A Champion for Chinese Optimism and Exceptionalism

C perplexes the world. The country’s rapid rise to global economic power poses an important set of questions regarding how one should perceive the transformation of the international system in light of this epochal change: —Is China on track to become a new superpower? If so, how will this transform the global economic and political landscape? —Will this ongoing power shift be comparable in scale to the rise of Europe in the seventeenth century or the rise of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? —Will the world witness increasingly intense competition between the United States, the existing superpower, and China, an emerging superpower? Could it even lead to the outbreak of what international relations scholars call a hegemonic war? —Might a new cold war take shape as China, a Leninist one-party state, comes to rival the West in the decades ahead? Will China present a military