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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In days of yore when it was believed the Earth was the center of the Universe, it was a harsh reality when we learned we were only one of many planets that circled the sun. Today, the same could be said for the U.S. and Americans’ belief that we generate more interaction on social media channels than the rest of the world.
Fact is, while the U.S. is one of the world’s top Twitter nations garnering 25 percent of the world’s tweets, it falls significantly below Asia as a region. According to a recent Semiocast study, users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea account for 37 percent of all tweets out of 2.9 million messages tracked. And while Asia is showing growth from March to June in 2010, North America as an aggregate is declining.
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IRVINE, CALIFORNIA – China’s government has been using unusually strong language of late to assert its sovereignty over disputed stretches of international waters near to its shores. This has led to a ratcheting up of tensions, in particular between China and the United States, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressing that the Obama administration is now ready to step in and help ensure the fair adjudication of disputes relating to the South China Sea. Chinese spokesmen denounced this as a throwback to the days when America thought it could, and should, try to “contain” the People’s Republic.
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Once in a while it is worth pondering whether the conventional wisdom about China’s meteoric rise is right. Is China destined to move beyond its newly won position as the world’s number two economy to become number one? Will the United States be displaced from its primacy in global security? Is the rising power destined to clash with the current leading power? These are the themes of much recent commentary, including journalist Martin Jacques’ new book, When China Rules the World.
Thinking unconventionally necessarily involves speculating about things that are unknowable today. But doing so might prove a useful exercise before we reach conventional conclusions that are expensive, defeatist, or just plain wrong.
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No one wishes for a total Chinese collapse, but certain setbacks should be welcomed
Seven decades ago President Chiang Kai-Shek wrote in a preface to his wife’s book China Shall Rise Again, “For the rebirth of a people certain factors are necessary. Of these one is that the people should go through a period of trials and tribulations.” China had already endured a century of turmoil when Chiang wrote those words in 1941, but more was to come. In contemplating China’s future, we should remember that its modern past includes numerous failures. The Chinese themselves certainly don’t forget. For decades before the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, China was beset by foreign encroachment and farmers’ uprisings, and, after the establishment of the Chinese republic, it experienced the depredations of regional warlords, an invasion by Japan, civil war, the collapse of Chiang’s regime in the late 1940s, and Mao Zedong’s quarter-century of uneven rule (1949 -76).
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It is foolish to make concrete predictions about China, due to how often – and how quickly – the country has been proving people wrong
Very occasionally, though, I feel something is such a sure bet that I’m ready to go out on a limb and describe something I’m sure will occur. Here’s my latest example: in the upcoming year or two, we’ll see a lot of new general interest books on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) show up at online sites like Amazon.com and in brick and mortar bookstores. I’ll go further than this and predict that the books will be by varied kinds of authors, from freelance writers to pundits, daily journalists to scholars, like me, who often write for specialized audiences but have decided to try to reach that elusive general educated reader. And one further point, of particular relevance to readers of this site: these books, while focusing on the present, will often make at least some nods to the past, in order to place recent events into historical perspective.
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Is China ready to rule the world? Not quite yet, argues Simon S.C. Tay. Both Asia and America need to be realistic about their limitations (and both sides now have more than a few of those) and concede that the future is not a zero-sum game. If both sides are interested in prosperity, the relationship will have to be more about cooperation than competition. And if our time is in indeed witnessing the long handoff of global power from one empire to another, the smoother the transition, the better.
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It’s always fun to find out what others are reading and peruse their book shelves. Here’s a glimpse at the summer reading lists of a variety of people from business, nonprofits, and corporate social responsibility
Matthew Bishop, Author, Philanthrocapitalism; U.S. Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist : “I’m reading The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Showing Up For Life by Bill Gates Senior. I am enjoying all of them immensely, but the Gates book most of all – not just because it helps to understand better Gates Junior, but because it serves up lots of practical wisdom about how to live an effective life, from someone who was clearly a big person in his various communities long before his son made his billions.”
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For anyone who thinks China is a superpower in only the political arena, they are missing the larger geopolitical picture. The Internet is the 21st Century’s newest battlefield where countries will fight for dominance over other nations. As content and data-mining transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, or from Social Media to the Semantic Web, most thought leaders are betting on China as the front-runner in leading this charge.
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US economic and political hegemony and the dominance of the US dollar have come to a screeching end
Corporate media, which never warned that capitalism was in crisis before the financial meltdown, now insists that the system is simply in a down period, and will at some point return to stability. But the crisis became inevitable precisely because “the most predatory, parasitic and criminal elements of Wall Street and bank capital became dominant over the economy and the government.” With these same elements still firmly in charge, how can the future be anything but chaotic?
In 2006-2009 the US financial system and economy came close to systemic collapse. Had it occurred most of the world would have gone down with it. Karl Marx famously described events like these as “momenti mori”, reminders of systemic death. This was the first truly existential crisis of the capitalist economic system since the Great Depression, and it reminds us of its near death fragility.
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