NEXT GLOBAL HEGEMONIC POWER

China as the Next Global Hegemonic Power



Research Proposal

Introduction

The assessment of China's present power status in the world, to a certain extent, reflects people's concern about the rise of China in the future. There is a significant difference between a country that takes 30 years to rise and one that takes 300 years. The former is a human exertion and the latter is destiny. The former requires strategy while the latter depends on mere luck. For the sake of developing a correct strategy for its rise, China has to make constant efforts to understand its current power status. Ever since the early 1990s, scholars including the author, began assessing China's international power status.1 More than 10 years have passed, yet scholars still have not reached any agreement on China's power status today. This article will set aside the popular index methodology, and as a replacement, adopt a power-class approach to assess China's power status based on our common knowledge of international studies. I hope this new approach will provide a simple and convenient method for judging China's power status and also create a common foundation for understanding the character of China's status and the conditions for China's ascent to a superpower.

Thesis Statement

China is one of the biggest opponent for America as a next global hegemonic super power.

Aim and Objectives of the Research

Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. A year later, debates on China's power status began to emerge. In 1992, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank Lawrence Summers believed that according to the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) calculation, China's economy was already 45% of that of the United States.2 In 1995, the World Bank's standard PPP estimates showed that China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 4.7 times as much as the GDP value calculated by currency exchange rates.3 Thus, China's GDP increased to US$3.8 trillion, which was 56% of the US GDP that year. The author once deemed that China's comprehensive power in 1993 already ranked third in the world.4 However, in the early 1990s most scholars agreed with the method of using currency exchange rates to evaluate China's power status. They thus believed that China's power status was still far behind that of France and ranked only sixth, rather than third.5

Today in the 21st century, the differences in assessment of China's power status still remain unresolved. Debates continue about not only China's rank, but also whether China has achieved a superpower status. For instance, one fellow scholar in the Science Academy of Russia argued that China 'had earned the utmost reverence among the world community long ago. It is an actual world power and a brand new superpower as well'. Meanwhile he also believed that China's traditional culture of modesty caused its scholars to understate China's power.6 Some scholars hold the opinion that China's comprehensive power surpassed that of Japan in 1998 to rank second, but that China has not yet reached the status of a ...