Indeed, the India-China dichotomy raises questions about whether democratic India or authoritarian China will prove to be the more attractive model in Asia and whether the contrast in their economic records to date may shape attitudes in the region more than Western democratic ideals. Though opinion surveys in Asia show substantial support for democracy, people’s responses become more nuanced on such specifics as its effectiveness in delivering rapid economic growth and efficient, clean government. The point is not that authoritarianism is better than democracy at promoting growth or curbing corruption—which is massive in China and elsewhere in Asia—but that the former’s successes may shape Asians’ political attitudes more than the End of History thesis assumes. This may also explain the lingering support for authoritarianism reflected in regional opinion polls.

GLOBALIZATION, THE third grand narrative, overlaps with Fukuyama’s framework. Its gurus proclaim that the desire for economic growth and technological prowess will force states to adopt market economics and open politics. But the first priority of any government is the preservation of its power, not maximizing economic growth. When leaders fear that liberalization could threaten their political power, economic privileges and patronage networks, they resist. North Korea is an extreme example. More pertinent, perhaps, are China, Russia, Japan, India, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Each, in its own way, has bent globalization to its own purposes.

Asian governments have shaped globalization as much as it has shaped them. Several restrict trade, foreign investment and travel. They decree currency controls, manipulate exchange rates and violate intellectual-property conventions. They censor the mass media and block Internet sites (a practice even in democratic India). They suppress opposition groups and imprison, or even kill, their leaders. They assert state ownership over key economic sectors. Globalization’s advocates might retort that such measures are inefficient. But that misses the point that governments covet stability and control more than efficiency. Seen thus, the curbs on economic or intellectual exchange in Iran, Central Asia, China, Singapore, Russia and other nations in Greater Asia have achieved their goals. On occasion, the refusal to adopt policies peddled by globalization pundits has proved prudent. During the 1997 East Asian currency crisis, Malaysia, India and China all limited capital mobility, faring better than Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand, which didn’t.

Each of the three narratives discussed above exalts a singular force, whether cultural, ideological or economic, as determinative and to which states appear hostage. But states remain the paramount political participants in world politics. Fashionable theories miss the mark when they proclaim states’ diminishing significance and assert that the political and military competition among them counts for less in the era of qualified sovereignty, global governance and nonstate actors. The biggest changes in Asia will result from the successes, failures and strategic choices of three states in particular: China, India and Japan.

THANKS TO growth rates averaging 9 percent a year since 1978, an unsurpassed record, China overtook Japan in 2010 as the world’s second-largest economy. By 2030 its economic output is expected to exceed that of the United States. This economic success gives Chinese leaders vast resources for advancing their objectives and their standing in Greater Asia. The economic boom also has yielded other sources of strength: near-universal literacy, a vast middle class, political stability, modern infrastructure, soaring exports and enormous trade surpluses, vast capital reserves, big advances in technological innovation, and a substantial and versatile manufacturing sector.

China’s trade ties, investments and lending in Greater Asia already are making it the fulcrum of an economic system. It is the leading trade partner for nine of Greater Asia’s countries: India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Mongolia and Taiwan. Central Asia—the preserve of czars and commissars for some 150 years—is being pulled eastward by Chinese trade, investment, migration, cultural programs, railways and energy pipelines. And this reorientation has happened in a remarkably short time frame: since 1991, the year the Soviet Union imploded. On another front, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization provides institutional legitimacy to China’s expanding role, and stake, in Central Asia’s security. In Afghanistan, China is investing in oil fields and minerals and countering India’s determined efforts to gain influence (though once NATO forces depart, Beijing will have to devise a strategy to defend its newly acquired assets amid instability). While China and India remain at odds, the former has become the latter’s biggest trade partner (and racks up surpluses). The West has moved to isolate Iran, but China has not. It is Iran’s foremost trade partner, while Iran is China’s third-largest source of imported oil. On Greater Asia’s eastern flank, Russia is connected to China by oil flows, trade and arms sales, while a “strategic partnership”—featuring joint military exercises—born of a shared opposition to a unipolar, American-dominated world has ended decades of ideological polemics, territorial disputes and militarized borders. Underlying this, however, is a dramatic shift in the balance of power in China’s favor, another historic transformation.

American alliances (or implied promises of protection) span Greater Asia and are especially salient for Australia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines. But these commitments will operate in a different context from the recent past. China still trails the United States in the standard indicators of power: GDP, defense spending, armed forces’ reach and lethality, sea and air power, and technological innovation. Yet such indices obscure a subtle yet critical shift occurring in East Asia. China has increased the risks faced by the United States in defending friends and allies. It has done this by increasing spending; purchasing modern ships, submarines and aircraft from Russia; modernizing its own military industries; and upgrading its technological know-how. This has not gone unnoticed in the region.

The ambit within which China can now exact a toll on American forces is larger than ever before and will expand. Standard “force on force” comparisons or tallies of relative economic power provide a snapshot of how the United States and China compare in aggregate global power. But such comparisons obscure the altered distribution of risk in East Asia and the degree to which it will require states in the area—especially those that have long relied on America for their safety (above all Japan)—to rethink familiar defense strategies. As the twenty-first century advances, the question these nations must ask themselves is just how far the United States will go to defend them, especially if they clash with China over the rightful ownership of tiny islands and outcroppings or challenge the validity of China’s “nine-dash line,” which essentially asserts Chinese ownership of the South China Sea. The point is not that China is likely to attack these countries but that, if current trends continue, it could prevail on contentious issues and cast doubt on America’s reliability, without firing a shot. That is the way of Sun Tzu.

Yet China also faces pressing problems. Perhaps the biggest stems, paradoxically, from Beijing’s success in transforming China’s economy and society since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping’s reforms commenced. The ensuing socioeconomic modernization has been revolutionary. What has been lacking, though, is a corresponding transformation in China’s political order, which has produced a disjuncture between, in Marxist parlance, the “base” (socioeconomic forces) and “superstructure” (the state and its institutions). The signs include the increasing group consciousness of non-Han nationalities; sharp increases in protests (which reached 180,000 in 2010, twice the number in 2006) over official land grabs, corruption and environmental despoliation; new levels of labor unrest; and an anachronistic official ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, which is an impediment to economic growth and management. Continued socioeconomic change will only aggravate this misalignment, for which the Communist Party appears to lack solutions beyond repression, co-option, censorship and harangues about subversive ideas.

Deng and his successors maintained order in part by ensuring phenomenal economic growth rates that have recast the lives of Chinese, creating opportunities few had imagined. Yet the post-Mao political system has never had to operate outside the congenial context of breakneck economic growth, so we don’t know just how much its stability hinges on maintaining the blistering pace. High-tempo growth also has increased income inequality, pervasive corruption and environmental degradation, all of which have bred social turmoil. The Communist Party is likely to manage the polity-society misalignment by embracing nationalism (the true opiate of the masses) and touting China’s emergence from weakness to global power. Yet that could present its own problems. Chinese leaders will find it harder to reassure their Asian neighbors that China’s rise is benign and that they need not take steps to bolster their security. Beijing’s room for compromise during crises and confrontations, especially involving Japan or the United States, will also be reduced. Chinese citizens, increasingly nationalistic and equipped with information and technologies that empower protesters, will judge the party against its rhetoric. And the more powerful China becomes, the greater these expectations will be.

The mainstream view among Sinologists is that China will overcome all such problems or will not even face them. Yet increasing capital flight (circumventing low official ceilings on moving money overseas) and a surge in the numbers of wealthy Chinese choosing to emigrate to the West suggest that China’s most privileged are hedging their bets. While China may not be headed for collapse, its long-running success could be replaced by a period of turbulence and uncertainty. A faltering China, rather than a rising one, could be the challenge that awaits Asia. Prolonged instability in China would have wide repercussions. Chinese leaders could lean harder on nationalism as a legitimizing ideology under such circumstances. And because of China’s importance in the global economy, its misfortunes would spread well beyond its borders.