You know the background here: the victor in the Cold War, the self-proclaimed “sole superpower” ready to accept no other nation or bloc of nations that might challenge it (ever), the towering land that was to be the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Vulcans all rolled into one. Well, those dreams are already in history’s dustbin. These days, Washington appears capable of doing little with its still-staggering military might but fight Pashtun guerrillas to a draw in distant Afghanistan and throw its air power and missile-armed drones at another fifth-rate power in a “humanitarian” gesture with the usual destruction and predictable non-results.
Toss in the obvious—rotting infrastructure, fiscal gridlock in Washington, high unemployment, cutbacks in crucial local services, and a general mood of paralysis, depression, and confusion—and even if the Chinese are only refurbishing a mothballed 1992 Ukrainian aircraft carrier as their first move into the imperial big time, is it really so illogical to imagine them as the next “sole superpower”? After all, China passed Japan in 2010 as the world’s number two economy, the same year it officially leaped over the United States to become the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases. Its growth rate came in at something close to 10 percent right through the great financial meltdown of 2008, making it the world’s fastest expanding major economy.
By mid-2010, it had 477,000 millionaires and sixty-four billionaires (second only to the United States), and what’s always being touted as a burgeoning middle class with an urge for the better things in life. It also had the world’s largest car market (again, the United States came in second), and staggering traffic jams to prove it, not to speak of a willingness to start threatening neighbors over control of the seas. In short, all the signs of classic future imperial success.
And those around the U.S. military aren’t alone in sounding the alarm. On April 25, 2011, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly posted a report at its website indicating that by 2016, the “age of America” would be over and, by one measure at least, the Chinese economy would take over first place from the American one.
With growing fears in the military-industrial complex of future cuts in the Pentagon budget, there will undoubtedly be increased jockeying among the armed services for slices of the military pie. This means a heightened need for the sort of enemies and looming challenges that would justify the weapons systems and force levels each service so desperately wants. And there’s nothing like having a rising power of impressive proportions sink some money into its own military (even if the sums are still embarrassingly small compared to the United States) to keep those fires burning.
In the Chinese case, it also helps when that country uses its control over rare earth metals to threaten Japan in a dispute over territorial waters in the East China Sea, begins to muscle neighbors on the high seas, and —so rumor has it—is preparing to name its refurbished aircraft carrier after the Qing Dynasty admiral who conquered the island of Taiwan.
The Unpredictability of China
Still, for all those naval- and air-power types who would like to remove American power from a quicksand planet and put it offshore, for those who would like to return to an age of superpower enmity, in fact, for all those pundits and analysts of whatever stripe picking China as the globe’s next superstar or super evildoer, I have a small suggestion: take a deep breath. Then remember: we’ve already been through this once. Might it not be worth approaching that number-one prediction with more humility the second time around?
Back in 1979, Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and Asia specialist, put out a book that was distinctly ahead of its time in capturing the rise to wealth and glory of a new global power. He entitled it
So how about
As a specialty line, our intelligence services offer new administrations predictions on the world to come by projecting present trends into a recognizably similar future. And why shouldn’t that be the logical way to proceed? So if you project Chinese growth rates into the future, as the IMF has recently done, you end up with a monster of success (and a military with a global reach). It’s not that hard, in other words, to end up with the U.S. Navy’s nightmare enemy.
But so much on our present planet suggests that we’re not in a world of steady, evolutionary development but of what the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium,” of sudden leaps and discontinuous change. Imagine then another perfectly logical scenario: What if, like Japan, China hits some major speed bumps on the highway to number one?
As you think about that, keep something else in mind. China’s story over the last century-plus already represents one of the great discontinuous bursts of energy of our modern moment. To predict most of the twists and turns along the way would have been next to impossible. In 1972, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong had set in motion six years earlier, to take but one example, no intelligence service, no set of seers, no American would have predicted today’s China or, for that matter, a three-and-a-half-decade burst of Communist Party–controlled capitalist industrial expansionism. The pundit who offered such a prediction then would have been drummed out of the corps of analysts.
No one at the time could have foreseen that the giant, independent-but-impoverished Communist land would become the expansive number two capitalist economy it is today. In fact, from the turn of the previous century, when China was the basket case of Asia and a combined Japanese/Western force marched on Beijing, when various great powers took parts of the country as their own property or “concessions,” followed by ensuing waves of warlordism, nationalism, revolutionary ferment, war with Japan, civil war, and finally the triumph of a Communist regime that united the country: the essence of China’s story has been unpredictability.
So what confidence should we now have in projections about China that assume more of the same, especially since, looking toward the future, that country seems like something of a one-trick pony? After all, the ruling Communist Party threw the dice definitively for state capitalism and untrammeled growth decades ago and now sits atop a potential volcano. As the country’s leaders undoubtedly know, only one thing may keep the present system safely in place: ever more growth.
The minute China’s economy falters, the minute some bubble bursts, whether through an overheating economy or for other reasons, the country’s rulers have a problem on their hands that could potentially make the Arab Spring look mild by comparison. What many here call China’s growing “middle class” remains anything but— and there are literally hundreds of millions of forgotten peasants and migrant workers who have found the Chinese success story less than a joy.
A Revolutionary Tradition for the Ages
It might take only a significant economic downturn, a period that offered little promise to Chinese workers and consumers, to unsettle that country in major ways. After all, despite its striking growth rates, it remains in some fashion a poor land. And one more factor should be taken into consideration that few of our seers ever consider. It’s no exaggeration to say that China has a revolutionary tradition unlike that of any other nation or even region on the planet.
Since at least the time of the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 CE, led by three brothers associated with a Taoist sect, the country has repeatedly experienced millenarian peasant movements bursting out of its interior with
