Does the world need a dominant power -- a leader of the pack?
The idea that the planet might benefit from an alpha dog sounds politically incorrect, but it has sometimes proved the case that socially flatter arrangements, in which there is no acknowledged leader, have produced squabbling and unhappiness and, worst of all, dangerous vacuums. The time between the first and second world wars of the twentieth century was that kind of a void -- and it was not filled until America emerged from its willful isolation and asserted a consummate leadership role with its economic and military might. America, remember, did not have to elbow everyone out of the way in order to gain this station: If one path to global dominance is conquest, another is the voluntary subservience of lesser powers whose overriding interest is in safety and stability....
The path to a Chinese Century would in all likelihood look something like the path to the American one -- a zigzag ascent driven by economic imperatives and assisted by the stumbles and miscalculations of others. The beginnings of this path can already be glimpsed. Just as the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries started to reorient itself toward America, without consciously knowing that America was destined to be the dominant power, the world of the early twenty-first century is already starting to make cultural, political, and economic adjustments to China's rising star.
And as the world reaches out to China, China reaches out to the world. This encounter is happening all over the globe, including in America's own backyard, in South America, a region that America has dominated for centuries and tends to take for granted. The Chinese are engaging politically, militarily, culturally, and, most of all, economically in South America, as a part of a planetwide search for raw materials. China's thirst for oil has led to a tightening of ties with socialist Hugo Chavez's Venezuela: Beijing is investing in oil-infrastructure projects there, and the two countries are considering proposals that include reactivating a pipeline through Panama to accommodate an increase in exports to China, possibly at the expense of the American market. Meanwhile, Chavez boasts of sending satellite technicians to China to receive training in a space-based air-defense system that presumably is intended to guard against an American military threat. South of Venezuela is Brazil, a prime source of soybeans for China; south of Brazil is Argentina, a prime source of meat; and to Argentina's west is Chile, a prime source of copper.... The Chinese penetration in South America has gone deeper than Americans generally realize. The Chinese have arrived, and their presence is shaping up as an enduring one....
Does a Chinese Century mean doom and gloom for America? This is a widespread anxiety among Americans, but the case can be made that a Chinese ascension could be a useful spur to America. If America were to wake up one day and find that it was no longer number one, that the Chinese were now on top, then Americans might finally feel compelled to undertake the necessary changes that the country has so long resisted, like genuine improvements to its education and social-policy systems. It is all a question of how America adapts to the situation.
Unless China's leaders decide to reverse the tack of their economic policy and shut the door on trade with the outside world, then there is nothing in the logic of China being the number-one economy that suggests that the American economy cannot continue to grow at a healthy pace, too.... America's Pacific Coast-based businesses, already profiting from the rise of China, might do especially well....
The wound to America, if it loses its hegemonic grip to China, may be more to the mind than to the pocketbook. But in all After America possibilities, Americans will have to make huge mental adjustments. In the case of a Chinese Century, one of the adjustments -- an especially awkward one, which folks will find hard to talk about -- will be a recognition that the leadership of the modern world has been won by a nonwhite group of people who come from a place remote from the origins of American civilization in the bosom of Europe. That realization alone could nourish a toxic brew of anxiety and racial prejudice and spur unhelpful inquiries along the lines of "Are they smarter than we are?" A Chinese Century, in this sense, could be the ultimate test of America's multicultural tolerance. It is easy to preach the virtues of global diversity when you occupy the world's tallest pulpit.
The arrival of a Chinese Century would not be an easy matter to spin for the history textbooks of the American schoolchild. It would represent the ascension of a civilization that embraced an extreme and brutal form of communism while Henry Luce's America was sermonizing on the virtues of the free market and popular democracy.
At the same time, a burden would slip from America's shoulders -- the burden of being number one. To the extent that America is disliked in the world, the sentiment has less to do with the personality qualities of "the American" than with the envies and animosities that naturally gravitate toward the leader, any leader, of the pack. Those attitudes would be directed away from Washington to Beijing, which would learn anew the eternal lesson that it is cold and very lonely on the mountaintop.
Reprinted from AFTER AMERICA: Narratives for the Next Global Age, by Paul Starobin, with permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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