Word: powers
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...accept that tension with China is unavoidable and that removing tension is not a strategy. To be sure, a vision that aims for a concept of co-evolution with China will be harder in the short run. But it accepts that China is, like it or not, a defining power of our time and that the day has come for the U.S. to think in fresh ways about our global system. U.S.-China friendship sounds as impossible at the moment as calming fireworks. But decisions we make now, the way Obama and his team handle China as early as when...
...problem with China isn't simply that we misunderstand each other. Mao used to say any problem could be divided into a "main problem" and "subsidiary problems." Our main problem is that China often feels only limited attachment to the power system that has evolved in the Western world. It has often been victimized by this system and has never felt the ownership over it that Western nations do. And of course China has centuries of native strategic culture that, overlaid with the neuralgia of Marxism, shapes its thinking. Calls for China to be a responsible stakeholder have failed...
...What Obama will face as he sits with Hu is a choice between old ways of looking at the world and a new way of thinking about power. Nowhere will this emerging dynamic be clearer than in the links between the U.S. and China, the other great power of the age. We can think of what we face as a choice between polite stasis and co-evolution, between stalemate and a commitment to a mutually assured stability that can mark our future with China as clearly as mutually assured destruction once marked our ties to the Soviet Union...
...mileposts of Western decline. There is a sense of American haziness that is reinforced by the fact that our leaders have often shown only a rudimentary understanding of what we might call Real China - the harsh, smashmouth China familiar to anyone who works in its streets and corridors of power. This is the China that has grown for 30 years at an average rate of some 10% a year with no rule of law. It is a very different place from the polite, harmony-seeking Middle Kingdom many Westerners expect. Real China can baffle Westerners and confound them as easily...
...this is wishful thinking. China may not be exporting hunger or revolution. But making trouble? Nothing as big as China moves without pressing up against old ideas of power and stability. For most of the past 30 years, U.S. Presidents arrived in office bashing China and left praising it. Ties between the countries were cemented by a desire to balance the Soviet Union and, later, economic co-dependence. But these underlying forces have now been complicated. The growth of nationalism in China, American economic nervousness, China's changing economic model - all conspire against common interest...