Historicizing the Emergence of China as a World Economic Power: Strategies, Challenges and Prospects

Although many scholarly works have endeavored to delve into the emergence of China as an economic power in the world, yet not many has taken an in-depth study of the forces that over the years crystalized into the reality of its emergence as a key player of the World’s Political Economy. This work therefore attempts a detailed discussion on the formative processes of China’s emergence to the economic world stage using the historical methodology. The work covers the underlying factors of the emergent economic competition between China and United States or America and its implications for the world economic scene as a whole. The problem which therefore confronts this study is to give an authentic assessment of the growth and development of the China’s economy. In fulfilment of this objective, the study adopted a Mixed Method Research (MMR) design involving elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Although the work is qualitative dominant in historical research methodology, elements of quantitative droves were derived from the data which corroborated findings from the oral interviews and secondary sources from journals, library search, books and other literature. Findings of the work revealed that factors such as diplomatic consistency with other countries, toleration of other parties’ expectations and trade demands and astute trades’ relations and fulfilment of transactional trade collaborative treaties promoted the emergence of China as an economic world power contrary to wide margin exploitations which characterized some Western power economies which often undermined third world capabilities to economic development. The study concluded that China must continue to strengthen its strategies for greater heights, not only by addressing challenges from other great powers such as the United States and other Western economies but maintain a balanced trade relation with other developing economies of the world.