Should We Fear China?

Jeffrey Wasserstrom gives five reasons why we need not fear the rise of China. Among them: “Some of the really scary things about China have U.S. parallels,” such as environmental disregard, he says. Wasserstrom says any fear we have about China is analogous to our irrational fear of dying in a plane crash when far more accidents occur on the highways. Our fear is normal and one with clear, but fallacious, precedent. ‘We’ve had related worries before about other countries. American concerns about China’s economic surge mirror ones we had in the 1980s about Japan, when it was rising in the global economic hierarchy and copies of the book ‘Japan as Number One’ were selling briskly,” concludes Wasserstrom.