Thinking of China's Grand Strategy: Chinese Perspectives

The rise of China has been a major issue in American foreign policy discourse. With China's leadership handover and the US presidential elections coming up in November 2012, the question of what the rise of China means and what implications it will have increasingly intrigues scholars of international relations and world politics. The rise of China is commonly understood as the growing economic, political, and military influences of China in world affairs. Specifically, the rise of China is manifested in, first, China's economy now becoming the second largest in the world and the potential to become the largest within decades. The rise of China is also evident in China's growing influence and engagement in world political issues. For example, China, along with Russia, is against Western intervention in the Syrian turmoil, which can be seen as a way of ‘soft balancing’ (Pape, 2005). The rise of China, finally, is seen in China's military growth and assertiveness in the latest territorial disputes with Japan.