In this essay, I am going to discuss several different issues of China’s rise. China’s rise has been discussed at quite great length at this point, and I am convinced that like bread dough that has been properly prepared with yeast and then placed in an oven, China WILL rise. I use this horrible hyperbole of a simile not because I bet a friend $5 that I would, but moreso because actually it is an apt description of a concrete and observable process that is governed by chemistry and physics, just as economic growth in China is an empirically observable phenomenon that can be explained by an economic theory that every Masters econ student learns in their intermediate macroeconomics course. Here, I refer to none other than the Solow Growth Model, which states that the income of poorer countries will tend to converge with the income of rich countries in the long run, given of course that markets are free, education and freedom of information is equal in the two countries, that the Chairman of the New York Fed has played a bad game of squash before grumbling an announcement of new higher interest rates whilst at the same time the Chairman of the People’s Bank of China has won at Mahjong the night before cheerily giving his normal pronouncement that ‘China is not manipulating its currency AND it will never yield to foreign pressure on its currency’. Regardless of whether or not China will eventually yield to hot money pressure on their currency and shift the two podes of its monetary trinity from fixed exchange rate and manageable monetary policy to free capital flows and manageable monetary policy, at very least the Chinese Renminbi Yuan has strengthened from 8.11 at its de-pegging from the dollar on July 19th, 2005 to around 6.7 at the time of this writing, a change of about 17% or about 1/6th of its original value in 5 years’ time. This is probably too slow, but then, the Chairman of the People’s Bank has been consistent with his policy. Please ignore the rest of this paragraph as I will use it mainly to address various things about rising bread and East Asian nations that do NOT threaten the United States of America, Wilsonian positions on unlawful jailing of individuals in violation of their human rights, Hamiltonian concerns with free trade when it works in favor of a nation or protectionism when it doesn’t, Jeffersonian wishes to be left alone on one’s farm to read and hunt, and Jacksonian wishes to be left alone on one’s farm to read and hunt and to kill anyone who comes onto the property(these last four with apologies to Walter Russell Mead of the Council of Foreign Relations). Instead I want to talk about values--- but not in the sense of ‘the American Values of Life Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. Instead I want to talk about a different value revered by the founders of our nation: the Puritan value of thrift. In normal everyday life, this value translates into trying to get the most value for the lowest price. If you go into Bradlees, and then you remember that the shirt you see being sold there for 30 dollars is being sold down the street at Zayre’s for 25 dollars, then you would shop at Zayre’s and not Bradlees, right?
Wrong! Wal-Mart put both those stores and dozens more lumbering reptilian tetrapods of the last Cretaceous retail period like them out of business years ago by selling that same shirt for 5 dollars by sourcing it wherever it was cheapest to produce. For a time, the placeholder ‘wherever it’s cheapest’ pointed to China, but that time had its golden age from 1978 to 2005 and is now over, with the buck passed to places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, leaving certain Congressional horsemen with nary a post to hitch their Autumnal hobby horses to, unless of course Vietnam is now keeping the value of the Vietnamese đồng artificially low in order to keep Vietnamese hobby-horse posts unfairly competitive against American-produced posts. Whilst thoroughbred racing may be the sport of kings and hobby- horse equestrianism the business of Senators, beating dead horses is a pastime that every citizen of the free world may indulge in after finishing his quotidian labors. However, honorable reader, while the horse that raced under the handle ‘The China Rising Threat’ is deader than Black Beauty, there are still a few colts out in the paddock that might be contenders in the next Asian Regional Threat Sweepstakes being organized jointly between China and the United States.
I consider both the possibilities of China playing the role of the Soviet Union in a new cold war or splintering apart as the USSR did after the cold war as extraneous to discussion of the possible threats to the United States by a strong or a weak China. The relationship between the United States and the USSR had its own unique characteristics and has little bearing on the relationship between the United States. George Kennan’s Long Telegram outlined the precepts of the USSR’s relationship with the rest of the world: inevitable conflict between communism and capitalism, subversion of Marxists worldwide to the USSR’s goals, paranoid xenophobia that did not serve the Russian people, and a skewed view of reality produced by flawed Soviet information gathering systems. On the other hand, China uses a soft-power approach towards its neighbors, dominating them through trade and business issues rather than through directly applied force. If we were to adapt the concepts of the US-USSR relationship to the US-China relationship, we could produce a paradigm that includes a possible conflict between ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ and Capitalism.
The former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the concept of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, a type of socialist market economy. In China, the state owns all or parts of large companies in the nation’s economy, but does not exercise command and control over the economy except under extenuating circumstances. However, while China’s present economy is relatively free compared to the conditions which prevailed during the time of Mao Zedong, the state does interfere with impunity in areas which it considers strategically important, which include not only industrial and military sectors, but also in media and book publishing. At the same time, the PRC government buys the compliance of the national populace by enforcing order, handing out jobs and promoting economic development, which substitute in the near term for free speech, freedom of movement, and democratic elections. For its part, the United States-China relationship has evolved from a cold war alliance into a engaged trading partnership, while the United States also overtly professes Wilsonian commitment to supporting human rights and freedom of religion in China. Various PRC government long range plans have described plans for greater democracy in the future, but only after the entire country has reached a certain level of economic prosperity, which is not expected to happen until after 2020 if there are no untoward problems with China’s economic development in the meantime. An untoward problem would cause social unrest that would cause China to change its economic development and increasing level of engagement with the world economy. The occurrence of such an economic collapse might cause a weakened Chinese state to collapse into a reactionary nationalism, or even into warlordism. In a sense, the problem that occupies the minds of some people these days is not that China would transform into the USSR, but rather that China would somehow transmute itself into a proto-fascist-Germany analogue, which would then goose-step its way to a full-fledged fascist Germany analogue. This vision of China would hold expansionist ambitions and prefer bellicose means to do so. However, as China already possesses ample open space in its western regions and northwestern regions, and no easily accessible neighboring countries to invade, we need to consider what benefit China would gain by diverging from its current model of use of trade and other types of non-physical means to control its neighbors which it currently using successfully to develop its economy. Certainly, one possible real danger in the event of a bellicose and fascistic China would be a war over Taiwan. If the use of force does not work out on balance, then we should reflect on whether the threat of an expansionist China has any credibility, as International Relations experts David Lampton and Michael Mandelbaum have notably done in their respective works ‘The Three Faces of Chinese Power‘ and ‘The Ideas That Conquered the World.’
Additionally, we should also note the demographic trend of the aging population in China, likely a stabilizing factor as younger generations will need to work to support a relatively higher number of parents and grandparents - although the demographic skew between males and females might destabilize the country somewhat due to the presence of extra unmarried males in society.
On the other hand, the threat of nuclear proliferation by a weakened China seems to be a more plausible one. In particular, a weakened Chinese state would signal the advent of greater corruption and stronger political-criminal nexuses, which are problems presently recognized by the PRC central government. In particular, a strong political-criminal nexus might be more willing to trade in nuclear materials to buyers in the Muslim world, Burma, or North Korea. As always, the United States will need to be vigilant, and any breakdown or breakup of the Chinese state, as happened to the USSR, will require the United States and other nations around the world to secure China’s nuclear arsenal, which at least is much smaller than that of the former USSR due to the late Chairman Mao’s demurral to participate in nuclear arms race with the United States and the USSR during the Cold War.
Currently, the government of the People’s Republic of China maintains a frostily cordial alliance with the United States, with the Beijing consensus providing the overall blueprint of China’s foreign affairs. In the medium term, I am confident that this alliance will continue; however, there are several things which independently I find innocuous but which overall do not seem to be entirely wholesome developments. These developments include Chinese cyber-warfare, a possible encroachment of the Chinese diaspora, and, finally, dramatic climactic change. The first one I mention because it is a phenomenon that deserves note: China’s government has developed and is developing the means to use computers disrupt the Command, Control, and Communications infrastructures of other countries. Moreover China-based computer hackers have attacked various parts of the US government, including Congress and the military. Naturally, the US should oppose this behavior by all overt and electronic means possible, and develop effective countermeasures.
Secondly, it is the policy of PRC’s government to covertly use its nationals abroad as a part of its information-gathering and propaganda systems. Although China is by no means the only country in the world to engage in such practices to a greater or lesser extent, China definitely engages in the practice with a bit more efficacy due to the relatively large number of emigrants which have left China. Again, the United States must be diligent in counterespionage tactics; however, the presence of Chinese agents around the world is not a new phenomenon, in fact the CIA has been conducting counterespionage work against the PRC since the time of the cold war.
Finally I would like to talk about climate change. China and the United States are the worlds #1 and #2 emitters of greenhouse gases, respectively. The possibility that all of the effects of global climate change will not be prevented could cause extremely drastic changes in the world’s food-production capacity. Especially in the short-term, the possibility of famines or refugees from flooding and storms will be high, both in the United States and in China. With more of its population centers located at or close to sea level, and high dependence on its major rivers for water supplies, China will be particularly hard hit by any major climate changes. Inasmuch as changes in sea level or famines caused by desertification could claim the lives of tens of millions of Chinese as well as other people around the world and create millions more refugees, the issues of preventing and mitigating climate change may well be the most important problems confronting the United States and a strong China.
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