China used to try to keep a low profile during its rise in power. Now it goes out of its way to openly push America and anybody else who resists China's rise. Does China think it is more powerful than it is?
China no longer follows the policy of avoiding provoking America into an arms race and political competition:
Chinese rhetoric and policy have a distinctly Cold War feel. Xi argues that the “East is rising” and the West declining; he has called for a “new long march” — an echo of the Communists’ struggle for survival in the 1930s — against a hostile America. Party officials are making military threats against the U.S. and its allies; wolf-warrior diplomats chastise American officials publicly, in tones reminiscent of Cold War rhetorical clashes.
China is racing to become technologically self-sufficient, in anticipation that the world will again be divided; it is putting ships to sea at a rate unheard of anywhere since World War II. Call it what you like, but China is certainly no longer evading the enmity of the U.S.
China is much more powerful than it ever has been since the Century of Humiliation when Western military superiority and Chinese internal weaknesses made China vulnerable to military defeat and diplomatic and economic demands.
But China may grossly over-estimate their relative power:
China is a danger because their chest is swelling over their regained military stature. And while their actual power will help decide the outcome of a war, their beliefs about their power will help decide whether they start a war.
I liken it to new soldiers just out of boot camp. You enter probably out of shape and a pure civilian. You endure and come out part of the mean green fighting machine, with new muscles and the new skills of killing planted in you. You think you are a bad-ass SEAL Team 6-level killing machine in your still-crisp BDUs (or whatever they are called now).
But you are not a killing machine. You aren't even a cog in the killing machine. You are just the first rough stamping of a cog that will eventually be sanded and polished into a part of the killing machine. I remember our drill sergeants telling us that we need to avoid being full of ourselves when we leave basic training and move on to a new base or go back on the block. We are stronger than when we arrived. Do not mistake that for being stronger than other people, they warned. If we do, we'll get our butts kicked.
China has gotten out of world power basic training. Let's hope they don't throw a punch before they realize how much farther that they need to go to be actually powerful.
Or maybe I should have said I hope they don't throw a punch before they realize it is counter-productive to throw a punch at all. Otherwise, China throwing a punch before they really are ready might be the thing to hope for.
And China has forgotten America's many allies and China's many enemies, which makes the Middle Kingdom the Surrounded Kingdom.
China has made great strides in increasing Chinese prosperity and power within the system America built and defends. Is China willing to throw away that foundation of success?
I sure wouldn't count on the Chinese foreseeing what lies ahead for them.
China is seen as a major military and economic threat to the rest of the world, and especially to its neighbors in East Asia. There is another important aspect of this threat that is less visible outside China. While the Chinese government backs the aggressive strategy, the Chinese people are not cooperating. The population is shrinking and the new middle-class of university grads see China as a military threat as anxiously as Chinese neighbors do. These internal problems impose restraints on this new Chinese aggression policy and the ability to use it.
I'd rather not fight a war with China even if I knew we'd win.
