China: Superpower or Developing Country?

This illustration highlights the disparity between China’s per-capita income and its aggregate income in comparison with other countries.

China is not a superpower, said Major General Pan Zhenqiang, deconstructing one of the “myths” about his country. A retired officer from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and deputy chairman of the China Foundation for International Studies, Pan Zhenqiang talked at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich last week. He was also a guest of Vivian Fritschi of ISN Podcasts. In his talk Pan said that China is a poor developing country. Is he right? Or is China a superpower, after all? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask.

Chinese leaders themselves perceive their country as a developing one with a number of paramount domestic challenges. The largest share of China’s population lives in rural, underdeveloped areas and there is a large urban-rural income gap. And although China’s per capita income has been increasing at a remarkable pace – it grew more than threefold over the last decade – it is still comparatively low. To anyone familiar with rural China, it is obvious that this is in fact a developing country. But that’s only one side of the coin: even though China is a poor country in per-capita terms, it is a rich country in aggregate terms, due to its immense population.

From a Western perspective, China’s development is usually seen at the macro level: China is the second largest economy in the world today and might surpass the US within the next decade.

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This Week in ISN Insights…

It's week 26 on our editorial calendar, Photo: Anna Armstrong/flickr

Coming up this week in ISN Insights:

  • On Monday, US space policy is under the microscope in an article from Washington, DC-based independent journalist Peter Buxbaum.
  • Professor Bob Ash of SOAS analyzes China’s changing consumption patterns on Tuesday to help determine who’s gained and lost during the country’s economic boom.
  • On Wednesday, Sofia University’s Professor Plamen Pantev examines Turkey’s foreign policy and geopolitical priorities in the wake of the 12 June elections.
  • And the Foreign Policy Association’s chief health blogger Cynthia Schweer investigates the changing logistical and political landscape of humanitarian aid on Thursday.

And in case you missed our special coverage of Chinese foreign relations all last week, you can catch up here with articles on: evolving China-Pakistan relations; shifting power dynamics in the relationship between China and Taiwan; dual-track EU-China relations; and China’s machinations within the BRICS grouping.

Top Security Threats: All Transnational

Boundary stone at the Swiss border: deters neither mafiosi, nor human traffickers nor cyber criminals. Photo: Thomas Bresson/flickr

Money laundering by mafiosi, human trafficking and cyber crime: these are the top three security threats identified by the Swiss federal police in their 2010 annual report (German).

What is striking about this list is that each menace is transnational in nature. What does this mean?

For one: as this assessment by the Swiss authorities indicates, police work is no longer the strictly domestic affair it once was. As a result,  international cooperation has become a first-order concern for national law-enforcement organizations.  And this can be very difficult in practice. Take, for example, the fight against the mafia in Italy and Switzerland —  two countries which,  though neighbors, have different legal regimes and requirements for due process.

It is clear that more efforts are needed to  properly track  criminal activity across borders. In this day and age, the police’s concerns cannot remain theirs alone. Everyone dealing with or talking about security should take heed of this annual report and perhaps even adjust their own priorities.

Great IR Thinkers: Robert O. Keohane

In 1965, Robert Keohane completed his PhD dissertation at Harvard University on the politics of the UN General Assembly. The question he tried to answer was whether institutions matter in explaining state behavior, or whether the latter could be deduced solely from the distribution of power. Over 30 years later, Keohane is still examining this question, and the ways in which he dealt with the question over the years have put him on the list of the most important political thinkers of our time.

Life
Keohane was born in 1941 at the University of Chicago Hospitals. When he was 10, the family moved to Mount Carroll, Illinois, where he attended public school; after the 10th grade, at the age of only 16, Keohane was an early entrant to Shimer College, a small offshoot of the College of the University of Chicago, where his parents were professors.

In 1965, he took up a teaching position at Swarthmore College. In 1969, after joining the board of editors for the journal International Organization, which has since become one of the leading journals in the field, Keohane began his remarkable research collaboration with Joseph S. Nye. He moved to California in 1973 to teach at Stanford University. In 1985, Keohane returned to Harvard, where he stayed for the next decade. In 1996, he was appointed James Duke Professor of International Relations at Duke University.

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IAEA Conference: Asking the Right Questions?

The earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima nuclear plant is a long overdue wake up call. Image: Douglas Sprott/flickr

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in March, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday began a five-day Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety in Vienna. The objective, according to Director General Yukiya Amano, is to identify the ‘lessons learned’ from the accident and determine how to improve the Agency’s efforts to increase nuclear safety worldwide. To be sure, public confidence in the safety of nuclear power plants has plummeted in recent months, particularly in Japan and Germany where demonstrators have taken to the streets demanding nuclear energy be phased out.

A glance at the conference‘s stated aims and objectives, and at what the media has thus far reported, suggests that discussion of these  ‘lessons learned’ has focused on : 1) safety in nuclear installations, 2) emergency preparedness, and, 3) effective first-response to accidents.  While the savvy reader will know that the focus of international conferences can change as unpredictably as the weather, a distinct pattern is emerging.

On Monday, the conference adopted a Declaration on Nuclear Safety which expresses the participants’ resolve to enhance nuclear safety around the world. Among the measures it proposes are : 1) enhancing knowledge about nuclear safety; 2) promoting international cooperation and coordination around the issue; and, perhaps most relevantly to Fukushima, 3)  meeting the public expectation to provide “factually correct information and assessments of nuclear accidents.”

But the response to the Fukushima accident must address not just the technical and political issues that have dominated the conference so far but, moreover, how we fundamentally think about nuclear safety. What the Japanese people experienced – an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by a nuclear disaster – should, in this sense, be an urgent wake up call.

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