An excerpt from Thomas P.M. Barnett's new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

When President Richard Nixon reopened diplomatic ties with Mao Zedong's Communist China in 1972, he enabled the most profound global economic dynamic of the last half-century: China's historic reemergence as a worldwide market force. After constituting roughly one-third of global GDP just as America was starting its climb in the early 1800s, China experienced its "century of humiliation" at the hands of foreign colonial powers that manhandled its economy without ever truly conquering it as a nation. Today's China ranks a G-8 slot (#4, actually) in GDP and trails only the United States when "parity purchasing power" is factored in. China won't overtake America in sheer economic weight anytime soon, but even having to discount that possibility tells you how rapid China's rise has been. Whether you realize it or not, nothing shapes your world today more than China's economic growth, and nothing will shape our planet's future more—for good or ill—than China's ongoing trajectory. China's decision to rejoin the world constituted globalization's tipping point, meaning—absent global war—there's no turning back now.

If Nixon opened the door, then Deng Xiaoping, Mao's ultimate successor, led one-fifth of humanity through it. Unlike the Soviet Union's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng chose wisely: By tackling economic freedom before political liberalization, Deng kept China stable during its tenuous first years of market reform. Deng's dream for China in 1979 would have struck Alexander Hamilton as a mirror image of his own for America in 1789: As historian Michael Marti puts it, "Deng's desire was to create an economic system that would allow China to become a rich and powerful nation by the middle of the twenty-first century." To do so, Deng would have to politically defeat another "immortal" of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Yun, who correctly feared that Deng's path would dramatically emphasize industry over rural development and lead to a huge rise in Western—and particularly American—cultural influences that would encourage factionalism within the party and among the people. In many ways, Chen's fears for a China that embraced Deng's ambitious agenda mirrored Thomas Jefferson's fears were America to follow the aggressive plan set out by Alexander Hamilton. Both Chen and Jefferson had great trepidation that their countries would abandon their agricultural center of gravity and quickly assume the have-versus-have-not, highly urbanized social structure of their economic model—Britain in the case of America, and the United States in the case of China. Whatever you can say about Mao's bizarre economic campaigns, he did create a society that was quite egalitarian in its lack of development and widespread poverty.

Although Deng is correctly labeled an autocrat, ordering—along with Chen—the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989, he's also correctly identified as a modernizer who unleashed a generation's immense creativity. Many from that ambitious generation will tell you that, before Tiananmen, they felt freedom was "90 percent political and 10 percent economic," but after Deng's crackdown, they concluded—somewhat harshly—that real freedom was "90 percent economic and 10 percent political." In other words, they decided that markets were the first, best instruments for generating positive change in China. Deng's objectives have roughly been met to date: to quadruple China's meager per capita income of roughly $250 in 1981 to approximately $1,000 by the century's end, and then quadruple it again by 2050, something China is well on its way to achieving, having already doubled to more than $2,000 per capita today. Deng's ultimate dream, as Marti notes, was that "China would become the center of an East Asian trading bloc similar to the European Community or the North American Free Trade Area," in effect echoing Henry Clay's lofty vision for America by placing China at the center of a continental system modeled on itself—a Chinese system for an Asian union.

Following the Tiananmen Massacre, Deng and his grand strategy came under attack by the conservative left wing of the party, but in turn that "Soviet faction" suffered its own loss of face when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself dissolved at the end of 1991. Embarking on his historic "southern tour" in 1992, Deng rallied his two great power bases: the People's Liberation Army and provincial officials. Striking back at his opponents, Deng commandeered the Fourteenth Party Congress to reshuffle the Politburo in his favor, installing his followers as the next generation to lead the nation. A "grand compromise" was struck inside the party: Deng won military support for further market reforms as long as a lid was kept on political change, and the army was afforded enough budget to modernize. The party would remain supreme, but state involvement in the economy would shrink, and private business would be encouraged along with investment from, and trade with, the outside world. By engineering the acceleration of market reforms, Deng sought to take advantage of the strategic pause generated by the Cold War's end. As Marti writes, "With a weak Russia to the north, an American withdrawal from the western Pacific, and the willingness and availability of foreign capital to invest in China, Deng argued that it was now or never. Reform and opening must be pushed to the limit."

Much as the U.S. military now plays bodyguard to globalization and once did the same for America's westward expansion across the nineteenth century, Deng enlisted the PLA to play "protector and escort" to China's economic modernization, the goal of which would become the party's basic line, replacing class conflict. Externally, China would adopt a foreign policy of avoiding dangerous entanglements, much as George Washington had advocated for a young America upon his retirement. No foreign crises or international issues would be allowed to interrupt China's focus on internal economic development, which would center on urbanization, industrialization, attracting foreign capital and maximizing export earnings, and significant trade protectionism to nurture the home market and home companies that would someday dominate global markets. Again, this is basically the American System of the early 1800s, right down to the dominance of a single-party elite and a strong aversion to political factionalism. Even China's infrastructural build-out mirrors our own: first make "external improvements" to link coastal regions to foreign markets, then tax the booming coastal regions to finance internal improvements that reach increasingly inward and westward.

China has experienced incredible economic growth ever since, increasing its GDP annually by almost 10 percent—as fast as you dare expand. But China is also nowhere near becoming a democracy, and that dubious achievement both scares and excites nations around the world, because it suggests that you can rapidly embrace globalization, achieve great income growth, and remain a single-party state. And that's the China model. But here's where the China System must likewise mirror the American System: The bulk of China's population, as well as most of its abject poverty, lies in its interior west. Those underdeveloped provinces represent the caboose on this train, and no matter how fast the train's engine may pull, the booming coastal provinces cannot embrace globalization without pulling the rural poor along for the ride; otherwise the train will break apart, just as China has many times in its history.