Sinotibetan

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=1446

Re-India’s role. I suggested that an alliance between Japan, India, Korea, and perhaps Russian, would be enough to block China from reaching regional hegemony. Attempts to form such a grouping will probably take place, they already are on some level, and the prospect is discomforting to China. But will it succeed, or are the interests of these nations simply too divergent and better served by cooperating with China?

Re-military modernization. First, yes I’ve heard about the waning of the aircraft carrier (War Nerd, David Crane, etc). However, there are two major caveats. First, along with amphibious forces, they will still remain an unparalleled tool of power projection, highly effective against all countries that can’t effectively do naval area denial (still the majority). Second, ship defenses are improving rapidly. While the current carrier group’s AEGIS system can be saturated and kills achieved given enough firepower, as the critics say, this will be much harder to do once naval DEW’s and railguns start coming online by the 2020′s. Second, and more generally, the “China being left behind” theory assumes that military technology 1) gets locked in at a certain point in time in China by 2020 – say, at the US level of 2005, while 2) military innovation accelerates in the US. I don’t see either as being very likely.

Re-food. I kind of marginally touched on it with my comments about grain production being on a plateau, its acquisition of foreign arable land, its growing food imports. I think that in a world facing declining food per capita, China will not be particularly badly-off, even taking into account its agricultural problems, because it has the trade surpluses (people want its goods) and political foresight (buying up on foreign farmland) to outsource the food production elsewhere.

Re-internal divisions. As I understand, the CCP is riven by different factions: New Right and New Left, internationalists and “neo-comms”, etc (going from Mark Leonard’s book What Does China Think?), but as far as I can see and as you yourself note, they all have a shared interest in keeping their squabbles under the carpet. But such elite divisions are the rule almost everywhere, so I don’t see why we should be overly concerned about any “clash”.

I won’t dispute your remark re-Huntington that Asian bandwagoning may just be the result of the “a history of a giant walking midst several dozen midgets”; certainly Huntington’s theory has drawn quite a lot of flak over the years, so perhaps there really is nothing particularly Asian about bandwagoning. Though of course the implications of China reassuming its mantle as a “giant” would be obvious.

I’ll try to comment on Japan and reserves later once I’ve read your links. An immediate response one could make to the quoted text re-foreign reserves is that late 1920′s USA and late 1980′s Japan were both already highly-developed nations, whereas China still has plenty of room for convergence-derived economic growth by further productivity improvements and unlocking of its consumer potential. Given this fundamental difference, I don’t think there’s any real grounds for expecting a Chinese Great Depression or even “lost decade”.

*I suggest you read Matshiro Matsuma’s Brookings Institute report, “The Japanese State Identity as a Grand Strategic Imperative.” It contains some useful insights as to how the Japanese strategic machinery works, particularly when it comes to balancing.

*Huntington’s argument concerning Asian bandwagoning is bogus, IMHO. There is no reason to use cultural arguments when standard IR ones work just as well — when is the last time Asia actually had two great powers at one time? The region bandwagons because the history of East Asia is a history of a giant walking midst several dozen midgets.

*But lets say Japan plays this game and jumps into China’s lap, and all of East Asia follows the Japs in. End of story? I doubt so. You forget of the Elephant in the room – India. I seriously doubt India takes Chinese appeals of Pan-Asian unity very seriously. India’s absence from you strategic equation is thus disconcerting. Do you think they will play no role in the region when year 2010 rolls around?

*Another suggested reading is a piece from another well written blog, China Financial Markets. Money quote:

China’s foreign reserves are certainly huge. They add up to an amount equal to about 5-6 % of global gross domestic product.

But they are not unprecedented. Twice before in history a country has, under similar circumstances, run up foreign reserves of the same magnitude.

The first time occurred in the late 1920s when, after a decade of record-beating trade and capital account surpluses, the United States had accumulated what John Maynard Keynes worriedly described as “all the bullion in the world”. At the time, total reserves accumulated by the US were more than 5-6% of global GDP. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this was probably the greatest hoard of central bank reserves ever accumulated as a share of global GDP, but please check before you accept this claim.

The second time occurred in the late 1980s, when it was Japan’s turn to combine huge trade surpluses, along with more moderate surpluses on the capital account, to accumulate a stockpile of foreign reserves only a little less than the equivalent of 5-6% of global GDP. By the late 1980s, Japan’s accumulation of reserves drew the sort of same breathless description – much of it incorrect, of course – that China’s does today.

Needless to say, and in sharp rebuttal to Friedman, both previous cases turned out badly for long investors and brilliantly for anyone dumb enough to have gone short.

*I would not get too cocky talking ’bout Chinese military superiority. I suspect that they will rapidly construct a military force able to rival anything produced in the 20th century. Problem is, the 20th century is over. Aircraft carriers are the Bismark of the 21rst Century — there is little evidence that a modern war would not blow them out of the water. (See here for my reasoning) In fact, since you concern yourself with futuristics, put that blog on your reading list.) So what happens if China commits itself to a naval regime that works in the now but doesn’t do **** in 2020?

*Another aspect left relatively untouched – you talk of China’s efforts to secure supplies for its growing energy needs — how about its food needs? Most Chinese, the ones below the Romanian level, eat 3 meals of rice a day. What happens when they reach the Portugal level, and start eating beef? Combine this sharp increase in demand for food with the predicted collapse of the neoliberal order and the existing crisis in land use, and the CCP is left with a horrendous crisis on its hands.

*Final note- The internal dynamics of the CCP deserve a shout out. If China is going to have instability, it will be on this front. The Chinese don’t like to show it, but their upper ranks are divided. Some want, as you mentioned in an earlier comment, a new cold war. Others see that as paramount to disaster. What happens when these folk clash?

Alas, there is a logical difficulty in this wistful hope, which is insuperable. Alternative modernities, so conceived, are cultural, not structural: they differentiate not social systems, but sets of values – typically, a distinctive combination of morality and sensibility, making up a certain national ‘style’ of life. But just because this is what is most specific to any given culture, it is typically what is least transferable to any other – that is, impossible to universalise… Moreover, projections of a Chinese modernity that will eventually become hegemonic not only forget the inherently self-limiting character of any strongly defined national culture, they further ignore the especially intense Chinese insistence, familiar to anyone who has been in the country, on the uniqueness of China.

I don’t see Chinese culture becoming anywhere near as “universalized” as Western, except to the extent that foreigners will find it prudent to learn more about its language and culture to function better in a world where it is fast becoming the predominant Power. (Like myself, in fact – I hope to take a intensified Chinese language summer session next year).

Re-the critique from Sinomania… well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I believe we’re in such a time now.

“The soft power of its sporting prowess, its martial arts, its costly painters, its multitudinous language, its ancient medicine, and not least the delights of its cuisine, will spread China’s radiance far and wide”

My direct knowledge of Chinese culture is pretty much limited to food, Hong Kong gangster flicks, and a dubious translation of the “Tao Te Ching,” so nothing I say should be taken seriously; however, I think some questions are worth asking. To what extent is Chinese culture exportable beyond a superficial level? Do they even consider it something that should be shared with foreigners, or are they possessive of it a la the Japanese? Do Karlin, Anderson, and Jacques really think that we Westerners will all be reading Chinese books and implementing Chinese ideas in our daily lives?

Let’s bear in mind that even when China was a dirt poor isolated Maoist state, the food and the martial arts were just as popular as they are now.

On another note, Martin Jacques has been peddling “Sinomania” for years in the Guardian and other venues. As Anderson notes, he is a onetime Communist and tends to get seduced by concepts of historical inevitability. For this reason alone I am tempted to be skeptical of his claims.

(sorry if this post is kind of rambling; I’m just thinking out loud)