ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the implications of the contemporary re-emergence of China as a global economic and political actor. It also discusses impacts of China’s contemporary engagement with the developing world and examines the empirics and logic of that engagement along a number of ‘vectors’: processes that carry and project China’s transformative dynamics. A key methodological point is that rather than ‘read-off’ the likely consequences of China’s external impact on the basis of our assumptions, hunches or prejudices, we need to be guided, on a case by case basis, by the empirical realities as they emerge. These realities are diverse and this needs to be appreciated. Only subsequently will we be able to develop the sort of aggregated picture that will be necessary to confirm whether or not the China-driven trajectories of transformation currently in-train, point to a better future for the developing world than that which the last 60 years of global transformation has delivered them.
