Why Should We Care About how China Became a Great Power?

Ray and Jim welcome Stanford University fellow and author Oriana Skylar Mastro to discuss her recent book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power".

Oriana emphasizes that outsiders often misunderstand the sources of China's strength. She says that while Beijing sometimes emulates Western strategies, it also frequently exploits their weaknesses--for example, engaging strongly with certain developing countries that the U.S. largely ignores.

She further asserts that China engages in entrepreneurial new strategies, such as training developing countries' police forces or building a vast maritime militia force. Many of these approaches are made possible by China's authoritarian political system in ways that democracies cannot easily emulate and probably shouldn't try, though they need to find other ways to contest them using their own st ...