The problems confronting China as a rising great power

China’s rapid growth and development in the recent years has been an issue of global concern. It is prudent to note that china has made significant progress in terms of military power, and economic development which are clear indications that china is gearing to become a global super power. Since starting to open up and reform its economy in 1978, the country’s economy has averaged 9.4 percent annual growth thus making China the leading country in annual GDP growth in the world. In 1978, it accounted for less than one percent of the world economy, and its total foreign trade was worth $20.6 billion (Bijian, 2005). Today, it accounts for four percent of the world economy and has foreign trade worth $851 billion, the third-largest national total in the world. China has also attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment and more than a trillion dollars of domestic non-public investment.

Despite the major progress in military and economic fronts, china still faces some challenges in its quest to becoming a global super power. One of the main challenges that china face in its quest to becoming a global super power is the large population within the country. It is said that china has the largest population in the world that is estimated to be around 1.3 billion people. Any small difficulty in its economic or social development, spread over this vast group, could become a huge problem (Kim, 2003). To make the matters worse, this population is not expected to fall soon as it is not yet at its peak which is expected to be 2030. By this time, the population of china is expected to be 1.5 billion people which is quite a big number. Such a big population means that china’s per capita income is that of a developing country thus making it a big challenge in its quest for global supremacy. In essence, the big population has dented china’s economic impact to the world.

The major problem that china must deal with before being recognised as a global super power is pulling the vast population out of poverty. The poor population coupled with scarcity of natural resources necessary to support such a big population remains a major challenge. Essential resources such as energy, water and raw materials are a big challenge. China’s per capita water resources are one-fourth of the amount of the world average, and its per capita area of cultivatable farmland is 40 percent of the world average. China’s oil, natural gas, copper, and aluminium resources in per capita terms amount to 8.3 percent, 4.1 percent, 25.5 percent, and 9·7 percent of the respective world averages (Bijian, 2005). Also, it is wise to note that China failed to recover effectively from the economic recession of 2008 which is also another critical challenge in it journey to global prominence. In essence, china has made tremendous efforts in its quest to become a global super power, nevertheless, there are still several domestic and international challenges that policy makers in the country must address to ensure that China’s dream becomes a reality.

Assess the influence of the military-industrial-congressional complex on U.S. foreign policy

Military industrial complex is a term that has been used for a long time to refer to the relationship between government entities and arm manufacturers. In most cases, these two groups seemingly have mutual benefits. For instance, the political class receive the tools necessary for war while the arm manufacturing companies get lucrative multi-million dollar deals. In the United States, the concept of military industrial complex did not come to an end with the end of the cold war but instead it only accelerated.  As a result of a rash of military-industry mergers encouraged and subsidized by the Clinton administration, the “Big Three” weapons makers –Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon – now receive among themselves over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts (Hartung, 2000). This represents more than one out of every four dollars that the Defence Department doles out for everything from rifles to rockets. Besides the influence in government spending, military industrial complex also has significant influence to the U.S foreign policy.

Military producers have a sustained relationship with key US foreign policy. Bureaucracies, especially the Defense Department, but also a range of departments and agencies that utilize military equipment and engage in strategic or tactical deployment of such equipment. The extent to which military contractors are embedded within the decision-making framework of identifiable bureaucracies within the US federal government makes their profit-making margins a function of the political process by which those departments and agencies identify long-term strategic threats (Bacevich, 2011). Thus, key turning points in US foreign policy, in which long-term threats are identified and long-term strategic plans are developed, provide an important critical juncture to observe the extent to which both corporations and bureaucracies work together to identify threats to US security in a manner that maximizes access to government revenues and tax dollars.

President Eisenhower’s warning about the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex is as relevant today as it was in 1961. Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget is higher today than it was when Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech in 1961. At more than $276 billion per year, the U.S. military budget (in constant dollars) remains near the peacetime cold war average that prevailed during the prime period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, from roughly 1950 to 1989. This is astonishing considering that Russia has slashed its weapons procurement budget by 77% since 1991, and that Russian forces could barely prevail over a rebel army in Chechnya (inside its own borders), much less project force against neighbouring countries (Preble, 2012). In essence, the relationship between the war planners and arm manufacturers has significant influence not only to government military spending but also on the US foreign policy.

References

Andrew Bacevich, “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.”, The Atlantic, 4 Jan. 2011.

Christopher Preble, “The Military-Industrial Complex’s Waning Political Influence”, US News and World Report, 29 Nov. 2012.

Samuel S. Kim, “China’s Path to Great Power Status in the Globalization Era”, Asian Perspective, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2003), p. 72.

William Hartung, “The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: How Weapons Makers are Shaping U.S. Foreign and Military Policies”, in M. Honey and T. Barry (eds), Global Focus: U.S. Foreign Policy at the Turn of the Millennium (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 21.

Zheng Bijian, “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great Power Status”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5     (Sept.-Oct. 2005), pp. 19 and 21

 
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