The World, Built by China
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", you know that the US has been following this strategy for years now. China is just copying a very workable model that the US pioneered. You have your banks giving loans to pay your companies to build projects that another country can't pay for (and you know it). Should they for some reason pay for it you made your bank some money and a lot of money for your construction company. Should they not be able to repay it your company has earned the same money and your bank is sitting on some pretty low risk long term loans which will pay out multiple times in interest. You make even more money.
Or, the country defaults (like Poland in the eighties), and negotiates a partial cancellation of the debt, in exchange for adopting some of the recommended economic policies (in case of Poland, these were the Chicago-school liberal policies).
As seen with Srilanka handing over a port to China.
Edit: this might have been the longest time China was not a superpower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
The industrial revolution pushed "the west" pretty far in terms of power/economics but there were thousands of years of human history prior to it. In that longer view of history, China has always been a major player, and the last 150-ish years have been a fluke that's being corrected.
But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.
That's one way to look at it. The other would be to yield to the continuum a bit, to see that growth (technological, military, economic) usually doesn't happen overnight. Even if Iran were on the cusp of again being a world power, it wouldn't happen overnight.
So, while they lost their head start, at least they have that...
However, painting the West’s ability to heap “unequal treaties” on China cannot reasonably be described as a function of finding and conquering the new word. Firstly: the major conquest of the new world came through Spain, which had little to no involvement in the humiliation of the Middle Kingdom. Second, colonies in North America did not give the British gunboats capable of demolishing the Chinese fleets.
The reasonable conclusion is that the Enlightenment and the scientific advances eminating from that allowed the West to go from isolated, low population minor powers into worldwide empires.
That's basically every body apart from the west.
Education was a very elite thing in most societies, even in the west too. But some thing very strange happened around Gutenberg's times and west was able to take advantage of that unique situation.
For example, there is no parallel of Renaissance or Industrial revolution in any non-western country. China comes close, but even then, not exactly.
Not every big country in the world (I'm not talking specifically about your examples) has society that's sufficiently developed and sophisticated to pull off a modern XXI-century information age economy. In other words, it's not obvious that all the laggers will eventually (say within the next 50-100 years) catch up.
What's different, though, is that China is now looking outward. In the past, China was mostly concerned with itself, it has now learned that it can't afford to ignore the rest of the world.
There was opportunity to learn this lesson before. Why is it different now?
China sent off Admiral Zheng He to discover the world before Columbus. He sailed off with a huge armada of ships (as far as East Africa), reported back with some giraffes and such, and the emperor concluded that it wasn't worth it, and reverted to inward focus.
After the "century of humiliation" and being eclipsed by the west, the "lesson" is obvious now. That's different.
The mongol conquest of china?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty
> I think through history China always have been a superpower (with some short exceptions).
China has never been a superpower. They were always a regional power. There has only been 1 real superpower in human history ( the United States ). The next closest empires to the title of superpower are the mongols, british, soviets, etc, but they never dominated the globe the way the United States has. But as with everything, I guess it all depends on how you define the term.
Also, "china" as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon stemming from mongol china ( aka yuan dynasty ). Before then, it was series of dynasties constantly shifting borders. The borders that modern china ( and taiwan ) claim goes back to the yuan dynasty. Even the capital of china is beijing because the mongols made it the capital of china.
I'm still dazzled why the realisation of what China's "grand plan" was, came so late into mainstream political culture in the West.
Few month ago, I wrote a piece saying that China was long preparing (at least since 1991,) an economic war chest in case the country will be hit by sanctions like North Korea was, or even worse. A big portion of all national level economic programs since 1991 were there to aid and act upon that strategy. And they weren't even trying to conceal the original strategy paper, and if one can get access to state archives, they will find a lot of evidence that Chinese state did fully commit to it as early as 1992. The motto of the program is "the primacy of expansionism."
They correctly identified that US domination in 20th century came from how they moulded the world after WW2. Now, when the West wasted itself on two decades of useless "wars on X," they felt that:
1. "The world was messed up enough" to yield to China's own Marshal plan.
2. This is the last opportunity to act before US takes action
So, all those impressive t-bill, cash, gold, and FX reserves that the West gave China in the last 30 years, will now be used by China to buy its own Pax Sinica
That's an awfully Western centric view of things. The West didn't "waste itself" on things, they just plain didn't care about various regions, for various reasons. They babysat Germany and Japan after WW2 but Iraq and Afghanistan were comparatively thrown to the wolves.
China mostly went where the West wouldn't go.
I can't really blame them. Their moves are very rational as an actor on the world stage and in many cases their involvement is also helping the locals (many of which have miserable lives, as-is).
And I'm neither American, nor Western, nor Chinese, so I'd consider myself a reasonably unbiased obverser.
Indeed, as a strategy it is as straightforward and rational as it can be.
When it is a detestable communist party that continuously follows upon plain, and rational strategies, and Western civil states can not despite their best efforts, you begin to question the rationale for living in the West.
This in big part was the reason for my move to China. And the constantly growing expat community in China is the proof that I am not alone having that idea.
The West hasn't wasted itself on such any more than China is presently wasting itself on wars on X. Your premise falls apart when you look at what China is doing. China currently has equivalent wars going on against: drugs, porn, jokes, speech & expression broadly, homosexuality, neighboring territories, Islam, all forms of protest, worker rights, political activism, privacy, social rebellion, journalism and news.
You know the Chinese war-on-all-things has gone wrong when the Communist Party is disappearing Marxist students who are activists for worker rights.[1]
Or consider just one recent example [2] of their long war on porn. Offering $86,000 rewards for citizens to rat on their fellow citizens regarding porn:
“I'm not going to work today,” wrote one potential porn-buster on Weibo. “I'll look everywhere for materials so I can report anyone who I find disagreeable. There’s money to be made in reporting, so what am I doing working myself to death?”
"In August, the 27-year-old founder of video app Hot TV was served with a 7-year prison sentence for hosting 1,579 illegal videos on the platform, 28 of which were defined as pornographic – that’s one year in prison for every four indecent videos."
"On Friday People's Daily, known as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a glowing report on (mostly retired) members of a community in the Chinese city of Chengdu that spend 90 per cent of their day snooping around their neighbours' backyards and propagating the “Clean up the Pornographic, Strike the Illegal” campaign."
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...
[2] https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/china-offering-it-ci...
There's zero evidence to support your claim.
The boom that the last 30-40 years of global trade and their joining the WTO produced (ie filling in the extreme slack in their economy), just as well may have papered over immense inefficiencies and wasted uses of resources during the boom phase.
The next 10-15 years will be a far better judge of how good the Chinese bureaucracy is at managing intricately via command & control economics. When you have hyper fast growth and vast slack to fill in, you can afford a lot of mistakes - which mostly go unnoticed. So far it's not looking good, in just the span of one decade they've become the world's most indebted nation as a means to continue faking their expansion. They've found they can no longer grow their economy acceptably without rapid debt expansion. The bureacracy keeps rolling from one looming asset disaster to the next trying to keep it all propped up, while households load up on debt at record pace. Sounds a lot like some of the more foolish financial mistakes made in the West over the last few decades.
When you have to lock-down nearly all capital from leaving your nation, you know something very bad is happening in terms of resource allocation. Don't confuse temporarily having a bonanza of resources to spend, with being brilliant at how you spend it, they're two different things. As the slack has filled in, their having to turn to extreme debt to continue on the path they set indicates they've made structurally incorrect choices. That rapid debt acquisition means the clock is running out on their former approach. They can't come close to accomplishing what they want to with the resources they actually have to spend, so they've switched to borrowing very aggressively from future output (a future with a rapidly declining worker base to pay for it all), which is an indication of incompetence at resource utilization.
The Belt and Road is a flailing, expensive mess so far. It's more likely to end up as the world's most expensive boondoggle.
Their biggest industries - such as steel, iron, aluminum, cement, etc - are mostly examples of incompetence at resource allocation. They've been over-producing to a great degree in their state-controlled industrial segments for a long time. There's nothing efficient or prudent about it, it's a very expensive way to run industries (instead of shifting those resources to where they're needed for sustainable growth, versus subsidizing unneeded production).
I'll take Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Denmark and Canada against China any day of the week in terms of effecient resource allocation for the betterment of society. Not to mention those nations all have tremendous protections when it comes to human rights. The standard of living and quality of life is astronomical at the median in those nations compared to China.
China still has half a billion people living on $5 per day or less. They have around 250 million people living on $3 per day or less. The bottom half billion people in China are among the poorest people on earth, and have among the fewest human rights. Human rights are a required top-line consideration for social well-being.
The party is definitely not good at doing anything greatly nuanced, totally true, but they aren't even trying. They seek the next big easy money opportunity - buying up the third world, in hopes that they can repeat the same wide brush strokes approach at economic projects they used at home.
Sounds about right.
(start rant)
The simple answer is "China consumed less, and invested more".
The US can tax fuel and SUV, and invest in green energy. The EU can tax London's banks and offshore, it can slash its agriculture subsidies, and invest in tech and innovation.
The Western world simply prefers bigger cars and exotic vacations.
(end rant. Goes online to order Sushi for lunch)
The real issue in America is voters appear to have temporarily lost interest in infrastructure spending in favor of other uses of public money.
One other development that is quite startling in historic terms is a lot of modern western democracies is their relation with energy. I wouldn't be surprised if Germany was one of the first industrial superpowers of all time to turn its nose up at using a cheap energy source to further its economic successes.
Wartime footing usually disables many of the checks and balances used by democracies in favor of "we have to go faster now".
Most dictatorships eventually fall behind because exploitation, the fight for power and the mistakes of an un-checked leader become a burden on the country.
Whats the longest running democracy? And now does it matchup against the longest dynasty?
People always make these claims but the data just doesn't back it up. How many republic is france on right? 5? How many years did they last on average?
The US could learn a thing or two about this flavor of nation building
The term “Greatest Generation” is a bit passé, but the USA immediately after WWII was legitimately great.
- Lending for infrastructure ( sometimes not even used/required ones) and they then build it themselves. It's just a method for having extra inflation.
With none of the employment/knowledge advantages for the country involved ( loans through "the bank of china"). It is a death trap.
the biggest player not in the sinosphere yet is japan and china is already working on that
japan weakness is apparent and honhai takeover of sharp and attempt at toshiba memory unit should be seen in this light
my guess is once the gdp tables flip within a decade japan too will see the writing on the wall and it will not be a controversial choice for the japanese either
I was shocked how misleading the bubble chart could be, The biggest dam is 3x larger than the smallest, but the it looks like only 1.5x larger on the bubble chart.
Using the first two conventions often underplays the actual difference - our brain doesn't seem to be wired that way. A ball with twice the diameter is 8 times as voluminous, but on paper it seems just a tad bigger.
While most of the comments here are focused on the economic elements of china’s rise - the political implications here are what are really scary to me. China is basically a totalitarian state with a capitalist escape valve. Moral and social decisions are made by a strong central state, and while corporations toe the party line, they are free to do what they want, and the government will pour money into them. The authors seem to think this is a new phenomena, but historically that’s not too far off from how many totalitarian states worked - most notably the NSDAP.
The NSDAP led a resurgence in German manfuacturing by backing their corporations, and corporations embraced the kultur promoted by the party. People prospered, and were free to act in their economic self-interest as long as they toed the party line.
The Chinese have developed something that the previous states never had - technology that supresses dissenting voices. The levers and restrictions that they can deploy at will are so much greater now then various fascist and communist governments enjoyed in the past. Let’s say that someone in the government decides that the South China Sea is worth killing over. Any voice of dissent in China will be shut down via the “Social Score” and it’s built in ability to marginalize people who act in a way inconsistent with the state.
China will claim that this is preferable to the infighting that is rocking the western world. Historically Liberal Democracies have proven that untrue, but it feels like Liberalism itself is under threat.
China has been running a eugenics program for 30 years, starting with the One Child Policy to discourage rural peasants from having children, to encouraging urbanisation and university education to allow assortative mating for the highly intelligent. Now, they have relaxed the One Child Policy so those who can pay can have more children, further allowing the intellectual elite to expand.
All of these things are thoroughly politically incorrect, but they seem to be working...
Assuming they aren't completely done in by climate change, I wouldn't be surprised if India became the dominant power in the second half of the 21st century.
I would (Fwiw, I am in Indian, lived for years in the USA, now live in India). Aside from climate change, India has tremendous problems with respect to literacy, religious intolerance, lack of engineering/manufacturing skills (outside the space program) , emigration of its brightest young people etc etc.
Any nation can progress only when it has competent leadership for a few decades. In India, across political parties, we have utterly terrible leaders with little education and less common sense. If anything I (personally) predict India will decline as the century progresses. (imo ime, ymmv, etc, saying this before the super patriots of India(n origin) accuse me of being some kind of traitor to our glorious destiny)
I don't want to rain on your parade (I'm not Indian), but from outside, despite their impressive on paper CVs, your past leaders were even worse, based on their results.
glad i moved away from such superpower paradise and my child suffered there only for one year
Give India a couple of decades of good management and they'll be strong enough
The development of China is amazing. I am not sure India will be able to catch up (or be allowed to) - China are probably not keen on having a new superpower next door, so they will do their best to thwart it.
USA can help India catch up at least when it comes to military and fill in any gaps with allies /US firepower should a war happen meanwhile. China cannot stop India, but India can stop India. If a war starts (not likely,) China will be virtually alone, maybe just NK joins them. At least Taiwan, Japan, South Korea have super-modern weapons and the rest of the countries can tie China's hands.