The world's next superpower

It is not clear, however, if even the leadership in its heavily guarded Beijing compound knows exactly what is going on in the 9.5 million km2 between the booming development zones of the coast and the huge deserts and mountains on the doorstep of Central Asia.

China is racing to meet its future, confident it will grow into a superpower within a couple of decades, with all that implies for the West and for its Asian neighbors. Yet it remains stunted under the authoritarian hand of a Communist Party for which the retention of power has become an end in itself.

It is the main motor of international expansion, but it contains an uncomfortable expanse of shady zones and, owing to its size and diversity, is very hard to control.

China's gleaming airports put Heathrow to shame. The size of construction projects have led to the joke about the crane being the national bird.

The tycoon class has expanded so substantially that the American business magazine Forbes produces an annual list of China's 100 richest. Car production is rising by millions of vehicles a year.

There are about 300 million mobile-phone users. Shopping malls are crammed with designer clothes, real and counterfeit. Top tickets for Real Madrid's forthcoming game against a Chinese team are priced at ?125 (US$200) each.

Figures issued last week showed that, despite a dip last spring because of the SARS epidemic, China's economic growth should still hit the 7 percent target for the year, with industrial production up by 16 percent in the first six months. Though there are doubts about the precision of official figures, this rate is even higher in the special economic development zones where big, modern factories ally automation with low-cost labour

Having started by making cheap goods, Chinese firms are moving on to more profitable ones as their country's membership of the WTO guarantees them access to world markets.

From toys to computer chips, just about everything seems to come from China these days. Despite SARS, exports in the first half of this year bounded by 34 percent to the equivalent of ?120 billion (US$192 billion). Foreign investment, bringing money, technology and expertise, rises by the year as Western and Japanese executives put the country at the top of their plans.

A recent article by an American economist was headlined: "What happens when everything is made in China?"

That raises concern about foreign jobs being exported to China -- as in the decision by Waterford Wedgwood crystal to close British factories and shift production to China for lower costs. But, while international pressure on Beijing to revalue its currency upwards grows, economic expansion is making the mainland a major importer of raw materials, machinery and factory components. Its purchases of crude oil rose by a third in the first half of this year and it could be the salvation of the world steel industry.

On his drive from the airport, British Prime Minister Tony Blair would have seen Beijing engaged in a huge building program running up to its staging of the 2008 Olympics. In Shanghai, a new business district has gone up on marshland and gleaming blocks of flats line the eight-lane roads into the city. A German magnetic-levitation train whisks passengers in from Shanghai's new Pudong airport at 402kph, and a Japanese bullet train is likely to link the city to Beijing. Shenzhen, a pioneering economic development zone across the border from Hong Kong, has grown from a small town into a city of millions attracted by work in its fast-growing factories. Chongqing, capital of the biggest province, Sichuan, is being transformed from a shabby city notorious for its nasty climate into what aims to be a model of growth in a special zone containing 30 million people.

The Three Gorges dam, with its enormous hydro-electric potential, has gone into operation, and there are plans for a mammoth waterway across the country to check the recurrent pattern of droughts and floods. Visit city centers from the once-isolated Kunming in the lush south-west to Manchuria on the border with Russia, and you find the same lines of glass and concrete offices, shops and flats on proud display as signs of modernity.

A middle class is emerging and, this being China, it is numbered in hundreds of millions. Artists and writers challenge tradition in a major way. The "iron rice bowl" of cradle-to-grave welfare promised by Mao Zedong is being smashed. Beijing's development is demolishing the alleyway hutong houses that were a characteristic of the capital for eight centuries.

Modern life is eating away at the traditional family: 14 percent of households now consist of either a single adult or a childless couple who both work. Older people are deeply worried about the future, as their children save to pay for health care and private education. At a lunch in Beijing, the Education Minister spoke to me enthusiastically about the model set by Warwick University for attracting paying students.

A lot of dark areas lie behind the bright lights on the Yangtze cliffs of Chongqing and the Shanghai Bund, where the huge Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building from before the World War II has been restored as the headquarters of a local development organization.

Income inequalities are enormous. Factory modernization has boosted unemployment, and there are periodic demonstrations by workers who have not been paid. Outside the city centers and modern apartment blocks, China's urban areas are dirty, unhealthy and overcrowded. Workers newly arrived from the country sleep out around train and bus stations, and drive down the already tiny wages paid for manual labor on all those building sites.

Low health and safety standards are highlighted by repeated industrial accidents and the recent spread of SARS. Pollution and environmental destruction are high. Floods kill an average of nearly 4,000 people a year.

The government has launched a series of high-profile crackdowns on major offenders, but corruption is embedded. Badly paid officials exploit their position -- in one city, police stopped motorists to tell them their cars contravened cleanliness regulations: they had a friend standing by to wash vehicles for a small fee.

Much of rural China, which contains most of the country's people, is left behind. Depending on the criteria adopted, upwards of 100 million Chinese live below the absolute poverty line. Though cities are linked by a fast-expanding motorway network, rural communications remain poor. Farmers stage periodic protests about local officials levying "special taxes" for their own enrichment.

Many villages are age-old huddles of mud or adobe huts without sanitation. One villager joked that, if the government really wanted to reduce the number of children, it should lay on electricity so people could watch television at night rather than having sex.

Foreign financial houses have started trading in Chinese shares, but the stock market is run largely for speculation and to direct capital to well-connected firms. The banking system is shot through with huge bad debts as a result of channelling money to politically favored enterprises rather than those which could best use the cash.

The reform of state enterprises seems to be taking longer than expected. Corporate accounts often bear little relation to reality.

An inquiry found recently that most state firms cooked the books. No wonder some commentators see as inevitable the scenario outlined in a recent book called The Coming Collapse of China.

Some of the highest-flying businessmen have crashed to Earth -- the second-ranking person on the Forbes list for 2001 has just been jailed for 18 years for fraud. Huge smuggling rings involving local dignitaries have been uncovered. Municipal officials in Manchuria's main city were found to have been in cahoots with the local mafia.

This is partly the result of such rapid development in a country with no independent legal system, where favors that bring the chance to make a fortune are bought and sold. But the way China is developing poses a distinct problem for the organization that sits obstinately on top of that system and has used its ability to hand out favors and punishment, as the glue that holds it together.

As an old Maoist once said, if the Communist Party does not get rid of corruption, it is done for; but, if does get rid of corruption, it is doomed anyway. Since the move to the market launched by the patriarch Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) two decades ago, individual liberty has grown enormously. Walking in the streets of Chinese cities, you do not feel the oppression that characterized eastern Europe under communism.

Taxi drivers joke about the leadership, and only the politically ambitious pay much attention to its ideological forays.

That is, in its way, is what the leadership is after. Its basic gamble is that growing wealth will provide a legitimacy to replace the tenets of Maoism. After the first, second and third ways of politics, welcome to China's fourth way where the prospect of getting rich means that politics, in the conventional Western sense, can be pigeonholed for so long as the economy roars ahead.

So, though there have been some electoral experiments at local level,democracy is far away, as it has been throughout China's history. For the new leadership of President Hu Jintao, as for his predecessor, Jiang Zemin stability is paramount -- the Cultural Revolution is held up as a terrible example of what can happen when things get out of hand.

Crossing the political line is perilous. Dissidents are out of the headlines in the West, but they are still persecuted relentlessly. Members of the deep-breathing Falun Gong exercise group are arrested as a security threat. Tibet remains tightly policed, and the war on terrorism is a convenient pretext for cracking down on the mainly Muslim population of the vast western territory of Xinjiang.

China has put on its best face for the world, particularly since it realized the benefits to be gained from Sept. 11. Blair and the other leaders beating a path to Beijing should realize, however, that, useful as foreigners are, China has never set much store by them. The round-eyes can provide technology and money, but the country will go its own path, making temporary alliances that suit it while increasingly using its clout as it chooses, in its bid to displace Japan as Asia's economic and political motor.

To do that, the leaders Blair met this week have to maintain the breakneck momentum of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" to demonstrate that "It's the economy, stupid."

Jonathan Fenby edited the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong from 1995 to 1999 and is the author of Dealing with the Dragon: A Year in the new Hong Kong.

The lack of technological innovation in Chinese civilization was the result of a tremendous luxury Imperial China enjoyed. No civilized enemies. The constant arms race since the invention of the crossbow that triggered Western technological progress was the result of Europe having three or so major powers (England, France, the Hapsburgs/Holy Roman Empire) and occasionally dangerous ambitious wannabees to balance things (Holland, Prussia, Venice, Sweden, Saxony, etc). A major military innovation could turn a wannabee into major player and a major player into an empire.

Also, Northern Sung China came within an inch of an industrial revolution. The key to firearms isn't gunpowder. It's making good, cheap metal. The development of the coking process for making purer, stronger, cheaper iron made the mass conscript armies and plentiful artillery of the Napoleonic Wars possible. Chinese entrepreneurs were beginning to create large scale iron production enterprises. But the imperial bureaucracy, fearing a rival bourgeous class, had them shut down. So China never had a chance to develop the firearms that might have stopped the Mongols. To them technological innovation was suspect and potentially dangerous.

Modern China had a tremendous advantage that Russia did not. It had that enormous pool of talent and wealth to draw from; the overseas Chinese. Their role cannot be understated. Chinese wherever they go practice the higher return Jewish model (high education, the professions, retail business ownership) instead of the lower return Irish-Italian-Black model (sports, entertainment, organized crime, machine politics, civil service). As such China will be vastly more formidable than the Soviet Union ever was. Try as they might the Russians just can't seem to get past a Mafia model of capitalism. They have yet to produce world quality export goods.

China will always have a strong state capitalist sector of the economy. That is their culture. Chinese civilization is built around organized water control on a massive scale from the rice paddy to two enormous rivers that do great damage with great loss of life when dikes or canals are neglected. Libertarianism is only for people or societies that think the world is a safe place and China is none such.

I think it incredibly significant when people like Kissinger are flatly saying that if the level of offshoring continues America will not be a great power a generation from now. People who can see past the next quarter are scared.

You hit the nail on the head. Spot on

"Neccessity is the Mother of Invention"

The Chinese Emperor does not feel the need to progress any further. China was the top dog, the only superpower in her part of the world, East Asia for the last several millenia. The Japanese was not a threat. The Japanese samurai class prevented the use of firearms as it violates the spirit of the Bushido, and the supremecy of the sword---only cowardly scum uses firearms. Similarly in China, the Kung Fu warriors regarded the firearms as coward's weapons.

Without any credible enemies, China felt over-confident and became covered in a time warp, and stagnated while the west progressed and modernized. The Western powers realized the importance of Scientific research into weaponry and spent lots of money into it.

The Chinese Qing Dynasty was on the other hand keen to keep the people poor and stupid so that it could continue its rule---if the people were educated and smart they would question the "Mandate of Heaven" and rebel. The Qing were Manchu conquerors of China, you see. One British General wrote in 1890 that the Chinese emperor was so fearful of the Han Chinese people having good quality artillary with which they could use to fight Qing that all the Chinese artillary were of poor quality, with the cannon more likely to explode in the faces of the artillarymen themselves. The Qing Manchu Army had a fearsome cavalry ,you see.

The feudal Emperor did not provide any universal education to the people, unlike Europe which went all-out to educate the people.

The feudal Emperor did not spend any money on R&D on weaponry

What you are basically saying is "Racial white superiority" which is pure emotional prejudice, Nazi kind of stuff. Any scientific evidence to back it up ? Bell Curve ? Anything ?

I'm not going to waste words with you, so here it goes:

Read what I wrote. What makes you think I'm white? If you didn't have your head up your ass and actually read just a little bit of history, you would realize that the primary differences in the development curves between, say, the Chinese and the Europeans was cultural and social. Which is what I stated. The Europeans were very backward for a long time in terms of science and technology, but due to various social and cultural factors (no real centralization of power being very important), they adapted much more quickly than most other cultures. It wasn't that they were so damn brilliant, but that the decentralized power structure made them highly adaptive and fostered a free market of ideas, even if they were too backward to develop many of the original core technologies themselves. The real important difference was that the Europeans were vastly better at metalwork and machining than anyone else even in the dark ages, and capitalized on this fact immensely.

Which essentially proves that you are not only illiterate, but ignorant as well. If I want to hear from a drooling imbecile, I'll ask for it. I don't need to hear whatever baseless and self-righteous assertions you can pull out of your ass. I have neither the time nor patience for it.

Do you even have an excuse?

Chinese entrepreneurs were beginning to create large scale iron production enterprises. But the imperial bureaucracy, fearing a rival bourgeous class, had them shut down.

The problem in a nutshell. Europe eventually came into its own in no small part because there was very limited centralization of power. While they started way behind the curve, outside technologies really fueled and bootstrapped what was otherwise a (relatively) highly competitive free market system with a mediocre educational basis. Europe was never amenable to centralization and this made it very competitive. For a while, the Catholic church came close to making Europe share the fate of China, but it slipped through their fingers as well. China was very advanced, but the environment wasn't competitive which dampened progress. Europe was backward but also highly competitive and adaptive, and only needed to be primed with someone else's technologies.

The Europeans had difficulty developing the core technologies, but the social, political, and cultural climate allowed them to exploit the core technologies developed by other peoples despite their initial barbarian status, allowing them to bootstrap to the same level as other cultures rather quickly.

The Chinese had moveable type in 1045 A.D. They were making paper perhaps has early as 5 A.D., but certainly by 105 A.D. They invented Gunpowder in the eighth century. They were using magnetic compasses for marine navigation by the 11th century.

And what else?

American innovations and achievements can fill a room full of encyclopedias. The Chinese rockets couldn't get off the pad until Clinton gave them the know-how.

Chinese achievements wouldn't fill a small notebook. The reason why is because the people have been living under various dictatorships for a thousand years. A dictatorship does not create a setting for creativity. Need proof?

Look at the Chinese descendents working here in our country - creative, intelligent and innovative.

China will always be a second rate country until it throws off the dictatorship. A compass does not make a people special.

<< And they are ruthless, relentless, persistent and patient about revenge. >>

But they also suffer psychopathological hesperophobia, of the kind that, for example, makes them all cringe with humiliation every time they remember that a hundred-odd years ago, a handful of Englishmen in a few wooden ships at the end of a ten-thousand miles long supply line took on the Middle Kingdom and soundly whipped its arse.

That's why they are still making anguished films about mindless barbarians, ang moh kwi and gwai loh forcing opium [Then as ordinary a commodity as is, say, perrier water today] on them -- and will be in another hundred and fifty years time.

It is also why they have about done looting Hong Kong, which on July 1 1997 comprised 27.5% of "china's" net worth -- and now doesn't amount to a hill of beans -- and why they will inevitably brutally, barbarically and savagely repress any real movement toward independence there in a way that will make the slaughter of Tiananmen Square's four thousand look like a disagreement among friends.

And they are cringing cravenly-cowardly bullies which is why although they will most certainly slaughter Hong Kong's unarmed and innocent once-FRee-British-Hong-Kong Citizens by the thousands, should they feel the need, they will not touch the FRee Men of the FRee Republic of China on Taiwan unless with massive mass-destructive [Nuclear] force.

Knowing as they do that should they try to take Taiwan by any means other than behind weapons of mass destruction, Taiwan's FRee Men will kick their much-vaunted billion plus arses all the way to Kunming -- and beyond! As, all those scores of years ago, did that handful of Englishmen they cannot get out of their minds.

Your emotion is quite understandable.

However, Taiwan personnel need to shore up/improve their personal disciplines . . . especially in terms of training, maintenance etc. of advanced military equipment.

Experts I have known involved extensively in trying to train etc. Taiwan personnel in the maintenance and operation of advanced military equipment found it almost impossible.

Persistently the personnel would excuse their laziness by: "It's not the Chinese way. We don't do it that way."

When "that way" was something as basic as reading the manual, doing the training and such basic things as cleaning, greasing etc. the mechanical equipment.

Thankfully, most of the Dah Lu personnel are probably as bad or worse. But I'm not that impressed with how well Taiwan personnel are likely to defend that precious island.

Prayer still seems like Taiwan's only hope.

The Manchu Qing Emperor avoided committing all his military to fight the British in the 1800s, thinking that he could buy the foreign invaders off with money, as the Chinese had traditionally done. The Manchu Qing was peserving his best armies to oppress the Han Chinese who comprised 95% of the population, for Qing knew that the Han were plotting a major rebellion, thru the secret societies. Besides , Qing Dynasty was weakened by the huge Taiping Rebellion. The Emperor only ordered his brother prince Kung to do one battle with the Beritish with a 20,000 strong Manchu cavalry, near Peking. And indeed the Manchu Emperor paid the British with many millons in silver to try to buy them off. Qing was more interested in maintianing/preserving their Dynasty

The cowardly ,decadent Manchu Emperor fled Peking rather han fight the British, (unlike his ancestors ,Manchus who were great warriors, managing even to conquer China from the Ming). If the Emperor was a full-blooded Han Chinese , he would had fought the British to the last. These British sure had cow's luck on their side

Everything being equal, it is how much money and financial resources that a Nation commit to R%D that will yield great advances in Scientific and technological achievements, ie progress is directly proportional to the amount of money invested in R&D. This has been proven again and again, eg, Britain, Europe, US, the USSR and Japan. Surely there is no magic or some supernatural forces, or Racial-superiority theories here

The USSR was communists, yet they had proved that if they focussed their energy and resources into R%D, they could achieved great results, eg, the SPUTNIK, etc

In the 1980s, everybody thought that the Japanese Century was coming, but it is the US thsat beats the Japanese, in IT, Internet and sciences, why???. Because, besides spending lots of money, the US also practised true MERITOCRACY by attracting and utilizing the best brains and talents the world has to offer, to work in American R&D, whereas the Japanese would hire only Japanese

The USSR was communists, yet they had proved that if they focussed their energy and resources into R%D, they could achieved great results, eg, the SPUTNIK, etc

The Russians had one critical advantage in addition to substantial natural resources. The Russians had some of the finest mathematical and engineering minds of that period and fostered this resource. Even today, if you look at mathematical and scientific literature a disproportionate amount of research is Russian in origin. Despite their poor economy, they were able to leverage their technical culture to overcome this to a certain extent.

The US imported a lot of its brain power during the same period, mostly Jews from Germany, for things like advanced physics.

Again, the culture matters. It takes a complex mix of things to push new boundaries of progress. A strong economy is part of that mix. Another part is a strong technical, mathematic, and scientific culture. Another aspect is the low viscosity of people movement and ideas. China is probably about as far up that hill now as the USSR ever was: weaker on the technical side, stronger on the economy, and about the same in social viscosity. The relative technical weakness and mediocrity of China is its weakest point right now. They always seem to be two steps behind for the most part, certainly compared to much of the industrialized West, though I'm sure that gap will close with time.

<< Holding the 1,000,000 strong well equiped Japanese army for 8 years, and fighting the US to a stale-mate in Korea >>

What absolute bullshit!

You Peking-gangster-owned jokers actually believe your own delusions!

We Americans and the British saved your sorry arses from the Japanese and American politics and a State Department Brahmanas comprised of Soviet agents were all that ever posed any kind of threat to our overwhelming superiority in Korea.

And when, once again undefeated and only at the whim of American "DemocRATS'" politics and our own chi-com-style corrupted State Department -- and the stinking un-and-anti-American mass media -- we left your gangster-bastard buddies whipped and wailing and wimping in Vietnam and came home -- and your much-vaunted p l a [Better at mass-murdering innocent unarmed women and children and at lying, looting and thieving than at actually fighting] took advantage of the vietkkkong's and the nva's sad and sorry state and invaded [No doubt to add a few more square miles to the more than 2.5 million of other peoples' land already colonized, brutalized and enslaved by Peking's psychopath pirates] -- even puny gangster-communist Vietnam, without even pausing in the mass-murder of citizens of the abandoned South, whipped your sorry arses one more time for good measure!

Oh, what a threat you peking-pla pansies pose.

[NOT!]

Well, Pres Roosevelt appreciated the tremendous war Chinese contributions towards the Allies and appointed (1944) China as one of the "Four policemen" of the World (the 4 Permanent members of the UN Security Council) in his "Dream for the United Nations" (source: Herbert Feis," Churchill, Roosevelt,Stalin, The War they waged and the Peace they sought", Princeton, N.J.Pinceton Press;1957,pg.370, and also from Henry Kissenger,"Diplomacy"Simon & Schuster.1994, pg 397)

In particular, Pres Roosevelt was grateful that China fought and tied down 1,000,0000 well equipped Japanese soldiers in China for 8 years (1938-1945). He was grateful to the Chinese for not accepting a Japanese peace offer halfway thru the war, for that would mean that the Japanese would be able to transfer these 1,000,000 troops to the Pacific War theather, where they would kill American boys. He realizes that the Chinese had fought on courageously, in spite of taking much casulties and suffering much bombings and other sacrifiges

At the end of the war the KMT under General Chiang accounted for every Japanese POWs and shipped all of them home to Japan. this high moral gesture was also noticed by Pres Roosevelt and the western powers

China opposed the Allied plan to partition Japan into 4 zones to be ruled by each victorious Allied powers. until today, the Japanese LDP Party is still grateful to the Chinese KMT for this opposition to the Partition of Japan that the LDP Party still honor and commemerate the birthday of Chiang Kai-Shek every year

you said "we Americans and British....'

come, come, NO American or British, would ever use the kind of language you use or attack with such barbaric personal attacks and disgusting name-callings that you stoop to. Plse, plse, a true American and British are too cultured and cultivated and have too much class, breeding and self-dignity to do what you do, in a civilised respectable FR forum.

In reality you MAY be Chandra, who just recently migrated to the USA from Malaysia. So, why are you trying to smear the American image with your foul foul language ??????

Forum administrator and moderator, plse take note

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