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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS
Cambridge International Level 3 Pre-U Certificate
9777/01
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
May/June 2009
Paper 1 Written Paper
1 hour 30 minutes
INSTRUCTIONS (Resource Booklet)
*4536959955*
READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST
This Resource Booklet contains Documents 1 and 2 which you should use to answer the questions.
You should spend approximately 10 minutes reading the documents before attempting to answer the
questions. This is allowed for within the time set for the examination.
This document consists of 3 printed pages and 1 blank page.
IB09 06_9777_01_RB/2RP
© UCLES 2009
[Turn over
2
The documents below consider whether China is a world power. Read them both in order to
answer all the questions on the accompanying question paper.
Document 1: adapted from Edward Friedman’s ‘China a Great Power? Then make a deal with
the Dalai Lama’, published in newspapers around the world, August 2008.
Friedman is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
USA.
On the eve of the Beijing Olympic Games, many human rights activists and observers continue to
hope that the Chinese Communist Party's embrace of odious regimes such as Burma's and
Sudan's, and its oppression of Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong spiritualists,
will lead democratic heads of state to boycott the Olympics, or athletes and spectators to
demonstrate on behalf of the victims. I doubt it.
No one should underestimate China's will and capacities, especially when it sets its collective
mind on a goal. China is a budding superpower that has amassed the largest foreign exchange
reserves in the world. No major government will risk retaliation by insulting the Chinese regime
with a boycott or public protest. Indeed, France has already dispatched representatives to Beijing
to apologize for supporting the Dalai Lama, and for the protests that took place during the
Olympic torch relay in Paris.
From Seoul to Sydney to San Francisco, citizens in democracies were angered at how Chinese
visitors bullied into silence powerless Tibetans demanding minimal rights on behalf of their
brethren in authoritarian China. But the reality is that the Chinese regime has largely neutralized
the international human rights movement. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, criticism of
China will be even more muted.
In 1997, Denmark, a nation whose people are demonstrably committed to human rights, asked
the United Nations Human Rights Commission to look into the long track record of abuse by the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). China responded by cancelling a Danish trade mission. France
got the message, and the French soon stopped promoting human rights resolutions directed at
China. The French were then rewarded with a string of lucrative contracts in China.
The United States, however, persisted, and China prevailed upon its allies to vote the US off the
UN Human Rights Commission. Although China is the world leader in capital punishment and
imprisoned activists, its human rights record is no longer a matter for significant international
scrutiny.
Although China touts its aid and investment in Africa as being given without strings, governments
that accept it repay China in natural resources and political capital. They avoid official relations
with Taiwan. They vote to protect China from human rights investigations. They agree not to
stand up for the Dalai Lama or Tibetan victims in China. Many African nations ship a large
percentage of their Gross Domestic Product to China every year. Europeans worry that Chinese
funds are used to shore up corrupt authoritarian regimes.
But a few bold voices have made themselves heard. South Africa's Nobel laureate Bishop
Desmond Tutu has spoken out forthrightly on behalf of Tibetan rights, and South African trade
unionists recently refused to unload Chinese weapons headed to Robert Mugabe's regime in
Zimbabwe.
© UCLES 2009
9777/01/RB/M/J/09
3
Of course, in response to the global outcry China has yielded a bit on Tibet, with Chinese officials
meeting with representatives of the Dalai Lama. But, as with the March 2008 Tibetan
demonstrators, anyone at the Olympics who tries to call attention to the regime's record of
abusing human rights will be dealt with firmly and visas are being denied to anyone active on
behalf of human rights.
The message of the Beijing Olympics, then, is that China's political system not only manages
international affairs adroitly, but that the "Chinese way" should be seen as superior even to
democratic systems.
Document 2: adapted from Samuel Kim’s ‘China as a Great Power’, published in Current
History. A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs, September 1997. Kim is
Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, USA.
China's economic power, measured in terms of the aggregate economic numbers, is impressive
enough. However, the unpleasant downside is that this remarkable economic growth has been
made possible by China's growing involvement in and dependence on the capitalist world
economic system. China's expanded involvement in the global political economy more easily
translates into greater vulnerability and sensitivity than into greater power. China's external debt
stands at about $120 billion and is still growing. While China has had the fastest-growing
economy in the world - its total output quadrupled between 1978 and 1995 - its external trade
dependence, defined as the sum of imports and exports as a percentage of Gross National
Product, rose dramatically during the same period.
Forecasting China's future economic growth is difficult because of the twin pressures of
globalization from above and localization from below. Indeed, because of localizing pressures
from below, China will not so easily become the economic superpower that many have predicted.
Recent World Bank data and estimates show that a larger part of China's burgeoning population
is being left behind than was previously assumed, even as the overall economy continues to
register impressive growth. More than one-quarter of all Chinese - about 350 million people subsist on less than $1 a day; most are concentrated in the peripheral but strategically important
areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Moreover, for the first time a significant number of
urban dwellers - 15 million or more - are falling below the poverty line without a state welfare net
to catch them. Some 100 million rural Chinese are part of a floating population that drifts from city
to city, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese are escaping their homeland in search of better
economic opportunities in foreign countries. There is also a growing mismatch between
population and resources, and a possible eruption of conflict between different ethnic groups
accompanied by domestic, social, political, demographic, and environmental problems, which
could make Beijing's march to the promised-land daunting if not impossible.
Changes in science and technology have greatly affected economic and military competitiveness
and productivity in different countries. China is relatively weak and vulnerable in the realm of
ideas and information. China takes rather than creates, importing far more than it exports; China
is not even among the top 15 patent powers in the world. How China adapts to the changing
importance of knowledge will have a direct impact on China's march towards being a great
power.
A country's success in global competition is also said to depend on the development of its hightech industries. If China is to become a world power, it must attend to these industries, as it once
did to the development of nuclear weapons and satellite programs.
© UCLES 2009
9777/01/RB/M/J/09
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BLANK PAGE
Copyright Acknowledgements:
Question 1
Question 1
© Edward Friedman; China a Great Power? Then make a deal with the Dali Lama; Daily Star; 6 August 2008.
www.DAILYSTAR/.com.lb/ARTICLES.asp?
© Samuel S Kim; China as a Great Power; www.currenthistory.com/archivessep97/Kim.html
Permission to reproduce items where third-party owned material protected by copyright is included has been sought and cleared where possible. Every
reasonable effort has been made by the publisher (UCLES) to trace copyright holders, but if any items requiring clearance have unwittingly been included, the
publisher will be pleased to make amends at the earliest possible opportunity.
University of Cambridge International Examinations is part of the Cambridge Assessment Group. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), which is itself a department of the University of Cambridge.
9777/01/RB/M/J/09