21st Century Middle Kingdom?

Ross Terrill answers the question, “What does China want?”

I speak of China as ambitious. Is China not rather a conservative power? Each proposition has passionate adherents, yet the two have a yin-yang relation. The expansionist claims of Beijing are transparent and unique among today’s powerful nations. But the Beijing regime, while a dictatorship, is a rational dictatorship. It can count the numbers. It is often patient in fulfilling its goals. Equipped with a growing cadre of younger, well-trained officials, Beijing does not, like the Ming and Qing courts, deceive itself with beautiful fictions to hide the gap between reality and China’s preferred worldview. China, in sum, is an ambitious power that, if faced with countervailing power, will act prudently in its long-term strategy. It surely knows that a formidable list of powers—the United States, Japan, Russia, India—has many reasons for denying China the opportunity to be a 21st-century Middle Kingdom. China was not as weak as it seemed when it was the “sick man of Asia.” It may not be as endurably strong as it now seems to those who fear or admire it.

His entire essay is here.