China’s Future in a Multinodal World Order

Over the next twenty years China is likely to become the world’s largest national economy, though not the richest one-fifth of the world’s population. Chinese demographic power will be qualitatively different from American technological power despite bottom-line similarities in GNP, and China will face challenges of political and economic sustainability. Assuming that globalization, constrained state sovereignty, and demographic revolution continue as basic world trends, the world order is likely to be one in which concerns about conflicts of interests drive interactions, but no state or group of states is capable of benefitting from unilaterally enforcing its will against the rest. Thus, there is no set of “poles” whose competition or cooperation determines the world order, despite the differences of exposure created by disparities in capacity. Although the United States and China will be the primary state actors and their relationship will contain elements of rivalry as well as cooperation, the prerequisites of Cold War bipolarity no longer exist. Rather, the order would be best described as “multinodal,” a matrix of interacting, unequal units that pursue their own interests within a stable array of national units and an increasing routinization of international regimes and interpenetrating transnational connections.