A Contest For Supremacy: China, America, And The Struggle For Mastery In Asia -- A Book Review

Let's Talk About China -- Foreign Policy

A new book argues that it's time to have an open conversation about the security challenges posed by the Middle Kingdom's rise, even if Beijing gets offended.

In the preface to A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, Aaron Friedberg, an international relations professor at Princeton, describes how, in the waning months of the Clinton administration, he was hired to review the U.S. intelligence community's assessment of China. The experience, he says, left him deeply troubled about what he saw coming between China and the United States. By contrast, the "China hands" he knew in and out of the U.S. government "seemed to believe that a Sino-American rivalry was either highly unlikely, too terrifying to contemplate, or (presumably because talking about it might increase the odds that it would occur) too dangerous to discuss. Whatever the reason, it was not something that serious people spoke about in polite company."

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My Comment: I have not read the book .... but if this brief analysis is any indication of what is it's contents .... this will be required reading for me this year.