Not for the first nor the last time, I regret the long-ago death of Rewi Alley, the New Zealander who is one of China’s acclaimed heroes.
He devoted 60 years to setting up schools and thousands of industrial co-operatives there. He wrote of them “fitting into the vast landscape of rural China”. His slogan was: “Yo Banfa!” – “There is a way.” He retained independent views in a country where such attitudes were suspect – and still are. His mana was unquestioned.
In particular, I remember a long conversation with him in Beijing in 1983, when he talked gloomily of his deep misgivings about China’s dogmatic one-child family policy. He feared for the effects on the domestic and family life of the nation he loved, a doubt amounting to communist heresy.
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Until fairly recently, the Chinese were earning praise for their shrewd handling of Southeast Asia. Not anymore.
It’s a showdown at the South China Sea Corral — or so you might think if you’ve been listening to China’s state-run news media. On July 23, speaking at an ASEAN regional forum in Hanoi, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that her government “supports a collaborative diplomatic process for resolving the various disputes” over the South China Sea. She also made a point of noting that the U.S. would be happy to offer its services as a mediator and that Washington opposes “the use or threat of force by any claimant.”
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Napoleon was right. Okay, so he was tragically wrong deciding to go on his long march to Moscow. But over China he was spot on.
The actual words and the timing of his quote vary but they all match. Example: Historians say that in 1803 he once pointed on a map to China, then a distant and little-known place, and said: “Here lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep, for when he wakes he will shock the world.”
No question Napoleon was basing his concerns on the reports of Jesuit missionaries who had then been in China for two centuries, some of them with the ear of the emperor as confidantes in the Forbidden City.
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Possibly the most fashionable theme in current discussions of the future is whether China will replace the United States as the leading world power. That it will do so seems to be taken for granted in pop-historical circles, as well as among economic forecasters or futurists (who currently have a record that does not inspire confidence). A Goldman Sachs analysis declares that China will replace the United States as the largest economy in the world by 2027. But the largest economy is not automatically the leading nation. And ruling the world is more of a problem than one thinks, as Washington is discovering.
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Only Tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in a desert. (Ibn Khaldun, 14th century Arab historian)
Time to chuck into the dustbin the cosmopolitan notions so celebrated at global conferences: a world run by wise men of the United Nations, science-driven socialists or their ostensibly more pragmatic twins, global free marketers. We are leaving the age of abstractions and entering one dominated by deep-seated ethnic, religious and cultural loyalties, some with roots from centuries and millennia ago.
The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun noted that what most holds people together is biology and shared history. These create the critical bonds of kinship and trust and a sense of common purpose that have animated every ascendant group from the days of the Greeks and Romans through the British empire, America and modern day China.
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On Thursday, July 1, China announced the launch of CNC World, a new global English-language TV network, to be available through satellite and on the Internet. Part of China’s official news agency, it is intended to project a China-friendly perspective on issues to the world – ostensibly to help outsiders understand China better.
To most analysts in the West, however, the launch of this network represents another sign of China’s growing prominence and confidence on the world stage – further evidence of its emerging status as the world’s next “superpower.” But is it really? A superpower is generally understood to be a nation, empire, or civilization that can project power globally; that is, a nation that possesses economic, political and cultural or “soft” power along with overwhelming military or “hard” power.
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With U.S. domination of the world on the wane, the time is now to embark on a multilateral future
Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2004 that the predominance of U.S. power in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union was a “staggering development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome.” Krauthammer and his fellow neoconservatives famously concluded from this disparity in power that the United States needed to adopt an aggressive foreign policy agenda to enhance and continue its dominance in the “New American Century.”
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“Because of statistics I can dig out the deepest secrets, because of statistics I am not alone any more, I can play in the numbers, because of statistics I can re-arrange the stars in the sky” — Love the Motherland, Love Statistics, by Wang Jiaowei, a statistician in Shandong Province
The Global Bears on the Hunt
Several prominent global bears – hedge fund managers Jim Chanos and Hugh Hendry among them – have concluded that China is engaging in a major misallocation of capital that will not have a happy ending. Overinvestment in basic materials and infrastructure, lack of profitability of the state owned companies that dominate the economy, death of the export model, and a major real estate bubble are among their concerns.
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