TOKYO.The ever-growing economic power of China poses important questions: will
China, despite its lack of freedom, become a true world-class power? And if
and when it does, how should the international community respond?

With 760 million laborers, an average wage that is a small fraction of
America's, and one of the highest savings rates in the world (38 percent to
42 percent, though much of this is wasted by the dysfunctional Chinese
banking system), China has enjoyed annual economic growth of 9 percent for
the last quarter-century.

The Central Intelligence Agency, using the purchasing power parity method,
ranks the Chinese gross domestic product as the second largest in the world,
about 62 percent of the American and 1.94 times Japan's, the third largest.

Yet Beijing has yet to forcefully claim the title of world leader.

There are two possible reasons. First, China is actually still poor and
weak. About two-thirds of the Chinese population is systematically excluded
from the glittering, vibrant urban centers and have the low living standard
typical of a developing nation. While China's most developed regions,
Shanghai and Beijing, were ranked by the United Nations in 2001 as
equivalent to Greece and Singapore, the more populous provinces, like Gansu
and Guizhou, were ranked with Haiti and Sudan.

China is essentially still a giant labor-intensive processing factory. Among
the great variety of industrial goods China now produces and exports, few
are invented or designed by Chinese. As a result, the Chinese end up earning
low wages at great costs to their environment, while foreign patent holders,
investors and retailers capture the lion's share of the profit. No wonder
foreign capitalists are among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of China's
rise.

Second, China's foreign policy is still motivated by a besieged one-party
regime's desire for preservation. The persistent abuse of human rights and
systematic suppression of freedom show how paranoid the regime is.

Many of China's business leaders hold or seek foreign passports or
residency. Capital flight from China has been surpassing foreign direct
investment since the late 1990's. Beijing's top diplomatic objective has
been to gain external acceptance that will prop up the regime, not to expand
Chinese national interests or exercise power abroad.

This profound divorce of the regime's political interest from the nation's
interest, of course, could easily change: Beijing could quickly become a
typical rising challenger or even an imperialist power if it feels secure
and powerful enough; the regime could also be aggressive and belligerent if
it feels desperately weak and in danger of collapse.

Therefore, predictions that China will quickly become a world power, and
will do so peacefully, are premature. Since the late 19th century, only one
major non-Western nation, Japan, has risen to become a world-class power,
and it did so only by wreaking much havoc.

Still, China should and can be powerful and rich. More important, the
Chinese people deserve to be free: free from poverty and backwardness, free
from the hurtful feelings of past humiliations, free from deeply trenched
ethnocentrism and chauvinism, and free from political tyranny. Such a rise
of China would enrich the world and truly glorify Chinese history.

Chinese people and the world must work together to devise and further
social, political and institutional changes, in addition to promoting
economic development, to ensure the peaceful rise of China.

It is also obviously premature to assume that China's rise necessarily
threatens the United States. Such a belief may become an enormously costly
self-fulfilling prophecy. It is morally dubious to suppress the Chinese, a
fifth of the human race, just because the government there is now
undemocratic. It will take much more than devising some clever geopolitical
moves to check and control China or to force a quick regime change in
Beijing.

What is needed from the current world leaders is serious commitment,
long-term goals, and steady leadership and coordination to help China rise
and change, peacefully. The success or failure of China's rise are too
consequential to be left for Beijing to manage alone.

(Fei-Ling Wang is a professor of international affairs at the Georgia
Institute of Technology and an international affairs fellow of the Council
on Foreign Relations.)