What our country’s nineteenth century experience teaches us about China today
One of the central national security questions of our time is whether a rising China will be a threat to the United States and the American-led international order. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress recently that China is the main threat to the United States. The Economist has proclaimed that the U.S. and China are “bound to be rivals.” Niall Ferguson decries “the descent of the West” and power shifting to Asia. Martin Jacques’ latest book is titled When China Rules the World. And even level-headed liberal internationalist John Eikenberry considers the rise of China “one of the great dramas of the 21st century.”
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A year of exploration in the Far West
In 2009 I left Beijing and moved to New York. It was a return to the United States for me: until 2004 I had lived on the other coast, in San Francisco. Those five years in between in China seemed as long as a century. Not for me, but for the balance of power between Asia and the West. When I left California, China was still a student, busy emulating its American teacher. I returned to find an America exhausted by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis that China avoided, in a masterly way, using the leverage of its state capitalism or “market dirigisme.” And so history had a sudden acceleration. It was clear that the 21st Century would be Asian, but the East’s fast rise soon gave the impression that the die had already been cast. China seems master of its own destiny, set on a fast track to modernization while America laboriously drags itself out of the darkness.
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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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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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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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