Let me keep punching your face or I won't be your friend any more

China is incensed over Hillary Clinton's criticism of their moral fibre:

China rejected Friday a call by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the lifting of restrictions on the Internet in the communist country, denouncing her criticism as false and damaging to bilateral ties.

A state-run newspaper labeled the appeal from Washington as "information imperialism."

Clinton's speech Thursday elevated the issue of Internet freedom in the U.S. human rights agenda as never before. She urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that recently prompted search engine Google to threaten to pull out of the country.

Meanwhile, China's government continues to actively wage cyberwarfare against American companies and the American government:

The much-publicized cyber attacks against Google, Yahoo! and other IT multinationals, plus redoubled efforts by China-originated hackers to infiltrate American government agencies and technological firms, however, have taken Beijing's Internet-based gambit to an international level...

While Western governments and companies have accused China-based hackers of pilfering a wide range of military intelligence, technology and commercial secrets, the Hu administration has justified its no-holds-barred development of cyber-warring capacity in the name of "IT sovereignty and security."

In internal speeches, President Hu and his advisers have expressed optimism that in this critical field of IT warfare, China can close the gap with the U.S. in 10 years or so.

This is a very important thing to understand: China is not threatening to attack us, they are already attacking us on a daily basis. Their threat is to attack us more if we complain about the attacks they're already carrying out.

Many commentators have wondered how a Chinese superpower would behave toward the rest of the world. Would it be isolationist, demanding only that world norms and institutions not violate its and others' sovereignty? Would it be interventionist, keeping the world peace and actively preserving global institutions, a la the 20th century U.S.?

I think we now have the beginnings of an answer. China the Superpower will simply reserve the right to fuck with anyone, in any way, at any time, for any reason. It will reserve the right to take any technology, seize any natural resources, dictate the terms of trade, wreak any environmental destruction it pleases, and arm any client states it decides to back. Any interference in these prerogatives will be sternly punished; otherwise, everyone else in the non-China world will be pretty much left to do their own thing. Institutions, stability, peace, international norms, etc. will be ignored, unless they contravene China's whim, in which case they will be smashed.

In other words, China simply intends to be the 800-lb. gorilla in the room, and nothing more.

This vision of a China-dominated world is far bleaker than the current (crumbling) U.S.-led, institutions-based world order that all of us have grown up with. It is depressingly reminiscent of the way China treated its "tribute states" (East , Southeast, and Central Asia) under the Ming and Qing dynasties.

But there are crucial differences between now and then; the world as a whole is a lot bigger than East Asia (China's population is less than 20% of the world total, and shrinking). China's potential rivals are richer and better organized, relative to China, than they were in the imperial age. If these rivals - the U.S., India, Russia, Japan, and Europe - were able to form any kind of coherent opposition to Chinese gorilla-ism, even mighty China would find itself quickly thwarted. It was by forging such "containment alliances" that Britain was able to thwart the hegemonic ambitions of France in the 1800s and Germany in the 1900s. If we took a page from Britain's book, we might actually find ourselves in a more multipolar, multilateral world, as opposition to China forced the coalition partners to align their interests and open their societies to one another.

The question is: does China's constant punching of our faces annoy us enough for us to start forging such a grand coalition?