Sunday, May 28, 2006

In both China and the United States, strategists are trying to figure out whether China's rise means America's decline -- or, to use economists' jargon, whether it's a win-win situation or a zero-sum game. In China: The Balance Sheet (PublicAffairs), two scholars from the Institute for International Economics and two from the Center for Strategic and International Studies survey the evidence, from human rights to military budgets, from pollution to the banking system. The result is a pithy, 161-page overview meant to influence the way people here think about people and institutions over there. The authors expect China's economy to overcome pollution, rising energy demand and bad bank loans, but they discourage panic about the country's economic rise by poking holes in theories about China as an emerging high-tech superstate. Without being Pollyanna-ish, they conclude that "the areas of mutual interest . . . are more prevalent, and more significant, than the spheres of potential conflict."

-- Steve Mufson