World-renowned scholar gives lecture at U of O
Jesse Mellott | Fulcrum Staff
Illustration by Mathias MacPhee
CHINA. IT SEEMS like every day we hear something new about the world’s most populous nation, and that was certainly the case when world-renowned professor John Mearsheimer came to the University of Ottawa to lecture on Oct. 17. Professor Mearsheimer, who teaches at the University of Chicago, gave a guest lecture entitled “Why China can’t rise peacefully.”
According to Mearsheimer, Canadians should be concerned about China’s rising influence in the world.
“I think that if China continues to rise over the next thirty years the way it has over the past thirty years, the central question of international politics for every person on the planet will be whether or not that rise can be peaceful,” Mearsheimer said. “Since the country that I will be most concerned [with] will be the United States, and Canada lives next door to the United States, it behoves Canadians to think long and hard about this issue.”
Mearsheimer said that he is making a prediction on the future of China in relation to the rest of the world.
“Given that [China] has four times the population of the United States, if it has the per-capita GNP [gross national product] that looks anything like Hong Kong, South Korea, or Japan, it will be able to build a much bigger military than the United States has,” said Mearsheimer.
Over 150 students, professors, and members of China’s embassy attended Mearsheimer’s lecture, including Jasmin Cyr, a masters student in political studies at the U of O.
“It is true that China is rising,” said Cyr. “That is not put in doubt at all. But then to say that the [United] States would attack China just because it’s growing economically, I don’t agree with that part. It’s true that China is a growing power, and you can’t really debate that.”
The lecture was hosted by the U of O’s Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS). Cynthia Brassard-Boudreau, program coordinator at the centre, said its main goal is to bring new ideas on international policy to the university.
“[CIPS] aims at promoting and supporting research in international affairs here at the University of Ottawa, and we do that through a number of activities and a number of programs,” said Brassard-Boudreau. “Our speakers’ series is probably the best known. We have one in international political economy, we have one in security studies, [and] we have one in international theory.”
Mearsheimer is a well known international relations theorist, with his most famous work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy coming out in 2007. He has taught at the University of Chicago since 1982, after getting a Masters degree from the University of Southern California and his Ph.D from Cornell University in 1980.
