Source: China.com
After the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, I published two Global Times articles about China’s comprehensive strength and its national interests. Following suit, I am writing in response to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The focus this time will be China’s “rising power dilemma” in an increasingly bipolar world.
China’s Gold Medal Count Serves as a Metaphor for China’s Identity Dilemma
The final gold medal count in London is an apt metaphor for the current global power dynamic. On the one hand, in the 2012 Olympic Games, the United States had the highest overall medal count and highest gold medal count. Also, the United States was the only country to exceed 100 Olympic medals, which symbolizes the United States’ position as the greatest superpower.
On the other hand, while China’s ranking as the second-strongest power was demonstrated by its second-highest total medal count and gold medal count, the number of total medals and gold medals it won showed that the nation is still somewhere between a major power and a superpower. China won 38 gold medals—which was 17.4 percent fewer than the United States, which earned 46 gold medals, but 31 percent more than the United Kingdom, which was in third place with 29 gold medals. Overall, China won 88 medals in total, 15.4 percent fewer than the United States’ 104 medals but only 7 percent higher than Russia, which won 82 medals and was in third place.Many people describe China as an “emerging” power, which may well be exemplified by China’s performance at the Olympic Games, but that does not fully capture China’s identity in the international community. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. In 2012, China won the second-largest number of gold medals. These successes have made it difficult for the international community to continue to accept China’s self-proclaimed status as a developing country.
Still, Chinese nationals think of China as a backward, developing country. According to a recent Global Times survey, 79.5 percent still regard China as a developing country. This percentage is higher than polls in 2011 and 2010. According to the same survey, only 2.5 percent regard China as a developed country—a lower percentage than the previous two polls.
Currently, the international community perceives China to be a developed country while the Chinese consider it a developing country. This mismatched perception reveals a tension within and outside China over whether China should assume greater responsibility in world affairs.
Domestic debates between critics and advocates of China’s state-sponsored athletic program’s contribution to the country’s Olympic success are just a reflection of Chinese nationals’ divergent perceptions of China’s global standing. In fact, the state-sponsored athletic program has not changed in decades and so cannot explain China’s recent Olympic successes. With the training program remaining constant, China received the highest number of Olympic gold medals in 2008 while it had the advantage of being the host and received the second-highest number in 2012. Before 2004, China never broke into the top two in the overall medal count, but it has been ranked among the top two three consecutive times since then. Only the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have finished in the top two places in three consecutive Olympic Games since the end of the World War II.
A Bipolar Dynamic Emerges
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, two prominent international relations theories arose: of a unipolar world and of a multipolar world. The first theory holds that for the foreseeable future, the United States will be the only superpower and no other country can challenge its dominance. According to the second theory, however, at least two other powers may well emulate the United States and become superpowers. A look at the final medal count of the 2012 Olympic Games demonstrates that both theories fail to accurately reflect the current trends of a changing international landscape.
The United States will no longer be the only superpower in the coming decade. In March 2011, USA Today predicted that China and the United States would be competing head-to-head for the highest gold medal count at the 2012 Olympics. Other media sources echoed the sentiment. The point here is not whether these predictions were accurate, but why the international community has often been convinced that China could rival the United States in overall medal count.
Media sometimes draw a parallel between the U.S.-Soviet race during the Cold War and Sino-U.S. Olympic competition. China has already overtaken the United States in terms of trade and automobile sales. China is also the largest creditor nation to the United States and has the second- largest military expenditure. As China is overtaking the United States in one sector after another, saying that China is not a challenge to the United States will deepen Americans’ fears of China’s policy of “keeping a low profile” (tao guang yang hui, 韬光养晦).
China is the only country able to overcome the power disparity with the United States. Since 2008, all other major powers have seen their power gap with the United States widen. The U.S. economy is growing faster than other developed countries. The United States’ absolute GDP was also becoming larger than any emerging economy except China.
This economic disparity is analogous to the disparities between the United States and other major powers in the 2012 Olympic gold medal count. When comparing the 2012 Olympic gold medal count to 2008, the United States widened the medal gap even more by adding nine to its difference with Russia, fifteen to its difference with Germany, six to its difference with France, and twelve to its difference with Japan. Only the United Kingdom maintained the 2008 disparity in 2012 with the advantage of being a host nation.
The main reason for these increasing disparities in national strength is not that the United States has a high economic growth rate but that growth in other developed countries has slowed down or stagnated in comparison to the United States. Some have suggested it would be more appropriate to compare the United States to the EU. However, the EU is an international organization with members differing so greatly on euro crisis policy that this kind of comparison is not fitting.
The relative decline of power also explains why many people are predicting China and the United States will be the two superpowers. The slowing economic growth of developed countries has highlighted China’s rapid growth rate, giving off the appearance of a strong China. This relative increase in Chinese strength resulted in a new idea that China’s international status was increasing.
While the power gap between China and the United States was rapidly narrowing, the gap between the two nations and the others was widening. This trend increases the probability that a bipolar world dominated by the United States and China will emerge. The 2012 Olympic gold medal count seems to indicate that the age of a bipolar world is coming. Aside from China and the United State, out of all the large countries (excluding the United Kingdom since it had the host advantage), only Russia won more than twenty Olympic gold medals.
Rising Power Dilemma is a Natural Law
In a “rising power dilemma,” when a state’s power increases, the growth of its international influence consistently burdens it with increasing pressure from other members of the international system. This concept resembles Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is, when you throw a ball against a wall, the harder you throw it, the stronger it bounces back.
The rise of China is a process in which China’s influence continues to pressurize the international system dominated by the United States. As a result, those countries that are unwilling to alter the status quo will likely grow unhappy with China and thus exert an increasing pressure on the rising power in return.
The “rising power dilemma” helps to explain why China faces more pressure even though its strength and influence continue to increase. Thus it is understandable that even though Chinese athletes performed splendidly in the London summer Olympic Games, they received disproportionately less applause from the audience there.
Operating under the assumption that as China’s power increases, international pressure on it may decrease is not conducive to effective foreign policy. Similar to athletes competing at the Olympic Games, only those who overcome the increasing pressure can reach victory. The United States became the only superpower after fighting World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. The global environment that the United States had faced on its way to achieving global dominance was far more hostile than the one China is currently faced with. However, this somewhat more favorable environment has also weakened China’s capability, so China may well be unable to safeguard its rise if the international situation becomes more hostile in the future.
If China can only advance in a less hostile environment with “strategic opportunities,” and ceases to rise without such opportunities, then China’s undertaking of national rejuvenation (min zu fu xing de jue qi da ye, 民族复兴的崛起大业) can only rely much on luck. Historically, few countries have achieved the status of great power by virtue of “strategic opportunities.” Instead, most world powers ascended to that position without “strategic opportunities.”
In the final stage of China’s rise, while it is hard to predict whether the international environment China is faced with will be better or worse than that of the Cold War, the probability of a worse situation cannot be ruled out. After the Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen won the gold medal in the women’s 400-meter individual medley swim, one U.S. swimming coach suggested that Ye was doping. This triggered waves of debates over the topic from the media. Both the U.S. network ABC and the German business newspaper Handelsblatt used the term “Cold War” in their headlines. It is worth noting that false accusations like this occurred quite often during the 2012 Olympic Games.
If it is somewhat difficult to keep Olympic Games fair, how can we Chinese expect “strategic opportunities” to be made available in the final stage of China’s rise? As we cheer for China winning the second-highest number of Olympic gold medals in 2012, we should also get ready for China’s “rising power dilemma” in the transition to a bipolar world.
This article was originally published in Chinese on www.China.com