China’s Changing Shape

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THE CHINESE IDENTITY CRISIS

At the very moment when China seems poised to regain its former power, doubts are growing about precisely what China is. China’s economy appears set to become the world’s largest, by some measures as early as 2002. Beijing has spurred this economic growth by abandoning Marxism and allowing China’s various regions remarkable independence. The risks of such a strategy raise enormous questions about China’s future. As the last of the communist old guard acquiesces in the move from Mao and Marx to market economics, China may be changing not only face but also shape.

This basic question over China’s future revolves around the degree to which Beijing’s authority will give way to the centrifugal pull of China’s increasingly dynamic periphery. The death of old ideologies has left Chinese nationalism as the obvious, if uncertain, organizing principle for Beijing’s domestic and foreign policies. Will China’s fate be dominated by its unsatisfied nationalism, or will it be moderated, even wrecked, by the fissiparous tendencies of Beijing’s continental empire?

The international context surrounding this internal challenge is critical. Never in China’s history has such a push for decentralization been accompanied by the pull of so many outside forces. In an age when empires disintegrate, sovereign powers form greater unions and the world economy grows more interdependent, can China be immune to revolutionary change? East Asia is rapidly evolving, and an era of increasing interdependence will tend to weave China’s competing regions into various patterns of global affairs. China’s neighbors may seek to exacerbate the regionalism begun by Beijing in order to restrain its impulse for domination. China’s regionalism at home thus connects with its increasing interdependence abroad.