Now that it is in the process of emerging as a leading economic power, some politicians and pundits are warning that not unlike the Soviet Union in its heyday, China is becoming a champion of a universal ideology that aims at supplanting the western political and economic model represented by the US.
Intertwining with legitimate concerns as well as with plain scare-mongering about China’s growing economic and military power, the tendency among these observers is to assume that China is exporting its political-economic model worldwide as part of a strategy to win international legitimacy for its stands. That several governments have joined China in boycotting the ceremony in Oslo in which Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was supposedly an indication that the Chinese campaign was achieving its goal.
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China’s growth has spawned an anxiety industry to rival the infamous ‘Yellow Peril’ panic of a hundred years ago
China was at last awake… She was the colossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in no uncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations… China’s swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than to anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The Chinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that. For sheer ability to work, no worker in the world could compare with him. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him what wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure had been to other peoples. Liberty, to him, epitomized itself in access to the means of toil… China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant.
– The Unparalleled Invasion (1910), Jack London
Look out, because the Chinese are the masters now – or shortly will be. At least, that’s the impression that can be drawn from recent media headlines and new books. “Buying up the world – the coming wave of Chinese takeovers,” blared the cover of The Economist last month, followed up a few weeks later with a front page devoted to “the dangers of a rising China”. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World was published last year and will come out in paperback in 2011. Last week, in The Financial Times, the headline on an article by Philip Stephens informed us that “a risen China reaches for power”. Unsettled yet?
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The West and China both seem to be making huge efforts to understand each other better. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to China was the latest in a long series of high-level visits by Western leaders. But will such visits lead to greater mutual understanding? My experience of writing an article in The Guardian last month suggests there are still major obstacles to overcome.
The West and China both seem to be making huge efforts to understand each other better. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to China was the latest in a long series of high-level visits by Western leaders. But will such visits lead to greater mutual understanding? My experience of writing an article in The Guardian last month suggests there are still major obstacles to overcome.
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Is China making an unprecedented leap to the top of the global economic hierarchy? Yes, Martin Jacques asserts confidently in his buzz-generating When China Rules the World
Is China making an unprecedented leap to the top of the global economic hierarchy? Yes, Martin Jacques asserts confidently in his buzz-generating When China Rules the World. He sees the country, which recently passed Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy, rising smoothly to the top spot by continuing to follow a thoroughly distinctive, Confucian-tinged development path. No, say China skeptics like economist John Markin and hedge-fund honcho James Chanos, with equal self-assurance. They predict that bursting bubbles will lead to a Chinese equivalent to Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s. To them, as George Friedman pithily puts it in his best-selling The Next 100 Years, which is sometimes displayed near Jacques’ tome in airport bookstores these days, China is just ‘Japan on steroids.’
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China is flexing its trade and military muscles. What does it mean for the West?
In the world of prized metals, dysprosium lacked a certain star power. It lies deep in the so-called f-block of the periodic table—that free-floating part near the bottom you never used in high school chemistry—along with the other so-called rare-earth elements with tongue-twisting names like neodymium and lutetium. No one ever set out with mule and pick-axe to find dysprosium. It occurs only as a constituent part of other mineral compounds, which explains why its name derives from the Greek for “hard to get at.”
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At a symposium sponsored by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington which had as its theme: “The impact of China on the Caribbean”, one of the panellists, Dr Richard Bernal, is reported to have said that Chinese aid was replacing that previously provided by traditional sources in the West.
Bernal noted that the interest which China was showing in the Caribbean was being driven primarily by diplomatic rivalries with Taiwan.
The assertiveness of Beijing in the Caribbean is however driven by other important considerations.
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Few expected the military might of the world to change so drastically in 1910 to 2010. The change in 2011 to 2111 will no doubt be far greater.
In 1910 to 2010, no country was powerful enough to take over the entire world. I leave out Hitler’s unrealized dreams since Hitler falls into the idiot category on the scale of human intelligence.
The word “development” as it applies to a person or a country became common in the 19th century. Darwin (died in 1882) noted that human beings, once considered one of the weakest species, compared with beasts like lions or tigers, were later armed with weapons that could kill at a distance and humans were then the most powerful and rapacious creatures.
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Western liberals who assume they can gradually influence China are wrong – it is an expansionist power without a conscience
Pity the Chinese. The inhabitants of the world’s next superpower cannot search the internet or assemble or travel or speak or read or write or even reproduce without restriction. Yet in the lands where freedom is abundant, China, rather than earning well-deserved rebukes, continues to be championed as the ineluctable future. This disgraceful journey began with a liberal assumption: the west, it was claimed, is more likely to influence China by partnering with it, by giving it a prominent position inside, rather than pushing it outside, global institutions.
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As a matter of political pastime or even serious study, leaders and observers often try to note who blinks first in a confrontation between two major powers
Viewed in this perspective, there is a message in the absence of an instant blink-watch when Japan set free the captured Chinese captain of a fishing boat on September 24. He was not formally charged. This can perhaps be treated as a sign of maturity in the enormously complex relationship between Beijing and Tokyo.
However, the statements by the two sides on this event bristled with the tone and tenor of righteous indignation. At the same time, the discernible political mood behind the scenes, a day or two after the captain’s release, was one of trying to prevent a further escalation of tensions. It was too early, at the time of writing, to foresee with certainty how exactly Japan and China ride out this new storm in their increasingly direct and dynamic engagement within the larger framework of inter-state cooperation in East Asia.
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I was booked to give a China talk in August, high season in the Hamptons, as part of the summer series at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.
You never know who’s going to show up for these well-attended sessions – Southampton summer residents number everybody from Henry Kissinger to George Soros to Madonna, who made headlines this season when she plunked down $500k to rent a place for just one month. (Well, it was beachfront.)
I decided to title the talk “Five Things Americans Need to Know about China – Now.” And then, since the venue was a library, I tacked on “… and Six Books that Will Deepen Your Knowledge.” My plan was to scour my dusty shelves for a half-dozen China books I had read – whether months ago or years ago didn’t make any difference, but to make the cut the books had to have lingered in my mind, which can be a difficult task for any book. So of course I spent a lot of beach time rereading the lot. Here they are in the order I mentioned them in my talk:
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