Re: "rise of china" and wst

> 2/28/2001, David Smith wrote:
> >I must confess, I'm baffled by the suggestion that the "relevant data" would 
>be what US or Chinese leaders say
>
> Is the intent of a nation's leaders irrelevant to the course that nation 
>might take?  Consider...
>

Just a quick (if obvious!) response:  Discerning the "intent" of any
nation's leaders is a rather difficult business.  Talk really is often
very very cheap -- in fact, in many instances it's rather deliberately
designed to mislead (especially, the language of "international
diplomacy").  So I'm not persuaded that even the most careful analysis of
public pronouncements by members of the "inner circle" of the PRC (or, for
that matter, those of Dubya and his "handlers") is as revelatory as
Richard Moore evidently believes...

The other part of his response to my posting involved China's military
power and a related "claim" to some "special role" in East Asia.  It turns
out that Pakistan is also a "nuclear power" which makes "consistent and repeated
territorial claims on a neighboring nation."  We could probably think of
other examples like this.  But, I think, that folks are suggesting that
"China is rising" in a very distinctive, world-historical way.  As someone
who is interested in world-system analysis I assumed that this sort of "rise"
(to core status? hegemonic status?) would necessarily involve SOME notion
that the country was undergoing "economic upgrading" (in fact, I would
have guessed that economic and technological "development" would be
required to even maintain and/or enhance that geo-military power).

In any case, my original message really was mainly asking folks to
clarify just what they DID mean by "the rise of China" and offer some sort
of data to back that up.  We probably need to do that first to avoid
"talking past each other"...

dave smith
sociology, uci