Could China Be the New Superpower?

The global crisis has boosted China’s strategic and economic role as a world power. This week, the United Nations assembly — those who direct the IMF, the World Bank, and the BRICS summit to assist Europe — is certainly presenting it that way.

In the IMF’s latest figures of the gross domestic product of countries presented in April, they projected that the Chinese economy would surpass the U.S.’ in 2016; in other words, within five years. China is the foremost world holder of Treasury bonds from the U.S., and for this reason has no interest in the collapse of the leading world power, even if it would enhance China’s own role in the world. At the same time, China is asking President Barack Obama to take more responsibility in reassuring its investors, to act more responsibly regarding his country’s debt and to reduce American military spending. Faced with the European crisis, China has helped by buying bonds from Spain, Greece and Portugal in order to prevent these countries from defaulting. The Chinese government is publicly warning that the crisis taking hold today is worse than the one in 2008, and that it can’t use the same tools now that it used then to lessen the effect on its economy.

For now, China is acting like the premier Asian power, and for that it needs the U.S. military to retreat from its surrounding lands. The American armed forces have bases in Japan with 40,000 men and nuclear missiles with ranges that could reach all Chinese territory. Similar bases are in South Korea with approximately the same number of men and the same type of missiles. Washington has offered a security guarantee to Taiwan that allows it not to accept the Chinese proposal for the solution to Hong Kong (one country with two systems, which would allow for the reunification of the national Chinese territory). At the same time, of the U.S.’ seven naval fleets, two are near the Chinese coast; these have aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines with long-range missiles. During its recent conflict with Vietnam over the South China Sea — whose seafloor is rich in petroleum — Beijing warned Washington not to intervene. This is one example of why U.S. military spending is still about eight times that of China, even though very soon their economies will be equal.

There is a question of whether what happened with a mistaken prediction about Japan, which had been projected to become the world’s leading economy by this time, could happen with China. In 1980, it was projected that by 2010 or earlier, Japan’s GDP would surpass that of the United States. There were two important reasons for this. First of all, Japan’s macroeconomic growth in the first 35 years after its defeat in World War II was double that of the United States. If the trend continued, it would have taken between a quarter of a century and three decades to become the largest economy in the world. The second reason was that the average performance of Japanese students in math was superior to students’ performance in the United States. Since the future was supposed to be all about the hard sciences — and something of that has actually come true with the information age — Japan had the necessary advantage to become the largest economy in the world. But the prediction fell short, and now Japan’s GDP isn’t in first place, but third. In the 1980s the Japanese economy stagnated, and it’s been in this situation for almost a quarter of a century, while the U.S. has reverted to importing brains — from all of Asia — to cover up their deficit in the matter.

Viewed historically, the last two centuries have shown that China’s stability can be precarious. The country has had 35 years of stability since the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. But in the 140 years before, since the Chinese defeat by the British in 1836 in the so-called Opium Wars that brought on the occupation of Hong Kong until 1975, China lived in a permanent state of civil war, which sunk their economy and undermined their role as an Asian power. Today the big question is whether the single-party authoritarian communist regime can resist the inevitable political changes that will generate economic transformations and social consequences. The country is going through tensions and conflicts, and the government, with decades of authoritarian experience, is increasing its control over the Internet, to which almost a third of Chinese have access. A political crisis in China that disorganized the country, like what happened during those 140 years, would probably cause the predictions of China being the world’s leading economy in just five years to fall short.

But viewed historically, China measures its time in millennia and not in centuries like the Western hemisphere — the Asian power would only be returning to the place it held during the greater part of its history. Universities in the U.S. have reconstructed the GDP of different areas of the world since the first century. From that it appears that between the first century and the 18th century, China always had a GDP greater than Europe. The Roman Empire, a union of the territories surrounding the Mediterranean, had an economy inferior to China’s, and the same thing is true of the Europe that discovered America between the 15th and 16th centuries. The Asian power had gunpowder, paper and the printing press before Europe did. The Chinese decline developed over the 19th and 20th centuries, which corresponds to the previously mentioned period of a century and a half of constant instability. From this perspective, what’s happening with China now in the 21st century is that it’s returning to be what it has always been: the leading power in Asia and the greatest economy in the world. This allows us to suggest that the accelerated economic development of China will surely generate social tension and political conflict, but it is very likely an irreversible process of returning to its history.

In conclusion: The global crisis is expanding China’s role as a world power both strategically and economically; for now it demands to be recognized as the leading power in Asia, and for this reason it seeks the military withdrawal of the U.S. from its surrounding countries, but it’s unclear whether what happened with the failed prediction of the Japanese economy in the last decades of the 20th century could happen with China. The considerable political instability suffered by China during the 19th and 20th centuries cast doubt on its future, but Chinese history, viewed in terms of millennia, shows that in reality, China is returning to the role it played during the greater part of its history, and that reduces the risks of this prediction.