BOOK
REVIEW Chinese
juggernaut World.Wide.Web:
Chinese Migration in the 21st Century - And How it
will Change the World by Bertil Lintner Reviewed by Kent Ewing
HONG
KONG - The next time you see a headline about US
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton making a
seemingly insignificant stopover at the Cook
Islands or some other Mutiny on the Bounty
backwater of the Asia-Pacific region, read on.
There is a big, if underreported, reason
for such little-noted visits: the US is scrambling
to make up for lost time and opportunities in the
wake of China's ascent as a world power, and the
battle for supremacy is being fought in far-flung
but strategic places outside the attention span of
the global media.
While that's not the
expressed thesis of veteran Asia-Pacific
journalist Bertil
Lintner's World.Wide.Web - indeed, the
author takes pains in his introduction to explain
that China's increasing economic and diplomatic
sway in the world is not necessarily a negative
development - his relentless narrative of Chinese
migration and influence-peddling nevertheless
piles up to constitute a threat.
"The 21st
century is bound to be not the American Century
but the Pacific Century," he states. "The question
is only whose Pacific Century?"
Of course,
this is one of the great - if obvious - questions
hanging over the next several decades. In the
context of Lintner's determined chronicling of the
inexorable expansion of Chinese people and
influence in Asia and around the globe, however,
it also seems a loaded one.
Lintner's tone
may be a model of journalistic objectivity, but
his presentation of evidence points to only one
possible conclusion at this point in history: the
Chinese century is already well under way and,
given Beijing's naked pursuit of its economic
self-interest, the next 100 years could be a long
and frightening ride for the rest of the world.
In the end, the book - well written and
researched (although some of this research is
dated) - fails to strike the balance that is
promised in its introduction, where Lintner
writes:
For better of for worse, the more
recent rise of China as a global superpower has
created some badly needed counterbalance to
American dominance of the world. Many may argue
that a bipolar world is better than one that is
dominated by a single power. China, like the
former Soviet Union, may not be a beacon of
freedom and democracy. But, at least, the United
States must take China's interests into
consideration - as it had to consider Soviet
interests during the Cold War - and that
provides checks and balances that are in the
interest of the world's smaller nations, which
want to maintain their neutrality and
independence of any superpower
dominance.
With little further comment
about balancing interests or Beijing as a friend
of the developing world, Lintner then doggedly
proceeds to demonstrate how China - through a mix
of migration, financial incentives and diplomacy -
has gained a foothold in the Russian Far East and
Pacific island nations such as Papua New Guinea,
Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Kiribati,
Fiji and the Federated States of Micronesia.
The author then turns to Southeast Asia,
where Beijing has launched huge infrastructure
projects to win friends and exploit natural
resources in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Even in
Thailand, a country long friendly to the West,
Lintner argues that a new wave of Chinese
migration, unofficially encouraged by China's
leadership, has drawn the country closer to
Beijing.
As Lintner sees it:
Today, it is almost impossible to
determine how many people of Chinese descent
there are in Thailand as intermarriages also
have been common. But the old equilibrium can be
upset by the flood of new migrants. It is a
creeping invasion that a growing number of local
Thais are watching with unease. "As a Thai, I
feel overwhelmed," a Bangkok-born woman who now
lives in Chiang Mai told me. "Of course, Chinese
have been moving south for centuries. But we
have never seen as many new businessmen and
settlers as now.
That tone of alarm
comes to characterize World.Wide.Web, whose
very title co-opts the language of the Internet to
describe Chinese migration and checkbook diplomacy
in what seems a warning against some vast
conspiracy to take over the world.
There
is no arguing against the evidence of China's
rapidly growing influence as presented by Lintner;
in fact, he could have gone much further by
broadening his scope to include Africa, which
barely gets a mention.
But the balanced
perspective of the author's introduction becomes
lost as - page by page, nation by nation - he
builds his case: Chinese triads pushing out
Russian gangsters in Vladivostok, anti-Chinese
riots over slave labor in Papua New Guinea,
passports for sale to Chinese businessmen in
Tonga, massive Chinese casinos in Laos, China's
US$200 million in interest-free loans to Cambodia,
a $2.5 billion pipeline project that will bring to
China, via Myanmar, oil from the Middle East and
Africa and also tap into Myanmar's gas reserves in
the Andaman Sea - the list goes on and on and
starts to take on the menacing force of an
unstoppable juggernaut.
Lintner's portrait
of an emerging superpower aggressively pursuing
its interests is fair enough. But informed
readers, remembering the US-China rivalry evoked
in the author's introduction, might conclude that
Beijing's interaction with the rest of the world
has been a model of peace and civility over the
past decade or so when lined up against
Washington's.
Through its disastrous "War
on Terror" - which was certainly launched not only
in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks but also with
US economic interests placed front and center -
the US brought chaos to Iraq and Afghanistan,
further destabilized the Middle East, alienated
Muslims everywhere and made the world a far more
dangerous place.
Keeping all this in mind,
China's record - spots and all - looks relatively
good.
Moreover, it is unfortunate that
Lintner's book makes no mention of Myanmar's
recent opening up to economic and political
reforms, which could make the country much less
dependent on China, or of the new commitment in
Washington to countering Beijing and expanding US
influence in the Pacific - the so-called "pivot to
Asia".
Lintner has done excellent work
building a narrative of a rapidly rising China
over the past three decades. Missing these pieces,
however, his book, although published just this
year, already seems dated.
WORLD.WIDE.WEB: Chinese Migration in
the 21st Century - And How it will Change the
World by Bertil Lintner. Orchid Press, 2012.
ISBN 978-974-524-150-3. Price US$ 23.00, 208
pages.
Kent Ewing is a Hong
Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached
at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter:
@KentEwing1
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Of course,
this is one of the great - if obvious - questions
hanging over the next several decades. In the
context of Lintner's determined chronicling of the
inexorable expansion of Chinese people and
influence in Asia and around the globe, however,
it also seems a loaded one. 
