Reference no: EM133401785

Question: Will US-China relations will be more conflictual or cooperative from a Liberal optimist point of View.

Liberal Optimists In foreign affairs, most Americans are liberals.9 As regards the prospects for peace, cooperation, and understanding among nations, most liberals are opti- mists. It should therefore come as no surprise that liberal optimists are com- mon and probably, in numerical terms, dominant among U.S. analysts, policymakers, and China watchers. On the question of the future of U.S.-China relations and, more generally, regarding the future of world politics, liberal optimists believe in the pacifying power of three interrelated and mutually reinforcing causal mechanisms: economic interdependence, international insti- tutions, and democratization.'0 ECONOMIC INTERDEPENDENCE Liberal optimists believe that bilateral economic exchange ests in good relations between states. The greater the v investment flowing between two countries, the more group have a strong interest in avoiding conflict and preserving Liberal optimists note that economic exchange between and China has increased dramatically since the onset of China in the late 1970s. From the start of reform in 1978 to the end of the twen- tieth century, the value of the trade moving between the two countries grew by more than two orders of magnitude, from $1 billion to almost $120 billion an- nually." By 2004 that figure had doubled to a reported total of $245 billion.