China's successful anti-satellite missile test has sparked a political firestorm, as analysts have tried to ascertain who in China knew what when and to what end. Were China's diplomats in the dark about the missile strike? Was it all a gambit to force a reluctant United States to the negotiating table for a ban on space-based weapons? While interesting to China watchers and nonproliferation experts, this discussion risks obscuring the real message of the test: Chinese rhetoric notwithstanding, China's rise will be as disruptive and difficult as that of any other global power.

Officials in both Beijing and Washington have worked hard to sketch out an alternative reality. China's leaders have traversed the globe, preaching the gospel of the country's peaceful rise, often to great effect: China will do things differently than the United States and earlier European powers did, not polluting the environment, not colonizing countries to gain access to their natural resources and not infringing on the sovereignty of other countries. For their part, senior U.S. officials, with a growing list of challenging issues on their China agenda, are reluctant to focus for too long on the reality of China's rise. Doing so would only make cooperation more difficult and provide support to an often obstreperous anti-China lobby in Congress. It is easier to paint China's rise as a work in progress -- one that the United States has the ability to influence.

Yet the truth is that China, with its rapidly growing economy and large population, already exerts an unsettling and often negative impact on the world. China is the largest or second-largest contributor to many of the most vexing global environmental problems, including climate change, the illegal timber trade, ozone depletion and marine pollution in the Pacific. It is squeezing manufacturing industries from South Africa to Thailand to Mexico, placing stress on economies ill-equipped to compete. And its weak public health infrastructure but strict media regulations rank it at the top of potential incubators for the next global health pandemic.

While such effects might be excused as unintentional consequences of China's rapid growth, others cannot be so easily dismissed. China's insistence that it doesn't mix business with politics in its foreign relations, while sounding benign, has the perverse effect of contributing to violence and repression throughout much of the world. Its political and financial support for regimes in Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Burma, among others, cannot in any way be construed as contributing to global peace and stability. Moreover, China's export of unsavory environmental and labor practices in countries where it is aggressively extracting natural resources has contributed to anti-Chinese demonstrations from Peru to Zambia.

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Economy, Elizabeth. "China's Missile Message." Washington Post. January 25, 2007. [ page A25 ]