Geopolitics in the 21st Century

Contemporary geopolitics has been substantially reshaped by the sustained rise of China as a global economic and military power, a process most scholars date to the market reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping from 1978 onward and accelerated markedly after China's accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. China's defense budget, according to figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), grew from roughly 30 billion dollars in 2000 to over 290 billion dollars by the early 2020s, the second-largest in the world after the United States, funding a substantially modernized navy that by the early 2020s possessed, by numerical count, the largest number of naval vessels of any country, alongside extensive island-building and militarization of contested reefs and shoals in the South China Sea since around 2014, actions a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague found to have no legal basis under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a ruling China has rejected.