e stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind”, he added. For this week’s edition of Milénio Stadium, we had a conversation about these matters with Professor Jeremy Paltiel, from the department of political science of Carleton University, who specializes in the government and foreign policies of Asia (China and Japan) and Canada-China Relations.
Milénio Stadium: What significant changes in Chinese political strategy can be identified as responsible for China’s transformation – from being an extremely poor country to one of the world’s major economic powers?
Jeremy Paltiel: The major change was the opening to foreign trade and investment and the opening up of the internal market. China’s opening to globalization first transformed the agricultural economy and freed up surplus rural labor for work in export industries.
MS: Other than the economic dominance, how relevant is China in the geopolitical design of Asia Pacific? And what impact might it have on a balance that guarantees world peace?
JP: This is a difficult question. The “Asia-Pacific” initially emerged out of the US defeat of Japan in the Pacific War and the subsequent outbreak of the Cold War which left China and the Soviet Union dominating Eurasia while the US and its allies “contained” them through a string of alliances and bases in maritime East and Southeast Asia. China “switched sides” and welcomed US President Nixon in 1972. After Mao’s death in 1976 this gave Deng Xiaoping an opportunity to join the West in globalization. But Deng never intended to transform China into a democracy and proved it with the repression of the students in Tiananmen in 1989. Deng Xiaoping also downplayed military modernization in favor of industrialization economic growth and educational and scientific advance. Nonetheless, the spectacular success of China’s globalization in the 1990’s and 2000’s enabled the rapid buildup of China’s military power to the point of becoming the dominant economic power in Asia and the second economic power in the world. China has no intention of dominating the West ideologically or militarily, but it does insist on preserving its own socio-political system and especially after US failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the economic crisis of 2008, the Chinese Communist Party believes itself to be the moral equal of the US and questions the superiority of the liberal model. The issue is whether China’s challenge as an “alternative” to the liberal model and its insistence on regaining the regional role it had before European Imperialism became dominant in the 19th century represents a “threat”. The Chinese Communist Party certainly wants to regain Taiwan which it believes was unfairly severed from China by Japanese Imperialism and US intervention in the Chinese Civil War in the 1940’s. How far this represents a threat to the Asia-Pacific remains something of a controversy.
MS: There is a growing economic power resulting from progressive “westernization” and the transformation of Maoist communism into what many call communism based on the purest capitalism – what impact has this had on the internal organization of the country? Do Chinese people live better in their country today?
JP: There is no question that Chinese are now enjoying the highest standard of living in Chinese history and China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty despite rising levels of inequality. The fact is that no Chinese is materially worse off than they were in the days of Mao Zedong and the vast majority are infinitely better off, with hundreds of millions now enjoying a middle-class lifestyle. Chinese live better, and longer, by every metric.
MS: The current Chinese president makes no secret of his ambition to make China a major global player. To what extent can the fact that the issue of alleged lack of respect for human rights (too often brought to the fore) be a brake on this goal?
JP: The human rights situation in China is not something the country can be proud of, even though, even there the human rights situation has vastly improved 