CHINA IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AND THEIR ROLE IN JAMAICA: IS IT POLITICS, ECONOMICS OR BOTH?

Abstract

China has long been a country with three of the most malleable attributes required for membership in the “great power clubâ€. By the early 1990s dramatic increases in China’s economy and political power were among the most important changes in international politics. Today, the world’s most populous nation has benefited from radically liberalizing its economy and has moved from being a relatively insignificant corner of the world to a colossus seeking to transform it. The jump in China’s exports has caused massive trade deficits for the United States and other traders. China has undoubtedly created an unstable trading global arena especially for countries like Mexico, overturning agreements like the NAFTA by becoming the second largest trading partner to the US. Chinese leaders recognize that rising powers in the past, such as Germany before World War I and Japan before World War II, became powerful in ways that challenged the prevailing international order.
The consequences of these actions were an alignment of other powers against them and their eventual destruction. Rapley in a newspaper article in the Jamaican Gleaner (May 18, 2006) states that though China has grown more in the last eight years than Jamaica has since independence (45 years), it has not been so fortunate as to escape the problem of grave social divisions (N/B this is not to imply that Jamaica has been). This article explores the aspect of Chinese trade and its effects on international stability, and their roles in Jamaica. The discourse is an evaluation of economics and politics, with emphasis on the gamesmanship that is played by China in seeking to attain world domination. A number of Political Scientists and International Relations
theorists write that China will become an economic superpower; they even go as far as to predict by when and with what GDP, however according to Lardy, they fail to include a number of factors about Asia’s rising star.