The World

By Geoff Dyer, China bureau chief

Pew Research last week put out an opinion poll with the astonishing result that 44 per cent of Americans think that China is now the “world’s leading economic power”. I could go on at length why this is misguided, but suffice to say that the Americans who believe this have a GDP per capita more than ten times higher than the Chinese.

Yet the Pew poll provides an interesting backdrop to the big power politics going on at the Copenhagen climate change conference. A couple of days after it was released, the head of the US delegation Todd Stern arrived in Copenhagen and announced bluntly that no US public money for climate change would go to China. Under intense pressure to make stronger commitments to limit carbon emissions, Chinese officials have found themselves in effect having to argue against the impressions in the Pew poll. What about the tens of millions of Chinese people still living in poverty, they have been pointing out.

This is an argument that is only going to get more intense over the coming years. Countries such as China, India and Brazil are rightly claiming a much larger international role to reflect their growing economic clout. But they also face gigantic development challenges. Even if they had the political will, they do not have the means to take on too many of the new international responsibilities that the Obama administration and some others would like them to embrace.

In the case of China, Copenhagen has brought these growing pains to a head. Throughout the build-up to Copenhagen, Beijing has been trying to pull off a delicate balancing act. Even though it has become both the biggest emitter of carbon and a powerhouse in renewable energy, China has also been the leading voice in the G77 group of developing nations (which actually has more than 130 members) and Beijing has used its position in the G77 to resist demands for more action. The American public might have an overly-rosy view of China’s real economic strength, but it should come as no surprise that Washington wants to peel China away from the safety in numbers of the G77.

Thank you for your responses to this entry. This post is closed to further comments.