Partners and Rivals

Until the global financial crisis, China was thought to be decades away from overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy. But while the US skirted economic stagnation, China was able to successfully navigate the crisis, and its growth continues to accelerate. Has the time arrived to re-evaluate our assumptions about the current world order? Will China openly contest the United States’ status, unchallenged since the Second World War, as a world leader? Will conflict be inevitable, or would its costs be unthinkable in a globalized world economy?

Partners and Rivals,  the latest book from acclaimed economist Wendy Dobson, examines the central role that China and the United States will play on the global stage in the next half-century. Dobson provides a balanced and accessibly written understanding of China’s domestic challenges, as well as an analysis of both the United States and China’s goals on the world stage. Demonstrating why neither power will be able to dominate the other, the book emphasizes that they will need to cooperate and work together in the coming decades because of their deep economic interdependence.

Wendy Dobson, one of Canada's leading international economists, provides two unique vantage points based on her own experiences in the two countries and in the international system. One is top-down, informed by her role as Canada's Associate Deputy Minister of Finance responsible for international financial diplomacy in the G-7 in the late 1980s and more recently as a professor at the University of Toronto. The other perspective is bottom-up, drawing on her life and work in India in the 1960s, in a job that took her into politicians' offices and sent her into the villages, and her many visits to China starting in 1978, the year that its transformation began to emerge.

Since 1993 she has led research and teaching at the Rotman Institute for International Business at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. She has published twenty books and many articles on Asia and the international economy. Between 1995 and 2002 she was the managing editor of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada's Papers on Asia, published by University of Toronto Press. One of her books, Multinationals and East Asian Integration, won the Ohira Prize in 1998 for the best English-language book on Asia, and several of her other publications have been translated into Chinese.