China Challeneg

Shannon Hartmann

PSC 607F

Dr. Pu

8 September 2015

Reaction Essay 1: How to Deal with the China Challenge

“China’s rise poses two broad challenges for U.S. foreign policy: how to deter the People’s Republic from destabilizing East Asia and how to encourage it to contribute to multilateral global governance” (Christensen 2014). Among scholars, China has been viewed as a challenge to U.S. power and influence. Scholars have, on occasion, seen armed conflict between the U.S. and China as inevitable as their economies begin to equalize and China’s global influence increases. Christensen argues that although China is large and growing economical power, but it is still a developing country. Its population suffers from poverty as shown per capita GDP, social injustices which cause mass protests around the state and a lack of stability, which makes it reluctant to involve itself in global governance. (Christensen 2015). With all the domestic problems China faces and their regional aggression, the U.S. has the challenge of encouraging global governance while discouraging regional antagonistic behavior.

Christensen offers a number of approaches to these two challenges, the first of which, global governance, being the more difficult. One suggestion offered by Christensen is that the U.S. can discourage behavior by solving problems that China has brushed aside with tactics that China is aversive to. For example, the U.S. response to North Korean attacks on South Korea in 2010 which resulted in China participating in governance of the region. When China failed to use their political pull to advise against this behavior by North Korea, the U.S., with allies Japan and South Korea, performed military exercises in the Yellow Sea. The strengthening of America/Asia allies motivated China to advise against any further military escalation on the part of North Korea (Christensen 2014).

The second challenge, discouraging antagonistic behavior is closely related to China’s role...