The Chinese are Coming (Back)

So it’s official (or at least, we have it on the authority of ‘The Economist’): China will become the world’s no. 1 economy before the end of this decade. It’s only a few years ago that forecasters were setting this date for 2040, with China only passing Japan around 2020 – but thanks to seemingly unstoppable growth the Middle Kingdom in fact took the no. 2 spot from its old rival last year. The date of 2019, if it’s revised, is likely to be corrected downwards – it could be as soon as 2016 or 2017, depending on the relative performance of the two economies.

OK, enough numbers already. Does it matter – and if so, what does it mean, to Americans, to other Westerners, to Chinese, and to the people of the planet as a whole? There are a number of competing narratives about this in circulation, and I’ll briefly review these before offering my own view.

1. The economic historian’s view
China, as a technically advanced country with a huge population, has been an economic giant for centuries, if not millennia, and it’s only the Western industrial revolutions of the past 200 years that have eclipsed it temporarily. As recently as 1820 China accounted for 30% of the world economy (see http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33604.pdf), a far higher proportion than it’s likely to have in 2020, or even 2030 – so all that’s happening is a return to the status quo. Why worry? Be happy!

Of course, a country with 1.5 billion people absolutely should have a larger economy than one with a mere 300 million, but this view doesn’t take into account the utterly different political, environmental, and military-strategic conditions of today’s world from that of 200 years ago. In any case, the Qing Dynasty China of those days was a rigidly conservative , deeply introverted and economically self-sufficient country with almost no interest in exploring the world beyond its own borders – arguably resembling today’s People’s Republic even less than Monroe’s United States resembles Obama’s.

2. The cultural historian’s view
Another historical precedent which is often cited is the transition in world hegemony from Britain to the United States that took place in the early 20th century; what we’re about to see is an analogous transition. But of course there’s a profound difference, in that Britain and the United States shared the same language, and to a considerable extent the same political and cultural value systems, whereas China and the United States very much don’t. Even if China was an electoral democracy there would be huge differences, but the fact that it’s a nominally Communist one-party state points to a massive disjunction and discontinuity in world-views; how this plays out will determine much of the history of this century.

There are a number of different perspectives on this discontinuity, depending on whether one imagines China converging towards the West, or vice versa – or the two simply remaining on separate and distinct tracks. For such as Martin Jacques and Joshua Cooper Ramos (of the ‘Beijing Consensus’) China will increasingly project its cultural values, and even its political system, around the world, establishing some sort of more or less enlightened autocracy as the norm around and perhaps beyond the developing world. For others, such as Will Hutton, China’s authoritarian political system is its Achilles’ heel, and it will not only fail to establish any kind of world cultural hegemony but won’t survive in the long run as a unitary state without significant reform.

Whichever view one takes, it’s pretty clear that some kind of war (friendly or otherwise) for hearts and minds is under way, and we in the West can’t assume that ‘our’ model will prevail in the long run, or that China will neatly metamorphose into a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy.

3. The right-wing warmonger’s view
Talking about war, the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives wasted no time in affirming their belief in the nation’s sacred duty to take up arms against anyone challenging its supremacy. Rep. Randy Forbes, new chair of an Armed Services subcommittee, commenting on the proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget, remarked: "Even more appalling, though, is the fact that the administration is not being honest with the threat we face with China”. According to this view, pretty widely held on the American right, China’s size and economic importance automatically make it a threat; add to that their determination to enforce (often questionable) territorial claims in the South China Sea, and the fact that they’re Communists with nuclear weapons, and the danger is as self-evident as that posed by the old Soviet Union.

Of course, if you operate on the assumption that America must always be the world’s no. 1 nation militarily, and that it has some kind of God-given duty and right to occupy this role, then war with China probably is inevitable sooner or later. (Though it’s far from inevitable that America would win.)

Understanding China
One thread that runs through all these different narratives is that we in the West don’t really understand China and what values it represents. Of the ‘experts’ I’ve cited so far only one (Joshua Cooper Ramos) is fluent in Mandarin; most people writing about China (myself included) can at the most manage everyday conversation; almost none of them could read a newspaper, blog article or textbook. Imagine, by analogy, a French or German commentator on the United States who relied on translators and interpreters for their information – how much credibility would they have? And the United States is an open society, at least as regards information, unlike China, where people can be jailed for ‘disclosing’ what in most other countries would be freely available on a thousand websites. Combined with the country’s huge size, population, and diversity, this makes it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any kind of valid generalization beyond the numerical data that dominate discourse around China, so accentuating the emphasis on the material and economic aspects of its development, rather than the philosophical, cultural and spiritual aspects.

And then of course there’s the apparently huge discontinuity between the traditional values of beauty and harmony as perceived by foreigners as well as the Chinese themselves, and the brash, hectic, ultra-competitive and hyper-polluting reality of China in 2011. This kind of cognitive dissonance applies to many societies: France is challenged by its failure to successfully assimilate recent generations of immigrants as equal citizens, while the ’American dream’ of hard work rewarded by upward mobility seems to have ground to a halt recently. But it exists in an extreme form in China, where even the physical form of the cities has changed unrecognizably, and you see few if any of the comforting reminders of the past that abound in Western cities such as London, Paris, or Washington. The entire country seems to be hectically, frantically, blindly rushing towards a future which the Party, for all its extraordinary ability to hold onto power and maintain economic stability, can no more foresee than anyone else.

Do the environmental crisis, the rise in food and oil prices, or the lack of transparency doom China to some kind of catastrophe in the near future, or will the people’s resourcefulness, creativity and ability to withstand hardship enable them to adapt peacefully to a more sustainable model of development? We should all hope that the latter is the case – not only as compassionate global citizens, but because a troubled China will sow trouble all around the world.

But then of course, as Lao Zi says, in the end “the weak overcomes the strong, the hard gives way to the gentle”. It’s just a question of taking a long enough view – which, of course, is itself a traditional Chinese accomplishment.