The East ascending, the West descending

by Maswood Alam Khan
November 16, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/1101/the-east-ascending-the-west-descending

UK Prime Minister David Cameron during his current visit to Beijing has said: "China will soon reclaim its position as the world's biggest economy, a role Britain held for 18 of the past 20 centuries." Cameron's statement sounds pretty like a king handing to a commoner his crown, a captain handing to a soldier his sword or a landlord handing to a tenant the ownership of his land.

China, a giant of autocracy and once not in the distant past an economic top dog, is going to replace Britain, a giant of democracy and an economic top lion only two centuries back! It is indeed an irony of fate that the world's biggest economy in the making in spite of its bad records of human rights violations is now a roaring dragon. With financial muscle the dragon is now so powerful that it can spew goblets of fire at anyone who would try to come in its way. China is of course poised to pick up the baton of global superpowers in a matter of years.

This is what is called the lesson of history. This is what the motion of a clock in the history is when hands of the clock are inching towards the bright future of the East and leaving past the West with its once bright sparkles getting dimmer.

There was a belief, a kind of bigotry in the West, that the Westerners were genetically superior and they had better leaders. People in the West used to claim that their religion, culture, ethics, institutions etc. were uniquely excellent. Others still don't agree with this western dogma, insisting that the Western superiority was just an accident in the history or a strange quirk of fate.

Pundits of political history however suggest that people were and still are much the same all the time, all over the world. The reason why some groups of people lagged behind stuck in hunting and gathering in the wild while others built empires and had industrial revolutions has nothing to do with genetics, beliefs, or attitudes; it was simply leadership and perhaps a cyclic order of history blessed by congenial geography.

The balance of international economic power is shifting among the major superpowers and new geo-economic blocs of countries are taking shape. The potential is growing for various powers, or alliances of powers, to gain greater geopolitical capacity to challenge U.S. dominance—not necessarily through direct military confrontation but nonetheless in increasingly economic muscle flexing interacting with other contradictions, conflicts, and struggles in the world. The challenge against US dominance may---not surprisingly---come from countries in the East: notably China and subsequently perhaps from India and other emerging economies in Asia and Africa.

For more than a millennium, until at least 1700, China was the richest, the strongest, and the most inventive place on earth when the East generally pulled ahead of the West. East Asian inventors came up with one breakthrough after another. There was however a break in China's rise in power in the last few centuries, especially in the 20th century when the country had to suffer heavily for its wars: civil wars and its wars with Japan. But, now China is again ahead of many countries in the East and the West, especially when it comes to technology.

China's leaders are autocratic; but they are intrinsically technocrats, having high regard for Science and Technology. China has ploughed its huge reservoir of domestic saving into some of the best infrastructures in the world. China has been brilliant in attracting massive inflows of foreign direct investment as the means to acquire technology, managerial expertise, and factories on a scale and with scope that is hard to believe.

Today, China possesses a diversified communications system equipped with the most sophisticated technology in the world that links all parts of the country by Internet, telephone, telegraph, radio, and television. China is the world's largest cell phone users of 400 million and world's largest cable TV subscriber base. China is the world's second largest PC market selling 20 million pieces of personal computer every year and it has 2nd largest internet users of 162 million. In 2008, China's software exports reached US$ 14.2 billion. Services outsourcing grew at a speed of 54.3% to $1.6 billion. During the current global recession, due to the downturn in the manufacturing and export sectors, China has selected outsourcing as a new arena for economic growth. China also provides a safe and stable environment to overseas investors: no terror attacks have ever taken place in Chinese cities.

Many people assume that China is a socialist society—after all, its leaders describe their system as socialist and there is, at least in name, a ruling communist party. But socialism no longer exists in China. It was overthrown in October 1976. Deng Xiaoping and other leading neo-capitalist forces within the Chinese Communist Party carried out a military coup soon after Mao Tsetung died. These forces moved quickly to arrest the Maoist leadership core and to suppress revolutionary opposition.

A new capitalist class now rules China. China's rulers are increasingly seeking in the world theatre an opportunity to carve out a space and pursue their own geostrategic interests. In quest of their new space and in pursuing their global interests China's capitalist rulers are presenting challenges to an economic framework that sounds more capitalistic---perhaps a bit imperialistic.

The U.S. still occupies the number one position in the imperialist world, both militarily and economically. It is the strongest military power and the largest economy in the world. The USA is still the financial glue of the whole world system; and the political-military "guarantor" of a global order that benefits, at least for now, all the big powers. U.S. imperialism possesses unparalleled military strength relative to rivals and would-be rivals. And since 2001, it has been pressing this advantage—mounting a global military offensive, focused in Iraq and Afghanistan, to secure unchallengeable dominance for decades to come.

But the U.S.'s economic position in the world has been fast declining. The United States is encountering difficulties in pursuing its global agenda. Its financial system has been experiencing growing turmoil. The shifts and changes in world economics are impacting U.S. imperialism's freedom of maneuver. In short, the imperialist system is in flux. And China is a highly dynamic element in the equation.

Now the question is: Is China poised to replace America as the new leader of a new imperialist world at a time when the possibility of a third world war based on military strength is very low and the probability of a first world war based on economic strength is very high?

Related Topics:  Op-Ed and Editorial receive the latest by email: subscribe to weekly blitz's free mailing list