China Rising

A report by the National Intelligence Council, a US government think tank, warns of the waning of American influence in international politics.  “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained,” says the report, which is the fourth in a series from the Intelligence Council. Furthermore “the international system — as constructed following the second World War — will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy , an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors.”

Fareed Zakaria calls this phenomenon “The Rise of The Rest”.

America’s biggest rival by 2025, the reports says, will be China. Which leads us to the question – what will the new Chinese era mean?

Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History and The Last Man, argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy signaled the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government.   What he meant, in simple terms, was that by the end of the cold war, there were no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy. The form of government represented by parliamentary democracy in the West had won the ideological race and that the world had entered into a period of convergence.

He may have been premature.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of China’s policy of reform and opening up. China can proudly boast of many undeniably impressive achievements – lifting millions of its people from poverty and bringing the country into the 21st century.  But moving to a market based economy, while political reforms have lagged, has brought a new set of problems.  Some recent setbacks – Lead painted toys, Melamine spiked milk products, vanishing factory owners. The Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year, there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest. Rising wages have led many laborers to expect better working conditions and residents now demand a more accountable government.

The worldwide recession has affected China as well.  Beijing is pumping half a trillion dollars in to the Chinese economy to stave off unrest.  Economists estimate that China’s GDP has to grow between 7.5 and 8 percent per year just to keep up with new jobs.

Deng Xiao Ping famously said that “to get rich is glorious” when he initiated market reform policies, but while China plunged into capitalism with a vengeance, there was nothing to protect it from the excesses of market forces. Capitalism, in its purest form is a vicious dog eat dog philosophy, a Darwinian competition for the survival of the fittest.  In the west, pure capitalism has been diluted by the philanthropic principles of western theology.  In China, it seems that the country has moved from a collectivist mindset, to every man for himself.  Many disadvantaged Chinese yearn for the days of Mao’s “Iron Rice Bowl”- the guarantee of a job, a home and basic social services for all. Reforms have brought unprecedented posperity, but the cutthroat competition has led to a disintegration of social harmony.  China’s suicide rate (23 out of every 100 000) is double the US number.  The Shanghai Mental Health Center reported that the incidence of depression in that city has quadrupled in the past decade.

In addition, China has become a ravenous consumer.   Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world’s steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world’s new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month.

The other side of this economic coin is the cost to China and the world in environmental destruction.  China has become not just the world’s manufacturer but its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning or mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities. Chemicals spill into Chinese rivers nearly every day, and have left nearly all of the nation’s surface water unfit for human consumption.

If China is to become a world leader, it needs to be more than a caricature of American excess. The question must be asked – When China is strong, what will it want of the world? It is practically a birthright of Americans to be able to answer the question of Americas’s expectations – liberty, democracy, equality, the end of tyranny. Like the empires that came before it, America stood for more than prosperity.   For all its faults, including its decadence and conspicuous consumption, the US was as much an idea, as a world power. For now, the people of China, like Rodney Dangerfield, want nothing more than respect.  The entire Olympic spectacle was a plea for recognition.  But there seems to be no defining principle behind it’s striving for material wealth.  Unless as a nation it can articulate a vision of China and it’s place in the world,  all of its achievements will be hollow at the core and like the former Soviet Union, once thought of as the main rival to the US in the field of ideas, it too will become a footnote rather than a chapter of history.