Transition of Power on the Example of USA and China: Establishment of Bipolar World Order or New American Cycle

Stamenić, Slavica and Arnaudov, Mitko (2017) Transition of Power on the Example of USA and China: Establishment of Bipolar World Order or New American Cycle. KNOWLEDGE - International Journal, 20 (3). pp. 1157-1161. ISSN 1857-923X

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Abstract

Large number of political scientists, especially from Asia, speak about transition of global power and the shift to multipolar or bipolar world in which BRICS countries or People’s Republic China, as the second largest economy at the moment, will take the position of the most serious challenger or the counterweight to the hegemony of the United States.However, economic turbulences have shown that most of BRICS countries do not have enough capacity to compete with the United States. On the other side, it is evident that China, as the most significant emerging power nowadays, gets more important role in the process of building a new world order. The World Economic Crisis, which is recognized as a milestone in power transition, brought to the surface all the anomalies of the American economy and raised the questions about sustainability of unipolar world order and the hegemonic status of the United States. At the same time, constant good economic performance, rise of China and its resistance to global crisis are evident. This paper considers comparative analysis of power transition on the example of United States and China in the period from 2008 until nowadays. Special focus is on analyzing and comparing the influence of the global recession to the power dimensions of these two countries. In that context, focus is not only on the potential establishment the bipolar world order, but also on the power transition process: from emerging to declining power. Therefore, the objective of the subject matter is to try to answer the following questions: How did the global economic crisis in 2008 affect China's power changes in correlation to the USA?; at what level is the power of these countries today?; and whether China as a rising power has enough capacity to support the hegemonic transition and lead to the creation of a bipolar world order?We conclude the United States is a force that is still dominant in the international context, and none of the "rising powers", including China are individually still not strong enough to be counterweigh. Although academic and political public worldwide are afraid of strengthening of Chinese power, it is unrealistic to expect from the point of view of neoliberalism and modernization theory that countries of authoritarian political regimes, such as China, will have the same chances to reach the peak of smart power, that is, to gain enviable resources of power in all its structures.

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