Posted on 10/22/2003 9:01:33 AM PDT by knighthawk
'Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," a threatening Nikita Khrushchev warned a group of Western diplomats in Moscow in 1956, adding: "We will bury you." Two events last week should warn us that, although the Soviet Union never succeeded in burying the West, Communist China might. For if history is on anyone's side at the moment, it seems to be moving in favour of Beijing's totalitarian rulers.
The astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in 21 hours last Wednesday, adding China to the elite club of America and Russia as the only three powers to have undertaken manned space exploration. By 2010, China hopes, in the words of its chief space scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, to "set up a base on the moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity." Since China's entire space program is controlled by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), it is unlikely that humanity's benefit is high on China's agenda. As Lt.-Gen. Edward Anderson, the deputy commander of U.S. Northern Command, has put it: "It will not be long before space becomes a battleground."
Also last week, the banking colossus HSBC announced that 4,000 British jobs are to be lost when it closes its processing and call centre operations in Birmingham, Swansea, Sheffield and Brentwood. Those jobs will now go to China, India and Malaysia, where labour costs are far lower. Unlike the space mission, the HSBC news was confined to the back pages, but its long-term implications are no less momentous; service-sector as well as manufacturing jobs are migrating east.
Napoleon called China "a sleeping giant," and predicted that "When she awakes she will shake the world." Well, now China is wide awake, and armed with an economy that is widely expected to outgrow that of the United States by 2025. Moreover, she is casting baleful stares at the English-speaking civilization that she believes kept her backward in the days of Western imperialism. The Second Boxer Rising has begun, but this time it is being fought on the battlefield of trade. (Beijing's trade surplus with the United States now stands at US$100-billion.) China's rulers are utterly ruthless; she has an army of 2.3-million men; her neighbours are understandably fearful; and she nurses proud but wounded national ambitions. It is high time that we woke up to the threat that an awakened Chinese empire poses to our present global hegemony.
Between 1993 and 2002, the capitalist coastal provinces of China grew in per capita GDP from US$815 to US$2,020 -- a staggering 148% -- while their population only grew from 321 million to 355 million, or 10%. Over the same period, European Union per capita GDP rose by 10% on a 2% population increase, the United States increased its per capita GDP by 43% as its population increased by 10%. If the Chinese economy continues to expand at something between 9% and 11% a year, as most economists expect, the 21st will be the Chinese Century, just as the 20th has been the American one.
By embracing free markets in its coastal provinces, China has unleashed the initiative of the most instinctively capitalist people on the planet. "One Country, Two Systems" has been a triumph for the octogenarian master-strategists of Beijing. Furthermore, by learning the lesson of the Soviet Union's overvalued ruble and therefore keeping its currency, the RMB, pegged at an undervalued rate to the dollar, China has boosted its exports to an astonishing degree. City analysts predict that next year they will rise by between 15% and 20%.
The world will be a very different, and far less comfortable place for us when China displaces the United States as the world's greatest power, as seems inevitable by the middle of of this century. When the imperial baton passed from Britain to the United States, at least the succeeding power spoke the same language, shared the same values and had twice been Britain's battle-tested ally. By contrast, China is one of the most vicious states in existence. In its 2003 annual report, Amnesty International highlighted the way that in that country, "serious human rights violations continued and in some respects the situation deteriorated. Tens of thousands of people continue to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association or belief. Torture and ill-treatment remain widespread."
Apologists for Chinese totalitarianism argue that a country of 1.5-billion people cannot be ruled democratically, yet neighbouring India, with more than one billion, has managed it well enough. Chinese democracy activists dread the coming of the Olympics to Beijing in 2008, since whenever a spotlight is trained on their country there are ruthless security crackdowns, such as those for the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June, 1999.
With a foot on the neck of Tibet, a projected 10% increase in defence spending for 2004, ceaseless sabre-rattling against democratic Taiwan, and an officer corps that is by turns paranoiac and jingoistic, China also protects North Korea's nuclear weapons program. This behaviour hardly augurs well for a peaceful Chinese Century.
Of course the Chinese themselves regard a superpower status, and the glory days of the Middle Kingdom, as no more than proper desserts for the country that invented printing, gunpowder and Ming porcelain. In 1500, China accounted for one-quarter of the world's GDP, a figure that rose to nearly one-third by 1820, when it suddenly began to collapse. A return to such global eminence by 2025 would simply confirm the Chinese in their belief that the period since 1820 has merely been an unfortunate blip.
For the rest of us, a world dominated by modern Chinese political culture would mean nothing less than the kind of "new Dark Age" that Churchill warned would be the consequence of a Nazi victory. The hymnal reminds us of how "Earth's proud empires pass away" and, of course, the present hegemony of the English-speaking peoples cannot last forever, but it will be tragic when -- not if -- Western civilization is overtaken in power, wealth and prestige by Chinese Communo-militarism.
Ah yes. Another great pillar of the legacy of Clintigula with help of his buddy, Bernie Schwartz of Loral Space and Communications.
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