The Middle Kingdom’s prosperity is an illusion. And when China finally falls, we’ll all feel the pain
As fearmongering election campaign ads go, it’s hard to top the “Chinese Professor,” which flickered across the Internet just before Americans went to the polls last fall. In the spot, set in a sleek Beijing lecture hall 20 years in the future, a sharply dressed Chinese instructor explains to his Asian students why previous empires, from Ancient Greece to the U.S.A., turned to dust. The Americans failed because they lost sight of their principles, he says in Mandarin, with subtitles. They overspent, overtaxed and over–borrowed. “Of course, we owned most of their debt,” he cackles, as the class joins in. “So now they work for us.”
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For unsurprising reasons, the people’s uprising in Egypt has been widely cast as an epochal event for Arab political culture, and somewhat more widely, for the entire Middle East.
To limit our understanding of these events in this way, however, is to lose sight of a story playing out against an immensely larger backdrop. The putative and much discussed decline of the United States in recent years has been cast against the perceived successes, or at least the argued attractiveness, of an authoritarian other.
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Mayor Richard Daley has a favorite book. Or at least one he repeatedly recommends.
He brought it up after a press conference I attended in February in Washington and several times before that with my colleagues at City Hall. In August he wrote to the author, British columnist Martin Jacques, telling him how much he enjoyed it.
“I was very touched by it,” Jacques said.
The book is titled “When China Rules the World,” or “China Rules” in Daley-speak. The 576-page tome often startles readers by sketching a future in which China’s economy and its belief in its own superiority dominate the world.
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Will 2011 be better than 2010? We can only hope. Many columnists agree with Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria that 2010 was a tough year. And if we read the tea leaves correctly, 2011 is going to be a hard one, too.
2010 was a year of dire natural catastrophes: according to Munich-Re, an insurance company, there were 960 earthquakes, floods, droughts and other disasters; climate change is intruding palpably in our daily lives; U.S. President Barack Obama, his approval rating at a personal low of 36 per cent, lost the House of Representatives to ever more petulant and aggressive Republicans; the euro almost failed, as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain faced insolvency; and an increasingly assertive China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.
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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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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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