This is not to say China will never be aggressive or act in ways its neighbors will find offensive. It would be historically na?ve to say so. But it is to say this is very different from being the kind of superpower the US has been. With the exception of China's own continental land mass, China has tended to look inward. This way of seeing is built into the very texture of Chinese history and culture. Unlike the US, China espouses no Universalist creed; it does not seek to have others copy its methods. Overall, Chinese history and culture is more conducive to the idea that each nation needs to chart its own path. No country is the model for humanity, none encompasses all its accomplishments. None should propagate its ways to the world. China's fiercely held drive is about controlling its own destiny and continuing to channel the momentous processes of tumultuous changes that have swept it for over a century. Moreover, unlike the Europeans, it has no history of colonization.

Today, the overriding belief in the U.S. is that a truly modern country in the end has to look somewhat like the US – with its particular form of electoral democracy, its democratic ways. A country that lacks such a western-style system of governance is seen in the end as intrinsically illegitimate and unsustainable. Washington's constantly reiterated divide between democratic and authoritarian nations serves its global purposes, to be sure, but the actual questions involved are not simple ones, nor are the implications. In reality, there remains all too little insight in the world today into how to combine economic and political progress, individual and collective needs; how to effectively deal with rising levels of inequality within and among nations. In truth, there are many legitimate ways to accomplish this, not one. Occasionally, Washington officials themselves acknowledge that there are really no set models for nation building, that the link between economic and political development is murky, and all sorts of compromises with the real world are necessary. "Nation building is at best an imperfect concept," states one CIA-supported study. "The accepted international practices to promote democracy...haven't proved to be all that satisfactory," the head of US Department of State's office overseeing transitions in "failed states", has warned. "The simple fact is that we do not know how to do democracy building."

But this countercurrent doesn't really drive the dominant foreign policy. An individual-centric vision of society and rights remains the dominant one which too often serves to undermine progressive traditions both within the US and abroad -- dividing needs and rights, individual and collective interests, reform and revolution, equality and freedom. All this serves to encourage elites to think more in "individualistic," "cosmopolitan," and consumer oriented ways than in terms of seeking independent, transformative development for their own people.

Historically, this potent ideological weapon has echoes in Secretary of State Dean Acheson's appeals to "Chinese individualism" in the 1940s, John Foster Dulles "peaceful evolution" in the 1950s, and "democratization," "the free flow of ideas," and "human rights" today. At the core it delegitimizes and operates at the expense of the struggles of peoples and nations seeking to chart their own course through various forms of collective struggle; their efforts to find new forms of solidarity and social cohesion; and the drive to change a still predatory international economic order by understanding how it has worked at such cost against so much of humanity. Chinese civilization, rooted in a community-based collectivism, will increasingly be contrasted on a global level with the diminished sense of collective responsivity evident in the America-centric vision of "individualism" and individual rights. The presence of a more influential China will not only raise such issues, but because they resonate with so many of the underlying challenges facing countries in all parts of the world, a far more diverse global debate on how to organize diverse societies may emerge, one in which the words "democratic" and "non-democratic" will not be illuminating enough. The rise of the South is likely to entail widespread experimentation among often contradictory means of emancipation. Finding ways to build viable societies is an inherently rocky, uncertain road. The ways in which political and economic progress are combined in coming years will likely overlap with the need to develop diverse collective strategies to deal with humanity's enormous problems. All this will take place, most likely, in a world in which the United Nations continues to be severely hobbled, issues of climate control threaten, and the ominous, unpredictable contradictions of global capitalism remain. A multipolar world world promises to be quite tumultuous, but for all that, it remains a vital prerequisite for a modicum of justice.

Washington has greatly benefited from its "war of ideas" as a global force and power. But as a deep tradition of dissent in America well reveals, this official vision of the US is not what is best or even completely central to America. For over a century American critics have warned that the profound absence of economic democracy in the US is destroying its political democracy – that the resulting plutocracy has left a largely hollow shell of democratic power amidst contending powerful economic forces, staggering inequality, and the collapse of the ability to define and pursue needs collectively. America's greatest internal critics, like Dr. Martin Luther King, have called for a "radical revolution of values" in the US without which its materialism, racism, and militarism can never be adequately confronted. In King's vision, the U.S. must confront the arrogance of its belief that it has everything to teach the world and nothing to learn from it. Such learning from others, King insisted, would bring much needed light to America. Nor is this concern about what America has become limited to critics alone. "To rule through wealth, or through the power of wealth, [once] fired our imagination," President Franklin Roosevelt warned during the Great Depression. "This was the dream of the golden ladder - each individual for himself." But in FDR's view America desperately needed "a different dream," one in which "the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those wo have too little."

The imminent rise of a multicultural world requires us in the end to touch on what is most enigmatic in man's historical experience – that we can speak of humanity but nowhere, in fact, can we convincingly discover a universal ethos. Humanity has played out its destiny in a dazzling diversity of languages and moral experiences, and in this sense humanity is irreducibly beautiful and plural. Why should it be otherwise? On the technical and scientific level it is relatively easy to communicate, but on the deeper level of historical creation, diverse civilizations need to communicate with each other with nuance and an appreciation of cultural differences that are a constant source of enrichment. Given its cultural density and enduring civilization, China may more easily encompass such an appreciation of humanity's variety than the homogenous globalization that has dominated the world from 1945 until the present day. The promises, risks, and unknowns of such a burgeoning multiplicity and diversity are one of the great and exciting challenges we are now only beginning to see unfold.