Bremmer draws foreign policy tips from the J Curve: “The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes — unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create conditions most favorable for a closed regime’s safe passage through the least stable segment of the J Curve — however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.”

So, where does this place China, with its capitalist economic orientation and its Communist Party rule? “Is it too economically open for the left side? Or is it too politically closed for the right?”

Opinion is divided. On Chinese new year — that is, within a span of 24 hours — in February 2005, for instance, 11 billion text messages were sent within the country. By the end of 2005 China was estimated to have 120 million internet users, and now 350 million Chinese own mobile phones.

And with the process of economic reform, first started in the late 1970s, China has become integrated in the global economy. For instance, between 1978 and 2004, $563.8 billion worth of foreign direct investment flowed into China. This is, concedes Bremmer, more than 10 times the total FDI that came into Japan between 1945 and 2000. Also, foreign funded enterprises produced 55 per cent of Chinese exports in 2003, a percentage far in excess of that in the Asian tigers. Also, now foreign-owned firms account for two-thirds of new FDI in China. According to Bremmer, the CCP “believes its political capital is replenished by rising Chinese living standards”. And with those standards intimately connected to FDI, the Party accepts “an extraordinary level of foreign influence in the establishment and enforcement of its economic rules of the road”.

... contd.