Foreign Affairs, January 2019

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Cover of the January 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs (magazine) says, "Who Will Run the World? America, China , and global order[.]"  Four articles appear in this topic. Only bits of the third and fourth articles are outstanding; they are below.

(3) Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Stealth Superpower; How China hid its global ambition.

Quote:

"ORIANA SKYLAR MASTRO is an Assistant Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime.

"China has also avoided sparking a concerted response  from the United States by deliberately delaying the modernization of its military. As Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping famously put it, 'Hide your strength, bide your time.' Since countries tend to draw inferences about a challenger's intentions from the size and nature of its armed forces, China opted to first build up other types of power -- economic, political, and cultural -- in order to project a less threatening image.  When, in the 1970s, Deng started pursuing the 'four modernizations' -- of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and natural defense -- he saved military modernization for last. Throughout the 1980s, China focused first on building its economy; it then supplemented its burgeoning economic power with political influence, joining international institutions throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century. At the turn of the millennium, China's military was still remarkably backward. Its ships didn't have the capacity to sail safely far beyond visual range of the coastline, its pilots were not adept at flying at night or over water, and its nuclear missiles relied on outmoded liquid fuel. Most of its ground units did not have modern. mechanized equipment, such as up-to-date tanks.  It was not until the late 1990s that China began modernizing its military in earnest. And even then, it focused on capabilities that were more appropriate for dominating Taiwan than projecting power more broadly. * * * Beijing has created uncertainty about its ultiate goals by supporting the ['US-led world'] order in some areas and undermining it in others. This pick-and-choose approach reflects the fact that China benefits greatly from the parts of the current order[:] * * * The World Trade Organization, which China joined in 2001, dramatically opened up the country's access to foreign markets, leading to a surge in exports that drove a decade  plus of impressive economic growth.  But there are parts of global order that China wants to alter.

(4) Yang Xuetong, The Age of Uneasy Peace; Chinese power in a divided world.
("the United States' own rise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides something of a model for how the coming power transition may take place. Because the United Kingdom, the world's undisputed hegemon at the time, was preoccupied with fending off a challenger in its vicinity -- Germany -- it did not bother much to contain the rise of a much bigger rival across the pond [Atlantic]. China is hoping for a similar dynamic now, and recent history suggests it could indeed play out. In the early months of George W Bush's presidency, for instance, relations between Beijing and Washington were souring over regional disputes in the South China Sea, reaching a boiling point when a Chinese air force pilot died in a midair collision with a US surveillance plane in April 2001. Following the 9/11 attacks a few months later, however, Washington came to see China as a useful strategic partner in its global fight against terrorism, and relations improved significantly over the rest of Bush's two terms.  Today, unfortunately the list of common threats that could force the two countries to cooperate is short")