As Chinese economic power continues to grow, more people are talking about the threat of Chinese hegemony. I think the fears are overblown. China has neither the means nor the will to dominate the globe, and China is already facing a lot of the same long-term problems that are now afflicting the United States.
If you
follow a doctrinaire conservative website like The Federalist, you’ll notice
that Red China is a regularly-appearing villain, taking turns alongside
congressional Democrats, climate activists, the transgender movement, Planned
Parenthood, teachers unions, Muslims, and the leftist media as the daily object
of contempt.
Some of China’s
villainies are genuine – i.e. the bad treatment of the Uighur Turks. Some are
clickbait – for instance, just yesterday The Federalist ran an article entitled
“How A Chinese Space Experiment Almost Caused A Massacre In The United States,”
in which the uncontrolled deorbit of an empty rocket, which actually ended up
hitting the Ivory Coast, was trumped up into a reckless attack on American lives.
Is this sort of thing routine for countries with a space program? Yes. Did the
American Skylab station do the same thing in Australia? Again, yes. Has space
debris ever actually killed anyone? No. Will any of this get in the way of a
good headline? Again, no.
Then
there are the China stories which you have to really think about – for
instance, is China to blame for the Coronavirus? Well, the authorities there
did cover it up for the first month or so, but once they realized what a big
deal it was, they were pretty tough on it. This mixture of competence and
lackadaisicality is pretty standard for government response to crisis, and I
don’t think that western countries like the US or Italy are in a position to
complain.
What
about China being a currency manipulator and running up a trade surplus with
the US that puts American laborers out of work? Again, you have to remember
that China is not the only actor here. Nobody is forcing the US to consume more
goods than it produces. In fact, it would be impossible for us to even have
a trade deficit without the huge amounts of fiat money and government debt that
we export in lieu of actual goods or services.
America
keeps doing this because our own industrial plant is so badly decayed that we
couldn’t maintain a first-world standard or living without cheap imported
goods. Do the workers whose role has been taken over by the Fed’s printing
press get to share in that standard of living? No, they don’t, but then again, the
lower classes have never had much of a say in monetary policy.
What is the Chinese’
role in all this? It is simple: they are lending us the money to buy their own
products. It isn’t something that’s going to work out well for China in the
long term. We certainly aren't being bested us in any kind of ‘trade war.’
So what
is my point here? Well, the overarching theme is that China doesn’t have all
that much influence on the United States. Currently, we are Top Nation – and
the uncomfortable thing about being Top Nation is that you don’t get to blame
anyone else for your problems: conditions in America are what they are because
Americans in positions of wealth and power have decided that those conditions
are acceptable.
For
example, we have a big trade deficit because the financial interests that
control the supply of dollars have both the desire and the power to fund that
deficit.
Needless
to say, they won’t have that power forever. China is already ahead of us in
population and (real) domestic product. One of these days, China will be ahead
in trade and military power as well. When this happens, the Yuan will probably
replace the dollar as the preferred international currency. After all, somebody
has to be Top Nation.
But China
will start its era of dominance in a weaker position than the United States
ever was. Owning all that bad American debt will take a bite out of the Chinese
economy. Furthermore, China’s present-day oil reserves are about three-quarters
the size of America’s – which on a per capita basis is a mere 17 percent as
much oil. While the need for foreign energy is going to be an incentive
to develop hegemony (it certainly was for the US) its also going to make it a
lot harder for China to have the sort of sustained economic boom that launched
America to the top of the global order in the first three decades after World
War II.
Then you
have to look at the Chinese military. The Chinese have not fought a war since
the 1970s, when they had some skirmishes with Vietnam. Nor do they seem to have
much interest in changing that. They have chosen not involve themselves in
Middle-Eastern conflicts the way that the Americans and the Russians do.
Right
now, the main emphasis of China’s foreign policy is on trade. The Belt and Road
Initiative has stirred up controversy because a lot of third-world leaders,
most importantly Narendra Modi, dislike the idea of having China own
infrastructure in their countries. But the Chinese aren’t interested in using
military force to impose the Belt and Road on countries that don’t want it –
they’re confident that the persuasive effects of commerce will be sufficient on
their own. It’s all a soft power thing.
Will this
change in years to come? Certainly. China will get bolder as American power
wanes. Taiwan will probably fall – the Taiwanese might be able to hold out if
they were willing to fight on the beaches like the Japanese at Okinawa, but that
is a very doubtful scenario; not much can be said in favour of a country so
apathetic about its future that the people only have 1.05 children per family
(for comparison, Red China’s fertility rate is 1.68).
I instead
expect the following anticlimactic end: the Chinese will blockade Taiwan with
their navy and tell the Taiwanese that they can have a normal economy again if
they accept the same status as Hong Kong. Thus Taiwan’s story will end, not
with a bang, but with a whimper.
Perhaps
you think that I am being short-sighted in my insistence that China’s present
preference for soft power will change little during its era of
dominance. After all, the United States of 1890 wasn’t exactly dreaming of
global domination, but we still managed to grow into that role over the next hundred
years.
The
problem for China is that China doesn’t have a hundred years. Remember that 1.68
fertility rate? Well, China has been at sub-replacement levels since 1992, and
that isn’t about to change. The number of men at prime military age is
shrinking, and it will keep shrinking. The combination of peak oil and a
declining and aging population will knock the wind out of the Chinese economy
sometime around mid century.
Who will
be the global leader after China? Most likely no one. India will be the
most populous country by that time, but notwithstanding all that the Indians have
contributed to philosophy, religion, mathematics, and art, their culture has
never done mass-organization or foreign conquest as well as the Chinese, which is why
India is, and will likely continue to be, a regional power only.
Russia,
for the moment, is militarily and technologically strong, but despite the
striking recovery in Russia’s fertility rate after it bottomed out at 1.16 in
1999, the number has since plateaud at 1.76 children per family. Unless the
Russians get it above 2 sometime really soon, I don’t expect them to even end
the century with their own borders intact.
Who will
be trying to take land away from Russia? Swarms of Indian and Pakistani migrants,
fleeing drought and climate change and pouring forth into a warmer and greener
Siberia. Will these people be the dominant force in every place they manage to
invade? You bet. Will they be a global hegemon in the style of the British and the
Americans of old? Not by a long shot.
So that,
then, is what I expect: decentralization and, in some places, anarchy. Not a
new hegemon waiting to step into America’s role like America stepped into
Britain’s.
What,
then, should a proactive American do? Stop worrying about China or other
foreign powers, and admit that the problems worth caring about are local or
personal in scale.
Be
realistic about how much money you can expect to make in a declining economy,
and modify your lifestyle accordingly. Be choosy about where you send your
children to school. Decide ahead of time that if your ex decides to do
something screwy and raise one of your children as the wrong gender, you will
flee the country rather than submit.
Learn to
grow your own food, and learn to use a rifle, because you will need those
skills in the days when nationwide order breaks down and both farming and
defense become local matters.
Eventually, local politics
will revolve around questions like whether or not your town can get its act
together and form a militia in time to stop the nearest drug lord from looting
your storehouses and burning your crops. And when that happens, local politics
will be the only politics that’s left.
