Page 2 of
2 BEIJING
HANDOVER The China challenge: War or
peace By Francesco
Sisci
Still, there are huge liabilities in
the Europe and America. In the dollar and euro
areas, states are burdened by huge debts. Yet a
revaluation, a reassessment of their assets, and a
new balance sheet for the states, taking into
account state property and inviting private
investment in state assets, could change the
picture in America, Europe, and China.
Yet
everything hinges on China. If China does not
start the process of political harmonization in
the world, everybody else will be stuck. And thus
consequences could be severe for China and
everybody else.
This is a dream, but it
could be worth also following the nightmare - the
possibility of a hard confrontation with China,
the matter of
the plans of a newly
born Dr Strangelove.
The problem with
China usually confuses two elements, one
represented by the threat of China itself as a
geopolitical entity and another the problem of
China as ruled by the communist party. We should
separate the two issues because it is clear that
even without the communist party, China as a
democracy objectively offers some threats to the
world. Assuming that the rise of China has changed
the global balance of power, objectively in a
zero-sum game framework, it decreases the global
power of America. We shall look at the different
options the US may have in stopping or slowing
down China's rise, which could create problems for
America.
The first option is a war against
China. The United States could wage a large war
against China, in which case it could certainly
win by killing, say, 400 million Chinese people.
This number of deaths is eight times the total
number deaths of World War II. Inflicting so many
casualties on China could open a huge ethical and
moral wound in the US, sapping its energy for
decades, which could bring America down even when
it was victorious.
On the other hand, if
we look at China, we see that from 1980 to 2010,
the one-child policy took away about 400 million
people from the Chinese population. That is,
without the one-child policy, the current Chinese
population would be about 1.8 billion people.
Therefore, if China, after such a bloody defeat,
were to simply lift its one-child policy, its
population could return to 1.4 billion people in
about 30 years. In this case, China, however,
would be extremely angry with the US, leading it
to want revenge at a time when America would
possibly still be morally hurt by the fact that it
had killed 400 million people.
There could
be a second option, which is to break China into a
number of competing Chinese states. This would
take away some tension from the competition
between China and the US, and it could give the US
the option to fight one smaller China after
another. In fact, China could be broken up into
four of five states, each with a population the
size of the United States. That is, each smaller
China could end up being a fierce competitor
against the others.
In fact, we can see
that the world encompassing the old Chinese
civilization has already broken up. Besides China
itself (the PRC), we have Japan, South Korea,
Vietnam, Taiwan, and Singapore, all of which are
extremely competitive states. Japan, which is the
largest of these, however, only has a population
of about one-third that of the US and of the
would-be smaller China. In the 1980s, Japan had
almost surpassed the US economically and posed
what looked then as an enormous strategic threat.
We can from this forecast the danger of
multiplying the "Chinas" of the world. That is,
these multiple would-be China states could pose a
greater problem, as in a greater economic threat,
to the US than a unified China.
A third
option could be a war of total annihilation
against China, in which 1.4 billion people would
have to be massacred. However, in modern times,
this is extremely difficult. The attempt by Hitler
to annihilate about 10 million Jews proved
impossible. In fact, his attempt had actually
helped to recreate, after 2,000 years, a Jewish
state, Israel, and the strength and influence of
the Jewish people is now much greater than in the
1930s, at the time of the Nazi anti-Jewish
campaign.
Chinese people have proved to be
extremely resilient in many Southeast Asian
countries. For instance, in Indonesia, while being
only a tiny minority (possibly less 5% of the
population) or in the Philippines (about 1% of the
population), they control some 90% of the economy.
Trying to annihilate 1.4 billion Chinese people is
far more difficult than Hitler's attempt and would
most likely end up miserably.
The fourth
option is America's present strategy, that of
containment/engagement, which is working with
mixed results. A full-fledged containment of the
kind the US applied against the USSR during the
Cold War is difficult because the Soviet economy
had little or no exchange with capitalist
economies. With such a situation, capitalist
economies could exert pressure on the Soviet Union
and make the Soviet economy suffer without any
damage to themselves. Containment against the
Soviet Union, in fact, could have actually
benefited the capitalist countries.
At
present, China, conversely, is fully integrated
with other capitalist economies. Any real
containment of China would certainly hurt China,
but it would also harm other capitalist countries.
Such a high level of economic integration between
China and the rest of the world signifies that
there is an increasing number of people outside of
China who would be badly affected in the case of
containment and would thus fight against the
policy.
Moreover, China can easily fight
any containment on two fronts. One, by increasing
pro-China interests in the US and doing the same
in other countries. Other countries would be
pressured into choosing between ties with America
or China, and those countries could use this
predicament to raise the stakes and try to sell
themselves to the highest bidder - or even better,
to both bidders. Thus they would actually thrive
in a confrontation between the two larger powers.
This containment and engagement policy
means creating a very complicated situation
surrounding China with states that are not with
China but are not entirely with America either.
Therefore in the long term, this creates a
situation in which China would not really be
contained, and the countries around China would
grow to become a challenge for the US, too.
At the end of the day, the result could be
either that a) China is contained, but the United
States has to confront a number of very aggressive
states, grown around China's borders; or b) China
is not contained, and it has been angered by this
competition.
Additionally, there would be
a very confused atmosphere in the world, where
everybody is competing with each other and the
role of the US could possibly grow smaller. It
would be a situation truly resembling the total
competition of the Warring States period or that
of Europe with the decline of the Habsburg Empire
after Philip II and before the emergence of the
superpowers of France and Great Britain.
Of course, there could be other ways that
America could fine-tune its policies of
containment/engagement. However, the reality is
that 10 years of these policies have not proved
extremely effective in containing China. It has
created growing distrust between the two states
and helped the growth of countries and economies
that are extremely aggressive and competitive with
both China and the US.
This is true to the
point, that even if containment were to succeed
completely, the US might face even more pressure
from those former anti-Chinese countries, some of
which might rediscover, after China's defeat that
they were anti-American to begin with. Certainly,
politics is the defeat of enemies one at the time.
However, it would be easier to avoid beating an
enemy while at the same time creating new ones.
In any case, China represents a threat
besides the issue of the communist party. By
looking at the nationalist movement and the
anti-Japanese movement, one would think that a
democratic China could easily become more
aggressive and shift to fascism. Perhaps in this
case, for the US the party is an asset and not an
enemy.
Perhaps, from the short and
simplified analysis above, Washington should think
along very different lines. The project should be
that of building a new AmeriChina. This project
would also radically break the idea of a zero-sum
game in geopolitics - and in China. It could be
supported by Zheng Bijian's idea of building a
community of common interests. Only through
cooperation between the two countries can America
ensure its political role in this century and the
next. Without it, any of the above solutions are
bound to bring down the United States along with
China.
Cooperation with China at present
could be extremely easy, given that China is a
very structured hierarchical state where the party
has immense control over society. The party, at
the same time, is in the middle of a deep
political crisis and at the moment has not decided
clearly what to do.
Moreover, the party is
extremely worried that the US could use the
current crisis to bring it down. The party
objectively needs a way out of the present
predicament, and the US needs a way out of its
present strategic challenges with China. America
needs energy and vitality from China, and with
China on the western horizon, China could be the
ultimate frontier for the United States, which has
already developed through California to Hawaii.
China could bring a necessary boost to America. It
is objectively interested in a systemic approach
with the US.
China, despite its huge
growth, has a systemic bottleneck: a lack of
innovation, meaning the ability to produce new
technologies and new ideas about the world. This
capability for innovation now comes from America,
which lacks, however, the vitality of China.
Therefore there is objective room for very strong
cooperation.
There is, however,
deep-seated distrust on both sides. This distrust,
could be overcome in a radical way. That is, the
US should help the Chinese people during China's
current transition, which would not undermine the
communist party but buttress its rule by making
its rule more democratic and more effective.
At the same time, the strong cooperation
between the United States and China should involve
all other states, which should feel included
rather than excluded. Exclusion of other countries
could push other countries to work against both
the US and China and to break any new-found trust.
This could be a difficult balancing act, but it is
not impossible, and it could prove easier than
having each country sell itself both to China and
to the United States.
Francesco
Sisci is a columnist for the Italian daily Il
Sole 24 Ore and can be reached at
fsisci@gmail.com
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