So Much for China's "Peaceful Rise"

I was not surprised to read China’s hawks demand cold war on the US in the Times Online.

[A]lmost 55% of those [in China] questioned for Global Times, a state-run newspaper, agree that “a cold war will break out between the US and China”...

An independent survey of Chinese-language media for The Sunday Times has found army and navy officers predicting a military showdown and political leaders calling for China to sell more arms to America’s foes...

“This time China must punish the US,” said Major-General Yang Yi, a naval officer. “We must make them hurt.” A major-general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Yuan, told a television audience that more missiles would be deployed against Taiwan. And a PLA strategist, Colonel Meng Xianging, said China would “qualitatively upgrade” its military over the next 10 years to force a showdown “when we’re strong enough for a hand-to-hand fight with the US”...

As a crescendo of strident nationalistic rhetoric swirls through the Chinese media and blogosphere, American officials seem baffled by what has gone wrong and how fast it has happened...

“The truth was that the atmosphere was cold and intransigent when the president went to Beijing yet his China team went on pretending that everything was fine,” the diplomat said.

American officials have been "baffled" because they fell for the so-called "peaceful rise" propaganda promulgated by the Chinese government and its sympathizers and apologists in the West. Now that the Chinese government is feeling confident, it's less inclined to keep its true intentions out of its state-run media. As Liu Menxiong, a member of the Chinese people’s political consultative conference, said in the article:

“We have nothing to be afraid of. The North Koreans have stood up to America and has anything happened to them? No. Iran stands up to America and does disaster befall it? No.”