In the twenty years since the end of the Cold War, China has gone on to recover from its relative isolation following the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 to become by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century a major global economic and political power courted by the world’s only superpower as its most important partner in tackling global problems. At the same time China’s booming economy has placed it at the centre of the economies of the Asia-Pacific region, and its deft diplomacy has turned China into a proactive player that is shaping the new regionalism in East Asia and a participant in developing a new global order. The modernization of its armed forces has begun to transform China’s military strategic significance from essentially a continental power to one with a burgeoning oceangoing naval capability, which is beginning to challenge the maritime distribution of power in the region. Yet despite China’s new assertiveness, at the time of writing in mid-2010, China is enjoying better relations simultaneously with the United States, all the regional great powers and all its neighbours than at any other time in modern history. There have been times when it has had better relations with one or more of these countries, but not with all of them at the same time. China’s rapid rise is a product of its phenomenal economic growth. In 2009 it

replaced Germany as the world’s leading exporter and it has begun to play an increasingly important role in the economies of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and South America. It has become a key figure in the G-20 meetings (regarded since 2008 as more important than the G-8) and its voting weight in the IMF has increased. China’s importance in the UN system has grown and it has become a serious contributor to UN PKO. Many global problems cannot be properly addressed without China’s participation. These include addressing global economic imbalances, preventing the proliferation of WMD, tackling climate change issues, countering international terrorism, preventing health pandemics and so on. Yet at the same time China’s leaders project uncertainty and even a degree of

anxiety in the major pronouncements of the Communist Party or the Government. Their main focus is domestic, where China confronts a host of structural problems, which they say can only be addressed through developing the economy continuously at a high rate of growth. Only that combined with the cultivation of

patriotism will, they believe, ensure the social stability necessary to retain the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. The character of its politics combined with the immensity of China’s domestic problems gave rise to the concept of China as a ‘fragile superpower’.1