China's peaceful rise?
30 April 2010 Chinas peaceful rise?
Jinghao Zhou, assistant professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at HWS, has recently published Chinas Peaceful Rise in a Global Context: A Domestic Aspect of Chinas Road Map to Democratization (Lexington Books, 2010).
According to Zhou, Chinas rise has become inevitable, but there is no agreement about whether China will rise peacefully or pose a threat to the United States. The author asserts that both theories of China threat and peaceful rise failed to address Chinas central domestic problem. Thus, both theories are not convincing. This book attempts to develop a third view of Chinas rise from a domestic perspective, and contends that Chinas potential threat to the existing global order is not derived from her rapid economic growth and military expansion, but from her potential domestic chaos. A strong democratic China will contribute to the global peace, but the collapse of China will gravely threaten Western societies.
The current Chinese political system directly contributes to this social instability and could possibly cause Chinas social crash. Chinas democratization is the key to ensuring Chinas peaceful rise in a global context. However, the Party is still in power and any attempt to dissolve the one-party system in present day China has poor prospects. China must take a two-step, gradual reform approach to complete the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. In the two-step theory, the first phase for promoting Chinas democratization includes exercising freedom of media, increasing the consciousness of citizen participation, and enacting religious rights. Through all these democratic exercises, China will gradually be able to achieve a fully democratic society. This two-step theory is crucial for the United States if it is to enact effective foreign policy toward China and for China to develop a democratic harmonious society.
Zhou joined the faculty in 2001, teaching contemporary China.Recently, he was invited by China Social Sciences Todayto give recommendations on Chinas political reformhttp://sspress.cass.cn/newspaper/paper.aspx?id=1000071(page 3) while the Conference of Chinas National Peoples Congress was held in March 2010.
He is the author of the other twobooks Remaking Chinas Public Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century (Praeger 2003) and Remaking Chinas Public Philosophy and Chinese Womens Liberation: The Volatile Mixing of Confucianism, Marxism, and Feminism (Edwin Mellen Press 2006).