The Coming China Wars.

• Author: Kamsky, Virginia A.
• Position: The Coming China Wars: Where They Will be Fought, How They Can be Won - Book review

The Coming China Wars

By Peter Navarro

Published by Financial Times Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J., 288 pages, $25.99

PETER NAVARRO'S The Coming China Wars: Where They Will be Fought, How They Can be Won, attempts to examine the obvious issues resulting from China's rapid economic growth over the past quarter-century. Navarro states his goal in no uncertain terms: to educate the "stakeholders" in China's future successes and failures to the "high stakes involved" and the "appropriate steps that can be taken" to prevent these "coming China Wars."

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The author devotes 10 core chapters to a series of concerns, including China's aging population, undervalued currency, and intellectual property piracy as well as its environmental pollution, search for oil, and pressing water shortage.

Unfortunately, the book is plagued by a sensationalist tone that skews the discussion of legitimate challenges. In the work's opening pages, Navarro presents his audience with a fictional headline from October 2012: "U.S.-China Chill Melts World Market."

While many of the problems Navarro describes must be acknowledged and, in fact, are being confronted by China's government and the wider world, his presupposition of inevitable China wars creates a false premise of China as an enemy in the global economy. Indeed, the best solutions to these problems will not come from a United States on alert for economic, social, or environmental war with China. Such combative posturing can only exacerbate existing tensions and destabilize an already precarious U.S.-China "mutually parasitic economic codependence," as Navarro terms it. One also worries about books like this resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is all very dangerous rhetoric.

It is important to have books about China that contain responsible data and analysis. China: The Balance Sheet--What the World Needs to Know Now about the Emerging Superpower, recently published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for International Economics, which Navarro thankfully footnotes in his last chapter, addresses many of the same problems but in a far more balanced and informed manner.

By establishing the U.S.-China relationship within a zero-sum framework in which China's gain is the U.S.'s loss, Navarro ignores the likely cooperative nature of many lasting solutions. For...