Op-Ed Contributors

China is reshaping the world, said Newsweek

( chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-03-17 16:54

Nobody doubts that China deserves a big say in what goes on in today’s world. However, Newsweek’s senior editor Rana Foroohar and its Beijing bureau chief Melinda Liu argued that China would not be satisfied with it.

In an article on March 12, the two believed that “Beijing wants to write—or, at least, help write—new rules of the road for the world.”

According to them, global affairs are dominated by America and suffused with US values, which China had to live with before. “But now that China has more worldwide clout, Beijing has begun to push harder to reshape international systems to make them more China-friendly,” they wrote.

They listed what Beijing has done to rewrite the global rules of the road. One is that it is reluctant to take part in systems set up by the West. “Beijing is eager to participate in groups it has had a hand in building, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” they wrote.

In addition, Beijing has made great efforts to push the yuan as an international currency. “China has inked $100 billion in currency-swap agreements with six countries, including Argentina, Indonesia, and South Korea. The yuan has become an official trading currency between Southeast Asia and two Chinese provinces along its periphery, ” they wrote.

And Beijing is helping re-design the Web. “The Chinese have been working hard on the next generation of Internet standards—what's called IPv6, for Internet Protocol version 6,” the article mentioned. “IPv6 will provide trillions of new addresses for everything from Web sites to intelligent home appliances and military applications—and Beijing intends to get its share of them.”

In addition, Beijing has taken steps to insure China could move ahead of the rest of the world, the article said. For example, China is on a fast track to space. “With NASA’s budgetary rollback, China is now the only country making major investments in space exploration,” they wrote.

Also, China is striving to “become a world leader in solar- and wind-energy hardware and is moving fast to set the standard in the next generation of clean-energy vehicles.”

Moreover, China already has the largest fleet of clean-energy vehicles in the world. “Should the Chinese succeed in developing not only the automotive field's gold-standard technology but also a market of that size, they can expect to control the future of the global car business.”

The authors are concerned that if China really reshapes the world, they may not support the rules of free trade and open global competition. “Ten years ago Beijing did everything possible to woo investors from abroad. Today the rules have changed. The country's $800 billion fiscal-stimulus package channeled much more clout to state-run firms and away from the private sector. New merger laws are making it tougher for foreign firms to acquire Chinese companies.”

In the end, the article concluded that China has its own way of development rather than following the US pattern. “The idea that as China got rich it would simply become more like America, or at least more sympathetic to the US agenda, is turning out to be wrong.”