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 wage war 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.)

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; 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 – the physical form of whose cities has
changed unrecognizably. There are few of the comforting reminders of the past that one sees in Western
cities such as London or Paris, or even Washington; the entire country seems to be hectically, frantically,
almost blindly on the move towards a future which the Party, for all its extraordinary ability to hold onto
power and maintain relative 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, that the hard gives way to the
gentle”. It’s just a question of taking a long enough view – another traditional Chinese accomplishment.