Almost all economic indicators show that the rise of China is all butinevitable. Many argue that it is already happening. China may rankas the second, or the third, or the fourth largest world economicpower, depending on how one does the counting, after enjoying anaverage annual GDP growth rate of nearly 10% in the past quarter ofa century (1983–2007) (National Bureau of Statistics of China).China currently has the largest foreign currency reserve in theworld, reaching one trillion U.S. dollars (People's Bank of China)and China became the second largest trade country after the U.S. in2007 (Wenweipo2007). In fact, no discussion of worldeconomy is adequate without talking about China. Even though theUnited States is currently embroiled in Iraq and the war on terror,there is no question that the rise of China is still very much inback of the minds of American foreign policy makers and politicalelites, especially during the current presidential campaigns. Forinstance, one survey of American international relations scholarsreveals that while 58% of the scholars believe that the greateststrategically important region for the United States is the MiddleEast right now, 60% of them think it will be China and East Asia in20 years (Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak 2005). A public survey shows that a majority of thecitizens in many developing countries think it would be a good thingif China were to become as large a military power as the UnitedStates (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2005).We would like toacknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their helpfulcomments on an earlier version of this paper. We also wantexpress our gratitude to the 132 scholars who participated inour survey.