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2 China-risers should pause for
breath By Tom
Engelhardt
So how about China as Number
One: Lessons for America? After all, its economy
is threatening to leave Japan in the dust; if you
were one of its neighbors, you might indeed be
fretting about your offshore claims to the mineral
wealth under various local seas; and everyone
knows that Shanghai is now Blade Runner without
the noir, just 40-story towers as far as the eye
can see. So what could go wrong?
As a
specialty line, our intelligence services offer
new administrations predictions on the world to
come by projecting present trends relatively
seamlessly into a reasonably similar future. And
why shouldn't that be a logical way to proceed? So
if you project Chinese growth rates into the
future, as the IMF has
just done, you end up with a
monster of success (and assumedly a military with
a global reach). It's not that hard, in other
words, to end up with the US Navy's nightmare
enemy.
But so much on our present planet
suggests that we're not in a world of steady,
evolutionary development but of "punctuated
equilibrium", of sudden leaps and discontinuous
change. Imagine then another perfectly logical
scenario: What if, like Japan, China hits some
major speed bumps on the highway to number one?
As you think about that, keep something
else in mind. China's story over the last
century-plus already represents one of the great
discontinuous bursts of energy of our modern
moment. To predict most of the twists and turns
along the way would have been next to impossible.
In 1972, in the wake of the Cultural
Revolution that Mao Zedong had set in motion six
years earlier, to take but one example, no
intelligence service, no set of seers, no American
would have predicted today's China or, for that
matter, a three-and-a-half-decade burst of
Communist Party-controlled capitalist industrial
expansionism. The pundit who offered such a
prediction then would have been drummed out of the
corps of analysts.
No one at the time
could have imagined that the giant, independent
but impoverished communist land would become the
expansive number two capitalist economy of today.
In fact, from the turn of the previous century
when China was the basket case of Asia and a
combined Japanese/Western force marched on
Beijing, when various great powers took parts of
the country as their own property or
"concessions," followed by ensuing waves of
warlordism, nationalism, revolutionary ferment,
war with Japan, civil war, and finally the triumph
of a communist regime that united the country, the
essence of China's story has been
unpredictability.
So what confidence
should we now have in projections about China that
assume more of the same, especially since, looking
toward the future, that country seems like
something of a one-trick pony? After all, the
ruling Communist Party threw the dice definitively
for state capitalism and untrammeled growth
decades ago and now sits atop a potential volcano.
As the country's leaders undoubtedly know, only
one thing may keep the present system safely in
place: ever more growth.
The minute
China's economy falters, the minute some bubble
bursts, whether through an overheating economy or
for other reasons, the country's rulers have a
problem on their hands that could potentially make
the Arab Spring look mild by comparison. What many
here call its growing "middle class" remains
anything but and there are literally hundreds of
millions of forgotten peasants and migrant workers
who have found the Chinese success story less than
a joy.
A revolutionary tradition for
the ages It might take only a significant
economic downturn, a period that offered little
promise to Chinese workers and consumers, to
unsettle that country in major ways. After all,
despite its striking growth rates, it remains in
some fashion a poor land. And one more factor
should be taken into consideration that few of our
seers ever consider. It's no exaggeration to say
that China has a revolutionary tradition unlike
that of any other nation or even region on the
planet.
Since at least the time of the
Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 CE, led by three
brothers associated with a Taoist sect, the
country has repeatedly experienced millenarian
peasant movements bursting out of its interior
with ferocious energy. There is no other record
like it. The last of these was undoubtedly Mao
Zedong's communist revolution.
Others
would certainly include the peasant uprising at
the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century
and, around the time of the American Civil War,
the Taiping Rebellion. It was led by a man we
would today call a cultist who had created a
syncretic mix of Chinese religions and
Christianity (and who considered himself the
younger brother of Jesus Christ). Before Qing
Dynasty forces finally suppressed it and a series
of other rebellions, an estimated 20 million
people died.
When Chinese leaders banned
and then tried to stamp out the fast-spreading
Falun Gong movement, they were not - as reported
here - simply "repressing religion"; they were
suppressing what they undoubtedly feared could be
the next Taiping Rebellion. Even if few
intelligence analysts in the West are thinking
about any of this, rest assured that the Communist
rulers of China know their own history. That's one
reason why they have been so quick to crack down
on any Arab-Spring-like demonstrations.
In
addition, though I'm no economist, when I look
around this planet I continue to wonder (as the
Chinese must) about the limits of growth for all
of us, but certainly for a vast country desperate
for energy and other raw materials, with an aging
population, and an environment already heavily
polluted by the last 40 years of unchecked
industrial expansion.
There is no question
that China has invested in its military, put
together a powerful (if largely defensive) navy,
elbowed its neighbors on questions of control of
undersea mineral rights, and gone on a global
search to lock up future energy resources and key
raw materials.
Nonetheless, if predictions
were to be made and trends projected into the
future, it might be far more reasonable to predict
a cautious Chinese government, focused on keeping
its populace under control and solving confounding
domestic problems than an expansively imperial
one. It's almost inconceivable that, in the
future, China could or would ever play the role
the US played in 1945 as the British Empire went
down. It's hard even to imagine China as another
Soviet Union in a great global struggle with the
United States.
And speaking of the
conjunctures of history, here's another thought
for the US Navy: What if this isn't an imperial
planet any more? What if, from resource scarcity
to global warming, humanity is nudging up against
previously unimagined limits on unbridled growth?
From at least the 17th century on, successive
great powers have struggled over the control of
vast realms of a globe in which expansion seemed
eternally the name of the game. For centuries, one
or more great powers were always on hand when the
previous great imperial power or set of powers
faltered.
In the wake of World War II,
with the collapse of the Japanese and German
empires, only two powers worthy of the name were
left, each so mighty that together they would be
called "superpowers". After 1991, only one
remained, so seemingly powerful that it was
sometimes termed a "hyperpower" and many believed
it had inherited the Earth.
What if, in
fact, the US was indeed the last empire? What if a
world of rivalries, on a planet heading into
resource scarcity, turned out to be less than
imperial in nature? Or what if - and think of me
as a devil's advocate here - this turned out not
to be an imperial world of bitter rivalries at
all, but in the face of unexpectedly tough times,
a partnership planet?
Unlikely? Sure, but
who knows? That's the great charm of the future.
In any case, just to be safe, you might not want
to start preparing for the Chinese century quite
so fast or bet your bottom dollar on China as
number one. Not just yet anyway.
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