中国崛起--美国《时代》杂志中文版

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安哥拉的Dondo火车站，已经有好几年没有看到一辆火车了。火车站的窗户用木板封上了，旁边的栅栏也支离破碎，很久以前，葡萄牙殖民者在这里建立了咖啡贸易体系，然而，现在这些咖啡贸易早已经没有了，成了遥远的回忆，安哥拉持续27年的内战早已经摧毁了这些咖啡贸易。不过，对于Dondo镇来说，财富可能有盼头了。这个月，中国的建筑公司来到这里，准备修建一条这里通向安哥拉首都Luanda（深水港）的公路，中国的勘探者已经在勘探线路了，一个安哥拉安全工作人员在这样表达自己的感受：“中国人来了，谢天谢地！”
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The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn‘t seen a train in years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink fa?ade crumbling away; the local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialists founded long ago is a distant memory, victim of a civil war that lasted for 27 years. Dondo‘s fortunes, however, may be looking up. This month, work is scheduled to start on the local section of the line that links the town to the deep harbor at Luanda, Angola‘s capital. The work will be done by Chinese construction firms, and as two of their workers survey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his feelings. "Thank you, God," he says, "for the Chinese."
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类似的这种情绪，这些天在非洲经常能听到，中国人在非洲投资修建公路和铁路、开办纺织厂、开采石油。你也可以在巴西听到这样的声音，因为中国人对巴西的大豆和牛肉很心仪，而这直接拉动了巴西的出口贸易急速发展。你也可以在泰国清莱（泰国北部靠近湄公河的一个小城）听到这样的声音，以前这里的居民为了生计，从事走私活动和农业，中国人来了，帮助这里爆破了湄公河的礁石，从此大船就可以拉着中国制造的货物经过湄公河运送到东南亚。一位缅甸移民Ba正在坐着休息，叼着香烟拿着红牛（一种功能型饮料），他的工作是从船上将那些大包大包的向日葵种子卸下，并将这些种子再转到运往曼谷的卡车上，Ba说：“中国人来这里之前，这里根本找不到任何工作，而现在，我可以挣钱给家里寄过去。”
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That sentiment, or something like it, can be heard a lot these days in Africa, where Chinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textile factories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil, where Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming export trade. And you hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand, where locals used to subsist on whatever they could make from farming and smuggling--until Chinese engineers began blasting the rapids and reefs on the upper Mekong so that large boats could take Chinese-manufactured goods to markets in Southeast Asia. "Before the Chinese came here, you couldn‘t find any work," says Ba, a Burmese immigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from his task hauling sacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for Bangkok. "Now I can send money back home to my family."
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你可能知道，现在全世界都在向往中国，那些来往于全世界的商人们，在上海或者深圳这样的地方开设工厂、建立专卖店、建立货仓等。但是你可能不知道，中国是如何走向世界的？通过对国外进行投资，以及对外国能源的需求，这个全世界人口第一的大国，已经在全世界范围内做生意，从安哥拉到澳大利亚。如今，中国力量已经从单纯的经济领域扩大到了政治领域，中国大踏步走向世界舞台，已经有了一个大国风范，并且很有可能成为世界有一个超级大国。去年，中国在北韩的核会谈中扮演着关键的角色、结盟俄罗斯，试图主导中亚的局势、在欧洲和拉丁美洲展开外交攻势、派驻维和部队协助联合国到黎巴嫩维和。目前，美国正在全力关注以色列的恐怖主义威胁，以及被日渐失败的伊拉克战争搞得焦头烂额，而中国正在准备挑战——甚至是破坏——美国政府对于其他国家的外交既定目标，不论是发生过种族屠杀的苏丹Darfur还是美国全力反对的“流氓国家”伊朗。中国在世界上扮演的角色已经引起了议会新民主党的全力关注。中国人权记录的批评者、美国国会外国事务代表议员Tom Lantos告诉《时代》周刊，他打算要支持关于中国的听讼（？），从中国的互联网审查制度到中国对于西藏的政治制度。美国密歇根大学的Kenneth Lieberthal，曾经是克林顿政府中国家安全委员会亚洲事务的主要领导人，他说：：“中国正在试图采取积极的战略，不是区域性的，而是全球性的，完全不同于以前做的。我们看到，中国的自信空前增强。”
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You may know all about the world coming to China--about the hordes of foreign businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showrooms in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less about how China is going out into the world. Through its foreign investments and appetite for raw materials, the world‘s most populous country has already transformed economies from Angola to Australia. Now China is turning that commercial might into real political muscle, striding onto the global stage and acting like a nation that very much intends to become the world‘s next great power. In the past year, China has established itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations with North Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape the future of central Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe and Latin America and contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. With the U.S. preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terrorism and struggling to extricate itself from a failing war in Iraq, China seems ready to challenge--possibly even undermine--some of Washington‘s other foreign policy goals, from halting the genocide in Darfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China‘s international role has won the attention of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Tom Lantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and a critic of Beijing‘s human-rights record, told TIME that he intends to hold early hearings on China, on everything from its censorship of the Internet to its policies toward Tibet. "China is thinking in much more active terms about its strategy," says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University of Michigan, who was senior director at the National Security Council Asia desk under President Bill Clinton, "not only regionally, but globally, than it has done in the past. We have seen a sea change in China‘s fundamental level of confidence."
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提到中国，你可能会想到这幅画面：长达200年之久的外国羞辱、内战、侵略、内乱和恐怖的革命，中国一直在为命运而准备着。 Lieberthal说：“中国人自己可能不会这么认为，但是我认为在他们的心里，21世纪将是中国世纪。”
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Blink for a moment and you can imagine that--as many Chinese would tell the tale--after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civil war, revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a date with destiny. "The Chinese wouldn‘t put it this way themselves," says Lieberthal. "But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China‘s century."
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中国世纪，这个概念可信度很高。但是，这是真的么？或者因为这个世纪刚刚开始吧，如果是真的，中国世纪将如何进行？如果这一切真的发生，将会给西方世界带来什么影响？国际社会可能平静地接受中国的崛起么？中国的崛起是否将威胁现有的国际局势呢？是不是像19世纪末德国的崛起和1930年代的日本崛起一样，引起战争呢？这些问题已经提了很多次了，但是如果中国和西方世界都企盼一个繁荣稳定的未来，这些问题的答案就至关重要！
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That‘s quite something to believe. Is it true? Or rather--since the century is yet young--will it be true? If so, when, and how would it happen? How comfortable would such a development be for the West? Can China‘s rise be managed peaceably by the international system? Or will China so threaten the interests of established powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th century and Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going to be nagging at us for some time--but a peaceful, prosperous future for both China and the West depends on trying to answer them now.