Charles Foran, author of "Mordecai: The Life and Times," has written eight previous books, including the award-winning "The Last House of Ulster," as well as documentaries for CBC Radio. He holds degrees from the University of Toronto and University College Dublin and has taught at universities in China, Hong Kong and Canada. He lives in Peterborough, Ont.
As a 21st-century superpower, China will be elusive, enigmatic, defensive, frustrating and largely benign. The country, in short, will remain in character as a reluctant global citizen.
China has always been the self-defined Middle Kingdom, located somewhere between heaven and earth, and, aside from a scarring period of colonial vulnerability, has always functioned as a closed empire. Empires are not countries; they contain countries, subject and even erase them; banner them, by force of character or, more often, simply by force, under their enforced ideological umbrella. They don't look out; others look in. Nor do they interact, intervene or simply co-exist, as one nation among many. Why would they? They're an empire. You're not.
But China is an empire without conventional imperial ambitions. Aside from its familiar self-declared historic "possessions" - Tibet, Taiwan, scattered islands along its eastern seaboard - the country shows no appetite for actual expansion. It has, however, much appetite for control, especially of resources, and its ever-expanding global financial might, aided and abetted by ballooning Western debt, is likely to embolden further state and privately sponsored takeovers of whatever is available to be taken over - in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. This will be strictly business, but it will also be politics. It may, too, be a new(ish) kind of imperialism.
Finally, China will be "benign" as a superpower only from an outsider's perspective. Short of a drastic alteration to its political system, the country will continue to oppress and occasionally brutalize its own population. It will do so, it will say, to maintain the necessary stability to further grow as an economic power. It won't mention the parallel urgent need for the Communist Party to self-perpetuate its dictatorship. The international business and political elite will continue to collude in this fiction, believing it can't be otherwise, and certainly not wanting to cause any kind of upset.