China's remarkable aggregation of national power over the past 35 years has been a source of wonderment: to economists, who have been surprised by that country's consistently high rate of growth; to political scientists, who are at a loss to explain the persistence of authoritarian Communist Party rule despite its more open market order; and to historians, who describe China's meteoric rise as unprecedented. But to the U.S. national security community, China's swift climb up the international power ladder has been a source less of wonderment than of increasing concern.