Shaping China's Rise through Strategic Friction

China's grand strategy calls for accumulating sufficient national power to maintain internal order, defend its sovereignty, and eventually replace the United States as the dominant global power. This Strategy Research Project examines the origins and nature of China's global objectives and their negative implications for the United States. Specifically, it will address these questions: How will China behave over the next several decades, and what should the United States do about it? China's history and cultural underpinnings indicate that it will continue on its course towards global superpower status. Unless China's political structure changes to allow a more representative form of government, its rise to this status will threaten American security. Washington's current China policy places its confidence in the unsubstantiated hope that increasing wealth will lead to democratic reform in China. Actually, China's increasing prosperity is countering democratic reform, and current policy will not quickly lead to a democratic China. This paper identifies China's economy as its strategic "center of gravity" and recommends maintaining a utilitarian relationship with Beijing while purposefully slowing the rate of China's economic growth. This will prevent China's premature rise to superpower status and eventually enable democratic reform to change China's culture, producing a more responsible superpower.