The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

In the face of these daunting challenges, many concerned
Chinese stepped forward to advocate ways to
cope with change. However, to China’s disappointment
and the Western powers’ fortune, the initial Chinese
efforts had largely failed. The awakened China
did not come to shake the world.
In retrospect, the Chinese failed to do so not because
Napoleon was wrong about China’s potentials,
but because they had taken questionable approaches
towards modernity. This reflection finds strong support
from the example of China’s fellow Asian nation,
Japan. With arguably much smaller potentials and
under very similar internal and external conditions, 2
Japan was able to transform itself into a powerful
modern state, replace China as the leading nation in
East Asia for much of the 20th century, and become an
economic superpower of the world, notwithstanding
its devastating loss in World War II. Many other factors
aside, one can reasonably argue that the different
approaches these two nations took towards modernization
most likely set them apart. 3
By many accounts, the questions of what kind of a
modern state an agrarian nation should become and
how to pursue modernization are the basic issues confronting
developing nations when they are brought to
the modernization process. Japan settled these issues
squarely in 1860 when it launched the Meiji Reformation
and moved on. China unfortunately has been
struggling with these issues since it was brought to
confront them in the mid-19th century. In many ways,
China’s inability to settle these issues has made its
transition to modernity a painful and difficult experience.
It has also kept China at odds with the dominant
powers that set the course of the world’s modernization
process. It is not unreasonable to argue that until
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