China in the Year of the Horse.

• Author: Levine, Paul
• Position: Book review

China Goes Global: The Partial Power by David Shambaugh. Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-19-986014-2, 409 pp., $29.95 (List), $22.19 (Amazon Hardcover), $16.20 (Paperback), $ 12.45 (Kindle), $21.95 (Audiobook).

In the Year of the Horse, relations between the United States and China may undergo a series of dramatic changes as President Barack Obama continues his "pivot" towards Asia and China's new leader, Xi Jinping, seeks to reform the economy, control the political system and transform China's global role. "The relationship between the United States and the PRC has rightly been described by officials on both sides as the most important bilateral relationship in the world," notes David Shambaugh. "It is also the most complex one."

This complexity is often undervalued in the media as "experts" seek to portray the relationship in the simple arithmetic of China's rise and America's decline. But as Shambaugh explains, "These two powers are interconnected in innumerable ways: strategically, diplomatically, economically, socially, culturally, environmentally, regionally, internationally, educationally, and in many other domains." Thus holistic understanding of the interconnections is essential for comprehending global politics. "By many measures, they are the world's two most important powers," says Shambaugh. "The United States and China today have the world's two largest economies, in aggregate the two largest military budgets and navies, are the two largest consumers of energy and importers of oil in the world, are the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses and contributors to climate change, contribute the two largest numbers of Ph.D.s and patent applications in the world, and are the only two true global actors on the world stage today."

David Shambaugh is the founding Director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. The author of six previous books on China, he has now published China Goes Global, an invaluable assessment of China's strengths and weaknesses as it comes to terms with its new international status. He describes himself as "a scholar, professor and public intellectual" who is impatient with the current academic emphasis on microanalyses and the journalistic weakness for sweeping generalizations. So he summarily rejects the apocalyptic conclusions of popular books like Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World and Gordon G. Chang's...