From Overseas Press

Where does China go from here?

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-06-09 16:31

Some foreign diplomats have complained about China's arrogant foreign policy recently, but Fareed Zakaria, columnist at the Washington Post, said he was "struck less by arrogance than by the doubt, uncertainty and apprehension that seemed to be plaguing the Chinese."

In a column published on June 7, Zakaria declared that success breeds confidence. China has "come out on top after the global economic crisis. Its massive fiscal stimulus is building a new generation of infrastructure; its banks are stable; its consumers have high savings rates; and the government keeps piling up reserves, which now total almost $2.5 trillion."

But Zakaria pointed out that deeper changes are also underway in China. With the growing clout of workers in China's economy, China's status as the world's factory may come to an end. "Our economy can't keep squeezing labor benefits because workers are unwilling to accept it," Chang Kai, director of Renmin University's Labor Institute, was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Chinese newspapers are more open and transparent in airing opinions, and the debate gets even more honest in private, said Zakaria. A Chinese businessman was quoted as saying, "In many ways the financial crisis and the discrediting of the American model has been bad for us. We don't know what we believe in. We used to think it was some version of the American Dream -- liberalize, open up, grow. But then you had your crisis. We can say, it proves we're strong. But where do we go now?"

Moreover, China's ongoing political transition poses uncertainties about its future policy, Zakaria added. "What are its broader foreign policy goals? Is it an ally or a rival of the United States? What kind of a world does it hope to shape?"

Zakaria concluded that China is entering a new era but seems ideologically and operationally ill-prepared for it. "It is less arrogant than ambivalent, something the United States also knows well from its own early history as a great power," he said.