Unravelling the Reality of China Today

The other day I read a sensationalist article by Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel in Foreign Policy. Fogel argued that based on his projections China's GDP would grow to $123 trillion/year by 2040, amounting to 40% of the world's economy. In other words, the coming decades will be defined by the emergence of a hegemon fielding a relative global influence to match America's in its post-WW II heyday.

Fogel is an economic historian who won a (ridiculous) Nobel Prize for introducing quantitative data into history well after it was first attempted by members of the French Annales school. He has argued in typically simplistic fashion that the only real factor behind Europe's 18th and 19th-century modernization was the increasing nutrition available to industrial labourers. It is therefore not surprising that his article is riddled with the same teleological reductionism, rigid economic determinism and exaggerated dependence on quantitative data that taint his other works. It is reminiscent of a raft of articles that appeared in the 1980s prophesying the inevitability of Japan eclipsing the US as the world's dominant economy. In crafting such a rosy future for China's economy Fogel ignores, among many other factors, the growing contradictions and instabilities in China's production and export-orientated, partially foreign-owned economy. He ignores the massive environmental toll (and future risks) that accompany China's economic growth, the growing potential for political instability or conflict at home and abroad, the limits of China's university system, the escalating and almost unprecedented social inequalities created by China's capitalist economy, the lingering and, in some respects, growing repression of a dictatorial government, the twin demographic threats of an aging and increasingly masculine citizenry, the potential for economic growth elsewhere in the world and, perhaps especially, the raw environmental, Malthusian limits of a planet that can probably only support about 2.5 billion people at an American standard of living.

Ultimately the greatest problem besetting Fogel's projection of future Chinese power is that it obscures the reality of China today while confusing the essence of modern power. Although China's economy is roughly a third that of America's today (half, according to the controversial purchasing power parity technique), its other forms of soft and hard power are much more impressive. China's demographic scale, cultural influence, its economic growth and the perception of its inevitable rise, coupled with its sprawling, geopolitically influential geography mean it is already a power of the present, not just the future. The important question is not whether or to what extent China will surpass America, but rather whether an empowered China is necessarily something to be feared in the West.

As a historian I naturally turn to the past for perspective, and it is at first glance troubling that perhaps the best historical parallel with China today is Wilhelmine Germany of the late-19th century. Among other similarities, both states were authoritarian yet also capitalist, both experimented with limited democratic systems, both were among the demographically and territorially largest states in their immediate surroundings, both were wedged between other great powers, both laid claim to disputed territories, both were rapidly modernizing in a patchwork manner that produced vast social inequalities, both were arming, both aspired to the model established by a dominant power removed from their immediate geographical surroundings (Britain for Germany; America for China), the governments and populations in both mingled a developing nationalism with an obsession with national humiliation, both were forged by military conflict. Fortunately, China today is distinguished from Wilhelmine Germany by its long tradition of unification, its arguably more muted (if still serious) internal conflicts and especially its profound lack of desired or historic expansionism.

The twin pillars of the Chinese regime's domestic policy are economic growth and political stability. Its foreign policy trends towards the acquisition of "respect" and the incorporation of China into the global economic system. The overall goal is to buttress and legitimize the regime's claim to authority at home and abroad while (ideally) minimizing social unrest. The Chinese regime is concerned by the prospect of excessive nationalism and terrified of any form of conflict that might jeopardize the state's growing economy. Meanwhile, unlike Germany China has for thousands of years existed as a continental empire or state, so large and self-contained that any expansion would be largely superfluous. Nor does China actively seek to export its economic or political ideology, like a modernizing Soviet Union before and after Joseph Stalin. A communist China once accepted, then rejected the Soviet political and economic model; later, it increasingly accepted the American economic model while, to a degree, retaining the Soviet political model. China's government has not been passive, of course, but it has imported rather than exported ideology. Hence, with the notable exception of the Taiwan issue - which China's regime considers an internal matter - for the moment the West has little to fear from Chinese territorial or ideological expansion, still the most serious grounds for conflict in the 21st century.

Overall the perceptions of many in the West regarding a rising power like China are burdened by two fatally flawed concepts: first, the idea that a unipolar world is necessarily more stable, and second, the notion that democracies are less aggressive and easier to incorporate into the international system than other regimes. The latter notion is patently absurd considering the aggressive, expansionary aims of democracies from Athens to imperial Britain to the modern American superpower. Although most people are usually loathe to participate in war, the aggression of a democracy can be partially explained through the practical limitations of the democratic concept. In more modern democracies especially the demos is inevitably constrained by a network of soft power sources, from corporations to cultural norms, and so power is still wielded by a minority. There are of course many other, possibly more insightful reasons for the aggression of democracies, but that subject deserves a blog post of its own.

The first concept - that of the unipolar world's inherent stability - is somewhat harder to topple. Still, the means of a global hegemon seem to trend inevitably towards dominion and conquest, while the reign of the American superpower has certainly not reduced the glaring global social inequalities that so powerfully influence much of the world's current instability. A new Cold War would be a disaster, but a check to American expansionism and an alternative to American financial institutions or military entanglement could prove a net positive for most of the world.

These are all big questions, and China's future remains clouded in uncertainty. In the coming decades its relationship with the West will take many paths, from confrontation to cooperation. These divergent roads will reflect a complex network of interests among governmental forces and corporate forces in many different regions and countries. Predicting the future, therefore, is probably pointless.

What is certain is that China's rise is, in many respects, already complete. For the first time in centuries China counts among the world's great powers, with influence far beyond its borders, and that may be a good thing for the rest of the world.