China's Pole-To-Pole Ambitions

The country says it’s no superpower, but it’s starting to behave like one

- Marc Champion, with Peter Martin and Dandan Li

One of the things Wang Wen remembers best about his trip to Antarctica, besides the brutality of the December cold, is the sight of the American flag fluttering by the sign that marks the geographic South Pole. Wang, who’s executive dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing, had traveled to the end of the Earth on a reconnaissance mission. He left awed by the sheer size of the American presence in a region so inhospitable to humans and so rich in resource potential. While China announced plans last year to build its fifth Antarctic research station, its footprint on the frozen continent is comparatively small. On his return, Wang penned a newspaper article that asked: “Should we contemporary Chinese be ashamed?”

For the first time in its long history, China has in President Xi Jinping a leader with a truly global vision. So, inevitably, Beijing looks to the U.S., the sole superpower, for a yardstick as to what that requires—be it a blue-water navy or more bases in Antarctica.

Yet Communist Party leaders also recoil at being seen as the next global hegemon and are reluctant to shoulder the expense that goes with it. They studiously avoid the word “superpower” and see the American version of it as ideologically unacceptable and spent.

Whether China does become a superpower and whether it could sustain the costs involved are questions that will have an impact on the world for decades. They will shape terms of trade, a changing global order, and issues of war and peace. “We don’t know,” Wang says over dinner a few floors below his institute, when asked what Chinese great power will look like. “Anything but America.”