China and the U.S.
Twenty nine years ago, having moved to a new office in Regent Street (London W.1), I wanted to hang up some pictures and found we had no hammer. I asked a colleague who was on his way out to buy a sandwich to pop into the ironmongers (we were just on the edge of Soho which still had lots of useful shops) and buy one for the office and I gave him £5 out of petty cash. He returned shortly with a magnificent hammer, beautifully made and finished to a standard hard to beat even with the best available at any price. I said ‘How much did you blow on that?’
50p was the reply. It was, he explained, made in China.
In those days we were still in the cold war, Russia was the other superpower, not one move could be made internationally about anything without weighing her reaction and neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact could trespass upon the other’s sphere of interest without the risk of nuclear war. The world was both frightening and at the same time stable. There was what was called called a balance of power. There were other players. The West had Japan. The East, as the communist world was known, had China but both were minor players. But I looked at that hammer and began to think.
Later I said to anyone who would listen that China would one day emerge as the world’s first mega power. Almost nobody listened. But the clue was in the hammer. Anything bought made in Russia was crude, or in America was functional. But this Chinese hammer had function, style and excellence, an air of outstanding quality. It seemed to me that if they ever sorted out an economic model to suit their totalitarian form of government with their vast population and their historic interest in technology they must one day rise to the top.
This is now so far advanced as a process of national development that it is certain that China will come out on top and within a shorter timescale than many think. Because unlike the Soviets whose economic model was dysfunctional, China’s is so good that it is set to become the world largest economy before babies born today are through their teens. China is at the heart of an astonishing irony. Its strategic plan has been to gain an economic, not military hegemony and becuase of the untrammeled greed and crass conceit of so many of the players in the West’s omnipotent free market economic system, it is already the dominant economic power. With Russia, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong behind it ( this is not yet fully the case) the world economic tune will be played to China’s beat. This will affect all our lives in the tiniest detail. Even the level of Council Tax.
If China were to decide to take the losses, dump the dollar and stop buying US debt, America is bust. China is not spendthrift and it will not do this yet. But it has decided that the arrogant expansion of imperial influence pursued by the U.S since the end of the cold war, is to stop. From now on it will want to approve every move. Sanctions is a word the West uses often to threaten smaller nations who will not do its bidding. But just suppose China decides to apply sanctions on America. Now that really would be something. The economic impact would be devastating but the psychological impact on the United States of America will much more profound than 9/11.
The time has come when for the first time in its history America will have to stop making enemies. It will have to learn to make friends. In the end it comes down to numbers. America has thee hundred years of history with 300 million people. China has 1.4 billion people and a civilisation many thousands of years old. Soon America will be forced to acknowledge that this time it has no choice.
There will be the trigger happy in the Pentagon. America has used armed force in the past to see off those in its way. Starting with the British the list goes on. The Mexicans, the Confederates, the Native Americans (red indians at the time), the Spanish, the Kaiser, the Japanese, the Nazis, the North Koreans, the Russians in the Cold War which they think they won by jacking up the military cost until the Soviets went bust, the Iraqis and unfinished business, the Taliban. Pretty impressive list. Mostly they were on the right side but not always. Oh, then there was Viet Nam.
China is different. It already has the nuclear capability to wipe out the population of the U.S. It has the ability to create a big enough army to invade and occupy the U.S. and it could rapidly create the naval and air forces to make it feasable. It also has the money. All that American spendthrift money. If America pressed the button and wiped out 3oo million Chinese and China retaliated and did the same, China would have 1.1 billion standing and America none.
The United States of America is approaching its crossroads of history. For the first time it is faced with a rival against whom its military hardware is of no value other than suicide and whose financial muscle is more potent than its own. More to the point its economy and standard of life now depends on China playing ball. Bit by bit China will shift the rules of the game to fulfil its vision of the world order of the future.
The U.S. will be forced by self interest which will including dependence, onto a different path. There it will find, for the first time, the promise of its inauguration as an independent country as it sets about building a society that lives up to the aspirations it has itself proclaimed, but never found, over the first three hundred years of it life. This is really a very bright prospect.