19 October 2003 11:14
China`s space shot is a warning for the West: Andrew Roberts, the historian, sees the dawn of the Chinese Century
`Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," a threatening Nikita Khrushchev warned a group of Western
diplomats in Moscow in 1956, adding: "We will bury you." Two events last week should warn us that, although
the Soviet Union never succeeded in burying the West, Communist China might. For if history is on anyone's side at
the moment, it seems to be moving in favour of Beijing's totalitarian rulers.
The astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the earth 14 times in 21 hours on Wednesday, adding China to the elite club of
America and Russia as the only three powers to have undertaken manned space exploration. By 2010 China hopes, in the
words of its chief space scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, to "set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches for the
benefit of humanity". Since China's entire space programme is controlled by the People's Liberation Army
(PLA), it is unlikely that humanity's benefit is high on China's agenda. As Lt-Gen Edward Anderson, the deputy
commander of US Northern Command, has put it: "It will not be long before space becomes a battleground."
Also last week, the banking colossus HSBC announced that 4,000 British jobs are to be lost when it closes its
processing and call centre operations in Birmingham, Swansea, Sheffield and Brentwood. Those jobs will now go to China,
India and Malaysia, where labour costs are far lower. Unlike the space mission, the HSBC news was confined to the back
pages, but its long-term implications are no less momentous; service-sector as well as manufacturing jobs are migrating
east.
Napoleon called China "a sleeping giant", and predicted that "When she awakes she will shake the
world". Well, now China is wide awake, and armed with an economy that is widely expected to outgrow that of the US
by 2025. Moreover, she is casting baleful stares at the English-speaking civilisation that she believes kept her
backward in the days of Western imperialism. The Second Boxer Rising has begun, but this time it is being fought on the
battlefield of trade. (Beijing's trade surplus with the US now stands at $100 billion.) China's rulers are
utterly ruthless; she has an army of 2.3 million men; her neighbours are understandably fearful; and she nurses proud
but wounded national ambitions. It is high time that we woke up to the threat that an awakened Chinese empire poses to
our present global hegemony.
Between 1993 and 2002, the capitalist coastal provinces of China grew in per capita GDP from $815 to $2,020 - a
staggering 148 per cent - while their population only grew from 321 million to 355 million, or 10 per cent. Over the
same period, EU per capita GDP rose by 10 per cent on a 2 per cent population increase, the US increased its per capita
GDP by 43 per cent as its population increased by 10 per cent. If the Chinese economy continues to expand at something
between 9 per cent and 11 per cent a year, as most economists expect, the 21st will be the Chinese Century, just as the
20th has been the American one.
By embracing free markets in its coastal provinces, China has unleashed the initiative of the most instinctively
capitalist people on the planet. "One Country, Two Systems" has been a triumph for the octogenarian
master-strategists of Beijing. Furthermore, by learning the lesson of the Soviet Union's overvalued rouble and
therefore keeping its currency, the RMB, pegged at an undervalued rate to the dollar, China has boosted its exports to
an astonishing degree. City analysts predict that next year they will rise by between 15 and 20 per cent.
The world will be a very different, and far less comfortable place for us when China displaces the US as the
world's greatest power, as seems inevitable by the middle of of this century. When the imperial baton passed from
Britain to the US, at least the succeeding power spoke our language, shared our values, and had twice been our
battle-tested ally. By contrast, China is one of the most vicious states in existence. In its 2003 annual report,
Amnesty International highlighted the way that in that country, "serious human rights violations continued and in
some respects the situation deteriorated. Tens of thousands of people continue to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned
for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association or belief. Torture and ill-treatment remain
widespread".
Apologists for Chinese totalitarianism argue that a country of 1.5 billion people cannot be ruled democratically, yet
neighbouring India, with over one billion, has managed it well enough. Chinese democracy activists dread the coming of
the Olympics to Beijing in 2008, since whenever a spotlight is trained on their country there are ruthless security
crackdowns, such as those for the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1999.
With a foot on the neck of Tibet, a projected 10 per cent increase in defence spending for 2004, ceaseless
sabre-rattling against democratic Taiwan, and an officer corps that is by turns paranoiac and jingoistic, China also
protects North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. This behaviour hardly augurs well for a peaceful Chinese
Century.
Of course the Chinese themselves regard a superpower status, and the glory days of the Middle Kingdom, as no more
than proper deserts for the country that invented printing, gunpowder and Ming porcelain. In 1500 China accounted for
one-quarter of the world's GDP, a figure that rose to nearly one-third by 1820, when it suddenly began to collapse.
A return to such global eminence by 2025 would simply confirm the Chinese in their belief that the period since 1820 has
merely been an unfortunate blip.
For the rest of us, a world dominated by modern Chinese political culture would mean nothing less than the kind of
"new Dark Age" that Churchill warned would be the consequence of a Nazi victory. The hymnal reminds us of how
"Earth's proud empires pass away" and, of course, the present hegemony of the English-speaking peoples
cannot last forever, but it will be tragic when - not if - Western civilisation is overtaken in power, wealth and
prestige by Chinese Communo-militarism.
[UKIR [UK & Ireland Intelligence Wire]] |
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