ABSTRACT
The rise of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC; China) has triggered a broad debate among academics, policy makers, and the interested public. The economic fallout from the global financial and economic crisis has added intensity to the question of how China’s growing role in world politics will affect the current international political and economic order. For Europe and the United States, earlier debates over whether to contain or to engage the emerging superpower (Mills 1996; Shambaugh 1996) have become obsolete: after more than three decades of high-level economic growth, social change, and modernization of its one-party state, China has moved to the center stage of the new global order (Breslin 2007).1 Thus, for the United States the real question seems to be whether China will become “a responsible stakeholder in world politics” in the American sense (Christensen 2006).
