Is China going to take over as world superpower? The question came up as we sat eating chicken one late December 2014 evening in Sinchon, Seoul. I sat with three South Koreans (by birth), male, born between the late 1970s and 1990, all of whom had lived extensively abroad.
One had lived half his life in England and had the air of a British intellectual about him. (He reminded me of my former coworker M.G. from England,
despite the racial difference.) He said the “key question” was whether China would make moves towards being the “world police,” as the USA has been for something around about seventy years now.I said I didn’t think China was interested in being world police. (This is not the same as saying China won’t be. I don’t think the USA was interested either in becoming a “world superpower” at all in, say,
1900 or 1910!) Another of the Koreans, who’d lived in China most of his life, did not address the issue directly but chose instead to tell us about a certain billboard campaign active in China right now. He said all over China you can see billboards on which are printed two large words. Those words are: “China’s Dream”. What’s that mean? It’s left unexplained. The two words stand alone. One interpretation, he said with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders, is that it means true world power, means China taking its proper place at the head of the world. My friend H.J. and I listened with interest.
I have gotten to know many young (almost all born after 1990) educated “PRC Chinese” in the past year.
I don’t necessarily see in them a world-imperial ambition. On the other hand, it’s not so hard to imagine a global version of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (i.e., economic colonization).