The China Challenge

Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power

By: Thomas Christensen

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Many see China's rise as a threat to US leadership in Asia and beyond. Thomas J. Christensen argues instead that the real challenge lies in dissuading China from regional aggression while eliciting its global cooperation. Drawing on decades of scholarship and experience as a senior diplomat, Christensen offers a deep perspective on China's military and economic capacity. Assessing China's political outlook and strategic goals, Christensen shows how nationalism and the threat of domestic instability influence the party's decisions about regional and global affairs. If China obstructs international efforts to confront nuclear proliferation, civil conflicts, financial instability, and climate change, those efforts will likely fail; but if China merely declines to support such efforts, the problems will grow vastly more complicated. Articulating a balanced strategic approach along with perceptive historical analysis, Christensen describes how we might shape China's choices in the coming decades so that it contributes more to the international system from which it benefits so much.

©2015 Original Material by Thomas J. Christensen. Recorded by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

UNDERSTANDING CHINA

Thomas Christensen addresses “The China Challenge” with a capsulized history of communist party' leadership from Mao to Xi. Christensen offers perspective to China’s support of North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Russia in the 21st century. Nationalism and history are at the heart of China’s support of non-western countries. Though “The China Challenge” is published in 2015, before Ukraine’s invasion, it offers insight to China’s response to international events that seem irrational to many western citizens. Christensen’s history disabuses reader/listeners of Xi’s irrationality. Mao’s resolve in the Korean war reinforces President Xi’s belief in the utility and strength of the Chinese Communist Party.

The fundamental theme of Christensen’s book is American leadership needs to understand China better. Only with understanding will respect be engendered and comity restored. Both China’s and America’s leaders realize humanity lives on spaceship earth. Without nation-state respect and comity, all nations (not to mention humans) are destined for the grave.