How is the "China brand" impacting on globalization? : examining new FDI patterns from a Japanese historical perspective

Graham Allison’s Destined for War is arguably the most ominous prognosis on China’s rise to be published in English in recent years. In this work, Allison argued that the Classical-era “Thucydides Trap” between the rising Athens and the incumbent power Sparta was a definitive characteristic of US-China competition on the world stage at present. He also poignantly likened the rapidity of China’s ascent this century with the rise of Prussia in the nineteenth century, suggesting that war with the US was inevitable because of growing American insecurities at the changing balance of power, as well as China’s own dissatisfaction at its global status. Indeed, that China’s state-led economic development resembles Prussia’s, and that its naval build-up at present echoes Germany in the 1900s, seems intuitively apt. Britain of course decided to contain a unified Germany largely because of the latter’s naval build-up in the 1910s. And the US did not sit idly by during World War I, even though Germany was by then its second largest contributor of inbound foreign direct investment (FDI). Against this background, the former Australian commando and current MP, Andrew Hastie, went even so far as to cause upset by suggesting that Chinese policy at present had much in common with Nazism.