BEIJING - China's problems are not all internal. On the outside, China's rise
has created plenty of fears, some small, some large.
Among the small fears are those commonly found among Americans who see China as
a second wave of the Yellow Peril that scared the US in the 1980s, when it was
thought that Japan would soon take over North America. In this new scenario,
American workers see jobs migrating to China because of investment going there;
at the same time, China has become
America's largest creditor, one of the countries that, by buying US bonds,
keeps the US afloat.
Thus China is seen as a modern version of Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens'
caricature of early industrial development in England. It is a tale of one
country stealing jobs and leaving common people unemployed while at the same
time being the stingy financier bankrolling America's profligate debts, and
possibly awaiting the occasion to call everything in and send the US into
bankruptcy.
However, these are only small fears, no matter how acutely they are felt. These
perceptions could easily be addressed and modified. After all, even Scrooge had
a soft side, as all kids are reminded when reading A Christmas Carol.
Furthermore, clear minds know that present-day China is not 1980s Japan; job
migration is not confined to China, it is a global and complex process: jobs
also go to Mexico, Bangladesh, Africa et cetera. As for credit, China bankrolls
the US, but it is the US that spends too much and saves too little. Besides,
with so much credit in China's hands, the trouble is not with the US, the
debtor, but with China, which cannot call in such an enormous debt without
endangering Beijing's own financial and economic balance.
But there are four larger issues at play that make the shadow of Scrooge more
substantive.
The size of China and its population
China is one of the largest countries geographically and has the largest
population. India's population is nearly as large and growing faster - it will
overtake China in a few decades. Already the Indian subcontinent as a whole has
more than 1.5 billion inhabitants, more than China, which is still below the
1.4 billion mark.
However, India's population is divided along many lines. There are religious
divides (Hindu or Muslim, to reckon only the two largest religions of the
subcontinent), ethnic-linguistic divides (Indo-European in the north and
Dravidian in the south), and "national" divides (the Bengalis, although
Indo-European, stand out as a distinct nation). Dozens of official languages
split the country. The result is a maze of many differences in India, whereas
China looks quite unitary. About 95% of its population calls itself ethnic Han.
Of China's other 55 ethnicities, only two create real problems to the largely
Han state, the Tibetans and the Uighurs, who together make up only about 1% of
the total population of China.
Chinese, linked by language and culture, are by far the single largest
concentration of people in a limited area who share common roots and thus a
common destiny. And they make up more than 20% of the world population - a mass
that is both vast and compact enough to control the world.
Speed of change and development
This mass is also developing very quickly. In the past 30 years, it maintained
an average economic growth rate of almost 10% a year. At this pace, the economy
doubles every eight years, and thus in 32 years it will have grown to 16 times
the size it was in 1978, at the beginning of the reforms. At this rate, in some
20 years, when it will be eight to 16 times as big as it is now, it will have
overtaken the United States. In 1840, at the time of the First Opium War,
China's gross domestic product was more than 30% of the world's. To reach that
level again it could take decades, maybe about 60 years, yet to reach the per
capita GDP of the average Western level, China will need to keep growing very
fast for maybe a century.
Up to the 19th century, China kept itself isolated. This time it is overflowing
into the rest of the world, with purchases and exports in every corner of the
globe. In 2009, China became the world's largest exporter, and Chinese people
are opening businesses, restaurants and other enterprises everywhere. It is a
whole different ball game than in the 19th century.
The changes to global politics and economics that these projections imply are
mind-boggling and impossible to compute.
The only certain thing is that the changes brought by China's rise will dwarf
the changes brought by the discovery of America in 1492. Only an invasion by
extraterrestrials or the colonization of Mars could be bigger. For the West,
and particularly for Europe, it could be the end of a world view centered on
itself, something akin to the end of the Roman Empire.
China could in a few decades become the driving economy of all Asia, as Asian
economies are growing around China. That means that a continent that is home to
60% of the world population will be the center of the world. This could further
spur China's growth to reach the Western standard of per capita GDP, and total
GDP as big as 50% of global GDP - a record China may have reached in the past
but which now, in a globalized economy, could mean much more. The United States
had more than 50% of global GDP at the end of World War II, when the rest of
the world had been bombed to near death and lay waste.
Yes, China could achieve the goal of concentrating half of the global wealth
without firing a shot, but what are the implications? Nobody knows, and
everybody can only trust the Chinese who say "we will do nothing in haste".
Certainly, as we have seen, they have no interest in doing anything in a rush,
but they themselves do not know what will happen. Thus we have fear of the
unknown, made even more scary as China is not "one of us".
An alien civilization
From a Western perspective, no civilization is more distant and more different
than that of the Chinese. The ancient Egyptians and Babylon soon merged with
the Greek civilization that inspired and was integrated into the Roman
tradition. The Persians were set apart, but were a constant enemy and threat to
the Roman Empire. Islam is a religion of the same God of the Jews and of the
Christians, who dominate Europe and the West. The Indian civilization remained
further away, but it has been in contact with the West since the time of
Alexander the Great; besides, it is an Indo-European culture: its pantheon and
its earliest myths share the same ancient linguistic roots as the Greco-Roman
world.
China is very different. It was isolated for the whole first millennium of
historical development. Its earliest proven and massive foreign influence came
in the 1st century AD, with the arrival of Buddhism from India. The religion
moved only east and not west, finally almost disappearing from the subcontinent
while evolving and thriving in China, thus making China even more odd compared
with the West.
Its sing-song language, its ideographic script, its lack of religion in the
Western sense, its lack of a systematic pantheon, even its use of chopsticks
and not the hands (long before forks and knives became standard in the West)
for eating made China distant from the West. Even without considering that
China for centuries kept to itself and was not interested in joining the trade
rush the Europeans started after the discovery of America, China was, and still
is to Europeans and their descendants, the closest thing to Mars there is on
Earth.
Furthermore, unlike other civilizations, such as the pre-Columbian American
peoples or those in Africa, which were easily wiped out by the sophisticated
onslaught of disease, crosses and gunpowder, China had a resilient
civilization, hard to put down.
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