Bremmer: Rise of China creating conflict
January 23, 2013 -- Updated 0551 GMT (1351 HKT)
The implications of the rise of China
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Bremmer: China-Japan conflict poses the greatest geopolitical conflict in 2013
- A dispute over a group of islands in the East China Sea has strained relations
- China's growing power has led to a reevaluation in Tokyo; made U.S. wary
- "Rise of China has enormous implications for both economic conflict and political conflict"
"China-Japan is by far
the most important and consequential geopolitical conflict on our screen
for the entire year of 2013," Bremmer told CNN's John Defterios at the
World Economic Forum in Davos.
A territorial dispute
over islands in the East China Sea boiled over into often violent
anti-Japanese demonstration in China last September has led to tensions
between the world's second and third largest economies. Last week, new
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned from a trip to Southeast Asia to shore up support of nations also at odds with China over disputed land claims in the South China Sea.
"The Chinese don't feel
like they need the Japanese in the way they used to -- they don't need
the technology, they don't need the investment dollars; and furthermore
unlike places like Vietnam and the Philippines where the Chinese have a
large Diaspora population that really controls the local business so
over time the Chinese feel they win no matter what; in Japan ... there's
no influence there," Bremmer said.
WEF founder upbeat on economic outlook
Caution and concern on display at Davos
After opening to economic
reforms in 1979, the economy of the world's most populated country
sprinted ahead at an average of 10% growth each year, overtaking Japan
as the world's second largest economy in late 2010. While China is still
in many ways a developing nation -- it's GDP per capita was 94th in the
world in 2011 -- most economists expect it will jump ahead of the U.S.
as the world's largest economy by 2030.
The December report by
the U.S. National Intelligence Council, "Global Trends 2030: Alternative
Worlds," forecast that U.S. economic and international influence will
decline in the next two decades as a shift of global power moves from
the West to the East -- with the rise of China as one of the greatest
forces
"China is slated to pass
the threshold of US$15,000 per capita purchasing power parity (PPP) in
the next five years or so—a level that is often a trigger for
democratization," the report notes.
"Chinese `soft' power could be dramatically boosted, setting off a wave
of democratic movements. Alternatively, many experts believe a
democratic China could also become more nationalistic. An economically
collapsed China would trigger political unrest and shock the global
economy."
Bremmer thinks the odds
of that are long, but a China moving on its current path will still be a
primary player of world events in the next two decades.
"Of course the rise of
China has enormous implications for both economic conflict and political
conflict precisely because this is a poor country, it's an
authoritarian country, it's a state capitalist country -- and by the
time China becomes the world's largest economy, surpassing the United
States, those fundamental qualities of China will not particularly
change," he said.
"Here you have a
situation for many decades where Americans felt that China's rise was in
their interest -- already Japan understands that China's rise is not in
its interest, it's a bad thing," Bremmer said. "Increasingly the U.S.
is very, very conflicted." COPY http://edition.cnn.com
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