The Rise of China and Global Disorder – Can ‘the Centre’ Hold in the 21st Century?

This chapter examines the rise of China. Specifically, it consider aspects of China’s behaviour that may challenge the existing rules-based international order. The chapter argues that China is determined to reshape existing international architecture in political, economic and security domains in a manner that gives it more influence and allows it to achieve the China Dream of a rejuvenated ‘middle kingdom’. This chapter examines in detail the issues related to China’s activities in the South China Sea and considers the linkage between the South China Sea and China’s broader ‘grand strategy’ for achieving the China Dream. It argues that Chinese actions in the South China Sea will mean that this dispute becomes the focal point for growing strategic competition between a rising China and the United States, in what commentators refer to as the Thucydides Trap. Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’, written in 1919 after the First World War and with its themes of instability, imminent change and dystopic foreboding of chaos, strongly resonates with these current world events.