China’s Foreign Policy after the Collapse of the USSR: Changes, Challenges and Opportunities

China has become a hot topic among business and foreign policy elites in neighboring countries but has also become the main concern of the United States and Europe. China’s rise, many researchers predict, may be the most important trend in the world for the next century. China is the fastest growing economy with the fastest growing military budget in the world. With a population of 1.2 billion and nuclear weapons, it has border disputes with most of its neighbors The former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew says: “The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance in thirty to forty years. It’s not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man” /I/ The task I have set for myself is this paper in to analyze China’s domestic and international environment and constraints on its foreign policy, and to make some tentative forecasts.