Chinese Dominance Isn't Certain Review

Chinese Dominance Isn't Certain

Apr 25, 2014 02:00 am | Jacqueline Newmyer Deal

Jacqueline Newmyer Deal

The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China--and How America Can Win

Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

Geoff Dyer, The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China—and How America Can Win (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 320 pp., $26.95.
Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014), 256 pp., $26.00.
FEARS OF CHINA’S RISE ARE GROWING. Only a decade ago, most experts insisted that the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas ambitions were limited to Taiwan. Now that Beijing has begun to adopt a more assertive posture abroad, the conventional wisdom has changed from dismissing the China threat to accepting it fatalistically. But must Washington and its Asian allies defer to Chinese expansionism? Can we really have jumped from one world to another so quickly?
Not a chance. Two new books provide a corrective to the lately fashionable gloom-and-doom analysis. Each is by a crack journalist. The first, Geoff Dyer’s The Contest of the Century, addresses the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the prism of China’s military, political, diplomatic and economic development. The second, Robert Kaplan’s Asia’s Cauldron, focuses on the competition between China and the states around the South China Sea—the central route for shipping between the Middle East and East Asia, and the site of disputed claims to resource-rich maritime territory.
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