China's rise: a Pacific view

What kind of great power is China becoming? How will Pacific Island countries be affected? Are there specific challenges and opportunities, already evident or foreseeable? If so, how can they best be handled?

Michael Powles, Adjunct Research Fellow, Institute of International Studies at  Fudan University in Shanghai, and a former New Zealand Ambassador to China and to the United Nations, has sought to answer these and other questions in a working paper for Fudan University’s Centre for Chinese Foreign Policy Studies, entitled "China's Rise: A Pacific View".

What kind of great power is China becoming? That is a question vigorously debated internationally. In his paper, Mr Powles argues that China’s rise is likely to bring enourmous opportunities to the Pacific region, but the extent to which nations manage to develop these opportunities into positive outcomes is dependent on the level and ways of engagement with the emerging power.

In the years since the 1970s when the process of dismantling a lengthy period of autarky began, China has undergone enormous change. Understanding what global role it is to play in the future goes hand in hand with reaching a balanced interpretation of the country’s domestic policies and developments.

The paper quotes a recent observer as saying that almost any statement about China is right in some parts of the country and wrong in others. Michael Powles’s detailed study looks at the multiple facets of life in China and the challenges the country faces as well as its foreign policy objectives, perspectives and ways of engagement with the world.

► Download "China's Rise: A Pacific View" by Michael Powles [PDF, 344kb]

► Click here to read "New Zealand and China: our shared economic future", speech by Prime Minister John Key at Peking University