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ShareAn apocryphal 19th century quotation attributed to French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte has him offering the general counsel that the world should "let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world".
Tomorrow, as China celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding as a modern nation-state, with a power-projecting military parade and elaborately regimented festivities, it will confirm that that earth-shaking prophesy, even if it was never made, has come true.
Over these 60 years, which mark a full cycle in the Chinese calendar, China has undergone a mind-bending transformation -- from an impoverished, agrarian country that was branded the 'sick man of Asia' and ruled by Communist revolutionaries to one whose brand equity today is associated with superfast economic growth, showcase cities and world-class infrastructure.
The Made-in-China label, touches billions of lives worldwide everyday. Even more strikingly, much of this transformation was achieved in just 30 dizzying years since China opened up to the world.
Today, no discussion of any global issue -- be it the mechanics of stimulating global economic growth, the future of the US dollar, climate change or the nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea -- is meaningful without a central role for China. As befits its Chinese name Zhong Guo (middle country), China is moving centrestage in geopolitics.
True as they are, such breathless accounts and linear projections of China's rise, however, tell only half the story, which overstates the country's strengths and misestimates its weaknesses. What the stereotypical 'shining citylight' images don't tell you is that the country is at a critical crossroads in its economic and political evolution. And that at 60, China faces a new set of nation-building challenges.
For one thing, its economic growth model of the past 30 years, driven by exports to shopaholic consumers in developed economies, is broken and an alternative template, which would depend on Chinese domestic consumption, isn't ready yet. For another, for all of China's population to attain the quality of lifestyle that developed economies enjoy, China would need the resource equivalent of six earths.
Increasingly, the Chinese government's 'growth at all costs' strategy is facing pushbacks from ordinary people who bear the social cost of rapid industrial transformation: forced displacement from their homes and wholesale pollution of rivers, land and air. Although the Chinese Communist Party has successfully averted a build-up of a broad-based political movement as happened with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, it hasn't been able to silence all dissent and aspirations for a society based on rule of law, human rights and democracy. And last year's uprising in Tibet and the Han-Uighur riots in Xinjiang earlier this year showed up China's fragilities starkly.
So far China has had a free ride on the geopolitical stage: it has leveraged its status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, mollycoddled dictatorships around the world and has gotten away without making many tough choices. But now, its policies will be tested by public criticism; and from what we've seen of how China responds to such criticism, it likely won't make a pretty picture.
For us in India and elsewhere in the world, it's easy, while framing our responses to China's rise, to be dazzled by headline numbers of China's GDP growth and be blinded to the darker side of that story. This is particularly because an excessively adulatory response to China is spawning a creeping illiberalism around the world. China's economic success is, as Ian Buruma notes, convincing too many leaders that citizens want to be treated like children. That's a slippery slope, particularly as a newly awakened China shakes the world.
