The meaning of China

Featured in

  • Published 20130903
  • ISBN: 9781922079985
  • Extent: 288pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

THE WORLD HAS been watching for China’s rise for a very long time. ‘Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world,’ said Napoleon. Even at the end of World War II, when China lay devastated by decades of internal warfare and invasion, divided between warring armies, plumbing the depths of poverty and de-industrialisation, and accounting for less than 5 per cent of global GDP, President Roosevelt included it among his ‘four policemen’ of great powers that would steward global order from the Security Council of the United Nations.

Twenty-six years later, with China in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and further impoverished by the Great Leap Forward (and still producing less than one-twentieth of global GDP) the United States was prepared to use it as the great swing player in its global tussle with the Soviet Union. It is as if the world had kept a mental space for a Chinese great power, long before China had the material means to fulfil that role.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Reality beyond the whiteboard

EssayIn May 2003, a week after President Bush had declared victory in Iraq from the foredeck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, I made my first...

More from this edition

Time to trade in

EssayON THE FRIDAY afternoon before a Sunday appearance on the ABC's Insiders couch, Barrie Cassidy emails the three panel members with a rough list...

How the Westies won

EssayONE BY ONE, the names flash up on the big screen, and one by one, the swaying, dancing ocean of red and black bellows...

Interview with
Billy Griffiths

InterviewBilly Griffiths is a Sydney-based writer and historian who published his first book The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971 in 2012....

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.