America and the East: Confronting a Powerful China with Western Characteristics

The Foreign Policy Research Institute presents James Kurth.

Speaker:
James Kurth
Senior Fellow, FPRI, and Claude Smith Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

The conventional American view of China's rapid economic rise has been that China will become more like America-a liberalizing economy will result in a liberalizing society, one which will adopt the Washington Consensus and become a global stakeholder. An alternative view is that China's rise will allow China to become more like itself, i.e., as it saw itself before the disruptive intrusions of the West, which was as a Central Kingdom with its own distinct conceptions of world order. What actually seems to be happening is that contemporary China is indeed driven to become more like the earlier China, but now one with distinctive Western characteristics. This is the case not only with respect to economic matters, but also to naval ones. We will discuss these developments with particular reference to (1) China's role in its three littoral seas (the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea) and in the two Koreas, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia; and (2) China's role in the global economy (the Beijing Consensus, China's resource supply network, and its global creditor status).

James Kurth, Senior Fellow of FPRI, is the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where he teaches defense policy, foreign policy, and international politics. He received his A.B. in History from Stanford University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where he was an assistant and associate professor of government. He has been a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), visiting professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, and visiting professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. He has authored over 100 professional articles and edited two professional volumes in the fields of defense policy, foreign policy, international politics, and European politics.

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