CHINA: Challenging Global Power and the Status Quo Economy
What defines a Superpower?
The defining traits of a global superpower are such that it finds itself as a leader, if not the leader in economic prowess, military might, cultural influence, political clout where global affairs are concerned, and of course, pure population size. The key characteristic though, is that these aspects are encapsulated in an attitude not limited to their internal borders, as any superpower recognizes that maintaining its strength means maintaining its interests on a global scale. Isolationism is antithetical to being considered a superpower, since by definition, it sets limits on productivity, relationships, and growth. With over 328 million people, a trade total of over $5.6 trillion U.S. dollars (O’Connell 2019), a military budget consisting of over one-third of the total global military expenditure (Barnhorst, 2018),
enough political strength to make or break any global initiative and a cultural output that essentially shapes what the rest of the world defines as western culture, the United States of America is unquestionably the single dominant superpower on the planet today. Having previously been challenged in this position by the USSR, that challenge ended abruptly when the communist union was revealed to be a paper tiger. The strength of the Soviet Union’s military, their unrivaled population, and the spread of their political ideology as a cultural identity could not hold up the mirage that was their command economy, as it could not adapt to technological innovation (Johnston, 2019), leading to its dramatic collapse in 1991.
It seems though that China, a communist ally of the USSR, was quick to realize that lessons needn’t only be learned by your own mistakes but also can be taken from the mistakes of others. China not only realized that innovation and collaboration would be key to a successful economy in a fast-changing technological world, but China also realized that the larger goal of sustaining yourself on the global stage meant prioritizing economics first. Meaning that military force, political influence and cultural export would come second as a natural outgrowth of economic success. As US President Bill Clinton’s political strategist James Carville so succinctly put it, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
China’s Meteoric Rise: From Communism to “Communism Plus”
China’s second revolution of the 20th century, or “War of Liberation” concluded in 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the political theories of communism. Inspired by the soviet bloc, Mao instituted a series of 5-year plans involving state-owned industries and government-directed production, which aided the economic recovery at first, but would ultimately provide dwindling returns. Economic isolation, mismanagement of resources, and the inability to “centrally-plan” for the unforeseeable resulted in a national famine from 1958 through 1961 causing 14 million to 40 million starvation deaths, depending on whether you believe government statistics or objective scholars (Holmes, 2009). Subsequently, the 60s in China were characterized by a brutal crackdown on anything and anyone having even the appearance or suspicion of being anti-communist; a process so-named by Mao as China’s “Cultural Revolution”. Political unrest and economic stagnation would continue through Chairman Mao’s death in 1976 until the adoption of a set of reform policies devised under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The reforms, dubbed “Communism with Chinese characteristics”, included the reopening of export opportunities, the return of profit-incentive economic polices, as well as the re-establishment of privately-owned enterprise (MacFarquhar, 1987). Most crucially, China began experimenting with foreign investment under its newfound but cautious openness to foreign trade. Agricultural revenues, industrial productivity, and the value of importing/exporting in terms of share of the national income began to rise rapidly under the new Chinese economic paradigm of “definitely not capitalism”.
The economic reforms of 1979 would see the establishment of “special economic zones” (SEZs), which (though unadmitted by the powers in Beijing) were essentially enclosed experiments in unfettered capitalism. These zones would be afforded special operating rules which included independence from central government influence and generous tax incentives (MacFarquhar, 1987). The directive for the SEZs was to utilize foreign capital, including the allowance of fully foreign-owned businesses in addition to joint ventures between local and foreign capital, and a focus on developing exportable goods driven by the demands of international market forces alone.
Shenzhen, one of the first special economic zones, experienced a GDP per capita growth of 24,569% between 1980 and 2016 while its population rose from a paltry 59,000 to a massive 12 million over the same period (History 101: “The Rise of China”, 2020). For perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to the city of Airdrie, Alberta — population 61,000 growing to the size of Los Angeles — population 12.4 million in just three and a half decades.
Overall, the decade that followed under “Communism with Chinese characteristics” would nearly double the Chinese economy, going from $190 billion in gross domestic product to $360 billion (History 101: “The Rise of China”, 2020). This shift would mark only the beginning of a period of exponential growth and influence for China, as it hit $1 trillion in GDP by 1998 (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2019), surpassed $10 trillion in 2014 (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2019), and is predicted to overtake the United States as the dominant global economy by 2025 with an annual productivity figure of $22 trillion dollars (History 101: “The Rise of China”, 2020).
What’s important to note here is that this powershift is absent any faltering on the part of the U.S., as it has enjoyed a steady growth curve over the course of the last century. The truly astounding takeaway is that, if we use $1 trillion in GDP as a performance benchmark for comparison, the United States’ dominance as a global superpower is undergirded by its growth from $1 trillion to $19 trillion in GDP over a period of nine decades (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2014); and China is about to achieve the same feat in just over two.
China’s China
While the west continues to treat African nations as a charity case, China looks at the continent of Africa and sees a mirror into its own past. It sees a mutually-beneficial investment opportunity to which African governments have greeted China with open arms and firm handshakes. Over the last decade and a half, China has become Africa’s largest trading partner (Brown, 2013), amounting to $200 billion in imports and exports every year (China Africa Research Initiative, 2020). Conversely, Africa has overtaken the rest of Asia as the number one beneficiary of Chinese construction contracts (Huang & Chen, 2016).
This difference in attitude towards Africa between the west and the far east is perhaps highlighted best in the language used by Chinese President Xi Jinping in speaking about the developing continent of 1.3 billion people. “Inadequate infrastructure is believed to be the biggest bottleneck to Africa’s development.”, Xi has said (Shepard, 2019), which is notable in that it sounds similar to the way a campaigning American politician might speak about a down-on-its-luck midwestern state. It speaks to a recognition of humanity in taking a pragmatic view of the problem of poverty instead of brushing it off as being cultural. It also rings of opportunity and partnership which China easily recognizes being that it was only a few decades ago that it was in the same position economically as Africa is in now. And given its subsequent rise to global economic powerhouse, no one knows the cure and precisely how to administer it better than China does. Especially now that those levers of economic power are in its own hands.
While “foreign aid” doesn’t have a cut-and-dry definition, China’s efforts are characterized by low and no-interest loans from the Export-Import Bank of China (Sam, 2018), which means they are instead engaging in business arrangements with governments, developers, and enterprises, as opposed to simply sending aid. Here is just a sampling of the hundreds of completed and ongoing China-backed projects in Africa:
- the 3200km Trans-Maghreb highway connecting 55 North African cities and key destinations like airports, universities, hospitals, research facilities, trade routes and shipping ports (Pheiffer, 2019)
- a $3.2 billion railway in Kenya stretching from the capital Nairobi to the coastal city of Mombasa (Sam, 2018)
- a $526 million dam in Guinea, which didn’t just correct the energy deficit there but actually provides it with an energy surplus that it can sell for a profit (Sam, 2018)
- a $475 million public transit system in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, intended to correct its heavy traffic problem (Sam, 2018)
- a massive Hydropower Plant in Nigeria that will double the country’s power output upon completion in 2030, ending its energy shortages and common blackouts (Pheiffer, 2019)
- in addition to these government-backed projects, more than 10,000 privately-owned Chinese businesses have cropped up around the African continent (Jayaram, Kassiri, & Sun, 2017)
Of course, nothing is “free” and kindness is not exactly a virtue in global geopolitics. One of China’s ulterior motivations behind its presence here is that its “return on investment” is about more than just meagre interest payments but is about the fact that it’s also collecting global influence along the way. This is no more evident than in the significant shift towards African support of Chinese interests when it comes to votes in the United Nations. African countries voting along with China in denying the independency of Taiwan or opposing the condemnation of human rights abuses in North Korea, for example, receive more infrastructure projects while those who do not vote favourably notice a decrease in Chinese investment the following year (Sam, 2018).
As China completes its transition from “developing country” to “developed”, it recognizes this means that its GDP growth potential is flattening and therefore sees the abundance of development opportunities in Africa as their own opportunities for continued growth outside of their own borders. As such, Africa is becoming China’s China in more ways than one. China’s labour-force has been shifting into middle-class skilled labour and with its remaining low-skill workers largely employed by American companies, ironically, it is beginning to look to Africa for its own source of cheap labour (Sam, 2018). Which is not the only resource China has its dragon-eye on as its investments are already paying dividends in the form of agricultural yields and the mining of raw materials.
And while China insists its expanded involvement is purely economic, it can’t help but be noticed that it has recently established its first overseas military and naval base in Djibouti, a key port if one were interested in controlling the Indian Ocean (Sam, 2018).
Silk Road Reborn
While the Sino-African relationship is a unique case to understand, it is only part of the China’s larger global development plan. For roughly two millennia the ancient Silk Road trade network connected Asia, Africa, and Europe. These routes saw the exchange of materials like its namesake silk, metals, dyes, honey, paper, ivory, spices and tea, goods such as weapons, books, perfumes, furs, live animals, porcelain, agricultural products, medicine, and gunpowder (Mark, 2018). Famously traveled and documented by Marco Polo, religion and culture were also spread via these trade routes, as was the bubonic plague (Mark, 2018). Fallen empires, fears of foreign diseases, and the rising ubiquity of gun-powder-fueled weaponry contributed to a period of economically and culturally isolated nations, greatly diminishing the use of and reliance on the silk routes (Kurin, 2002).
That is until 2013 when China announced one of the largest and most ambitious infrastructure construction projects ever devised by humanity. The crown jewel of President Xi Jinping’s economic and foreign policy is the Belt and Road Initiative. Requiring $900 billion in investment for each year (Firzli, 2017) of its 36-year plan, it projects a new network of highways, railroads, shipping ports, power grids, oil and natural gas pipelines, and telecommunications infrastructure connecting over 100 countries and accounting for over two-thirds of the world’s population, from Jakarta to Nairobi, Rotterdam to Moscow and back to Beijing (Dollar, 2019).
Notably absent from the list of included countries is the U.S. and the rest of the Americas, as this economic strategy is intentionally designed to reduce the economic reliance on the U.S. (Saimum, 2017) by Europe, Africa, and Asia, replacing it with an expanded sino-sphere of influence. Critics worry that this “influence” is not entirely innocent economics but that China is engaging in a practice known as “debt-trap diplomacy” (Chellaney, 2017), where the true nature of its seemingly generous loans to foreign governments to develop these various projects is a political ploy whereby China knows many of these debts will not be repayable and thus intends to extract future political and economic concessions from its new partner countries. It’s being seen as a form of neo-colonialism where one needn’t expand its borders in order to control more land and seize more power.
Meanwhile, the United States continues its retreat into isolationism by stepping away from its leadership in and funding of international organizations like WHO and NATO, pulling out of international agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the climate accords, not to mention recently taking an arbitrarily antagonistic approach to foreign diplomacy. While a subsection of the American public cheers this on, it remains core to the general American identity to be and feel as though you are number one; to feel as though you represent the best and most powerful country in the world. Unfortunately, this pride-based identity-marker may conflict with the oncoming global power shift in a way that may end up being disastrous for the entire world.
An Unstoppable Force vs. An Immovable Object
“Thucydides’ Trap” is a political theory proposed by Graham Allison in the book “Destined for War”, where he extrapolates from the quote by Thucydides to outline a historical pattern that may be useful in predicting future conflicts (or, hopefully, useful in wisely avoiding potential conflicts).
In a study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, of which Allison is Director, researchers took a Thucydidecian (th-oo-si-de-dee-see-an) lens to the last 500 years of major regional/global powers and the respective dynamics of the politics at the time. What they found is nothing short of striking, if not revelatory, in terms of how looking back at old information with a new eye can produce entirely new insights. The researchers found 16 clear cases where a long-established and ruling power found itself challenged by the presence of a new empire or nation having recently found its place in the changing world. No less than twelve of these champion and challenger cases led to an all-out war. That is to say that, historically speaking, when unstoppable forces arise in the presence of immovable objects, three out of four instances are going to be on an inevitable collision course with one another.
On the other hand, a more positive spin would be that three of the four non-war cases account for the three most recent instances of the trap, all occurring (or “not occurring” if you like) during the current post-WWII liberal world order. Chalk one for Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels” theory of the slow but steady demise of violence as a method of conflict resolution.
Now that I’ve afforded you a moment of relief, allow me to usher you back into dread. The historical study of Thucydides’ trap also uncovered an interesting point of nuance. In many of the studied cases there existed no direct desire to engage in bloody battle on the part of either major player. But a recurring theme in the data is that of a third-party catalyst, the most famous example of which would be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, setting off a chain reaction of ally-ships and activated defensive pacts resulting in the entire European continent going from peace and prosperity to combat zones and chemical warfare in a matter of months.
This, of course, would only be the first time that a rising Germany would challenge the dominion of the United Kingdom and France over Europe. Like a game of “Mousetrap”, this single event set in motion a conflict so all-encompassing that historians needed to invent an entire new category of war for it. The “World” war.
How is this relevant to a rising China and an established United States, you ask? Enter North Korea. The “Democratic” “People’s” “Republic” of Korea* is the global equivalent of the awkward male teenager who, despite hiding in his room with a “No Adultz Allowed” sign plastered on his door, just wants to be loved. Unfortunately, he isn’t concerned with the difference between respect and fear since the latter is all that’s ever worked for him. China, North Korea’s de facto parental figure, tends to leave it to its own devices but make no mistake that they are allies if for no other reason than that the last thing China wants to deal with is an immigration crisis from a destabilized DPRK.
*Editor’s Note: Honestly Kim, could you fit in any more overtly false public-relations words into the official name of your country?
South Korea, naturally then, is North Korea’s cool, outgoing, popular, fashionable and successful twin sister, for which he harbors endless resentment. To make matters worse, her best friend is the United States, who is the cultural equivalent of Satan in North Korean folklore (a.k.a. propaganda). (Though even a perfectly objective student of history couldn’t blame them for holding such feelings towards the U.S.)
Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-Un’s diplomacy skills amount to engaging in “Madman Theory” (Machiavelli, 1517), routinely threatening to unload its nuclear arsenal on Seoul, South Korea and the pacific territories of the United States, while publicly launching its test missiles over Japanese territory, another U.S. military ally. China, meanwhile, seems unconcerned with curbing its unruly step-child’s behaviour as it focuses on its business plans with authoritarian brother-in-arms Russia and its newly adopted African children. All it would take is one international incident on the part of North Korea where the U.S. could consider itself the victim (including attacks affecting U.S. military bases in South Korea) to obligate the entire weight of the NATO member countries to enter the conflict. Not to mention all the countries in the Asian archipelago with long-standing grievances against China over their territorial claims in the South China Sea.
If all this weren’t enough, then let us end on the funnest of facts! The Korean War never actually officially ended so much as it is on a nearly-70-year ceasefire. The U.S. and South Korea are still technically in a state of war with North Korea, China, and… the Soviet Union(?). It seems an absurd point to make but it isn’t merely one of those odd but inconsequential quirks of history where Delaware technically isn’t a state in the union on account of some ye olde clerical error or what have you. It is for this reason that North and South Korea don’t share a border so much as it is that they share the opposite sides of a 4-kilometre wide “demilitarized zone” (DMZ) of no-man’s-land, the exterior of which is the most heavily-militarized border in the world and includes the presence of the U.S. military. There have been numerous attacks and deaths involving this area since the armistice, both military and civilian. In fact, North Korea has declared an end to the ceasefire numerous times, most recently in 2013 citing U.S. aggression and threatening their territories in the pacific with the delivery of intercontinental ballistic missiles (BBC, 2013). The U.S. responded by installing a high-altitude missile defense system in Guam (Stewart & Kim, 2013), knowing full-well where China stands.
While the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century launched for China a self-proclaimed “hundred years of humiliation” at the hands of western powers, it is clear that China is intending in the 21st century to usher itself into a hundred years of domination. Though it remains to be seen if it also has designs on returning the “favours of the past” to the west.
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