one of the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council. By virtue of the country’s size and independent revolutionary achievements, China was the only serious rival to the Soviet Union’s leadership of the international communist movement.
Finally, even China’s home-grown distinction of being the world’s most populous country, the heir to one of the world’s great civilizations, with a history of continuous statehood reaching back for more than 2,000 years, has been recognized in the special respect accorded it by diplomatic envoys from all over the world. As a result China’s leaders have tended to claim a leading global role that their country’s capabilities do not yet allow them to exercise. The leaders of the PRC have consistently argued that they have a right to be heard on every major problem in the world. It has been argued, not unjustifiably, that ‘without first having acquired the reach of a global power, China acts as if it has already become a world power’.3
