As an initial matter, the popular conception of China rests on a gross misreading of the past. The country, in short, has never been dominant on “the world stage,” as Kaplan and others put it. “The idea that China was somehow a great Asian hegemon at some point in the past, so that all she is doing now is resuming her traditional position is a total misunderstanding of how nations in pre-modern Asia interacted,” Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania told Strategika. “Fundamentally, they avoided contact lest that lead to disorder, as globalization is doing in China today.”
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