I once heard a U.S. Postal Service worker, while waiting on some unlucky customer, preach for all the world to hear that it was "a matter of when, not if" America was overtaken by China .
But before we start learning Mandarin and hanging portraits of Chairman Mao in every public place, it might be worth considering a second opinion.
The same sort of prophesies were made in the 1980s and into the '90s, when the coming colossus was supposed to be Japan. Or Germany. Or in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was supposed to have been winning the Cold War.
Today’s visions of a Chinese future got some clarification late last year, when the World Bank reported what may qualify as the world’s biggest accounting error. It found that “the size of China’s economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures....” That overestimation was a ballyhooed factoid in more than a few forecasts of Chinese ascendancy and American decline.
It must be said that China is a great power already, and has been for some time. China began its double-digit annual growth in the 1980s; it was a foreign policy obsession in Washington in the 1970s; it has been a nuclear power since 1964; it has had a space program since 1956; it held American-led forces to the 38th Parallel in Korea in the early 1950s; and it has been one of only five permanent members of the Security Council since the UN's founding in 1945.
So China has been a leading power in the world for 60 years. But it is a long way from there to global hegemony. And China is a big country with problems to match.
The numbers show much more than an unstoppable sprint to global domination. China ’s economy is now second only to America ’s, but U.S. GDP is still twice China ’s, and equal to the second, third, and fourth largest economies combined. China is awash in cash -- enough to help finance U.S. debt -- yet mainland China’s market capitalization is not very much higher than tiny Hong Kong’s, and only about a quarter of America’s.
Many Chinese cities – Beijing , Shanghai , Guangzhou -- are truly impressive, even evocative of some futuristic science fiction film. But outside the favored urban centres, China remains profoundly impoverished. 800 to 900 million of China 's 1,300 million souls are peasants, and nearly half the Chinese people live on less than $2 a day.
China ’s success has been largely propped atop its exports to the West, and China produces those exports to Western designs, in Western factories, for Western consumers. The Chinese export economy is an enormous branch plant. And branch plants are derivative and dependent. Taiwan was once the West’s preferred branch plant location. India could easily be our next, or even Vietnam. What happens to Chinese growth then?
And the fear of dependence on China should be mutual. China has precious little natural resources for its size. Even the Chinese staple of soy beans has to be imported, largely from the United States.
China is also getting old. As a predictable consequence of the Communists' forced one-child-per-couple policy, every generation is twice the size of its children’s generation. China 's ratio of retirees to workers hit 1:3 in 2003. So it's not for nothing that China-watchers often say " China will get old before it gets rich."
America, meanwhile, has increased its fertility rate to the highest in 35 years, reaching the "replacement rate" in 2006 for the first time since 1972.
And the one-child policy has had another consequence. The male-to-female ratio in China has already become imbalanced, at 6:5, and it is difficult to see how that trend can be anything but problematic.
The fantasies of a Chinese-dominated world are in some part a product of resentment and contempt for America. And though it may be appealing to certain people to imagine a world in which Washington takes orders from Beijing, such a world would be appreciably less free, less democratic, less humanitarian, even less environmentally-friendly.
The recent satellite shoot-downs may put things into some perspective. When China decided to shoot down a satellite in 2007, it did so unannounced and at an altitude that put the thousands of shards into the paths of other satellites and spacecraft. When the United States decided to shoot down a satellite in February, it informed the affected governments directly, then the international press, and it smashed the satellite at just the altitude to cause the debris to be incinerated in re-entering the atmosphere.
A crass assessment would call both powers bulls in china shops, so to speak, but clearly there is a bad way and a better way of going about being a superpower.
China has been a top-tier global power for some time already, and it has room to grow. But to conjure the future and see China in anything like the role America now plays is wildly speculative and takes far too little account of China’s gargantuan problems.
The kind of nation that denies its citizens the right to have children as they wish, or to worship as they wish, let alone to vote, is not the sort of nation that can hope to compete over the long term with the boundless creativity and energy, the self-correction and dynamism, of the great free societies.
Andrew W. Smith
Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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