China–USA: The Cold War Changes Continents

The time for the battle has come. This is the thesis of François Lenglet, managing editor of La Tribune and author of “La Guerre des Empires, “an essay on China’s growth in power and its relationship with the USA. The author shows that the battle for power will be rough in most regards and that the possibility of armed conflict is not absent.

“Stop naïve geopolitics.” This is the leitmotif of François Lenglet, director of the daily La Tribune, who in “La Guerre des Empires” breaks down bit by bit the myth of the G-2: a Sino-American condominium that “controls the planet and will be in charge of the common good.” The two giants will be condemned to come to a compromise in post-Cold War terror: “For heavily indebted America, there is no friend in the Beijing banker, who purchases tens of millions of Treasury bonds. And for China, currently the world’s leading exporter, there can be no growth without access to a key market: that of the United States.”

Many of the accepted ideas only exist in the minds of diplomats “who are almost as clairvoyant as economists before the crisis,” jokes the author. If this interdependence between the powers has a certain logic in periods of economic growth, it works entirely differently in times of crisis. Far from the oversold idea of “Chinamerica,” François Lenglet wrote “La crise des années 30 est devant nous” [The crisis of the 1930s is before us] in 2007, seeing from afar the inexorable clash of empires: “This is the day before a shock, the likes of which our planet knows at regular intervals, every three or four generations when the leader affronts a declining power. History shows that this battle for power never happens peaceably. In fact, it ends in the most violent of wars.”

During the Great Recession, there has been a vast redistribution of geopolitical maps operating on the planetary level, with a lot of instability as a result.

Economic war, monetary war, energy war and ideological war. Once again, at the global scale, two models come head to head: the democratic West with the market serving as an instrument of economic regulation and Communist, authoritarian China. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese model and its competitiveness has gained points and attracted the most attention. The crisis has not put China under water. In fact, “the Great Recession has made China aware of its own power. The world economy is now in the hands of the Chinese.”

So why encumber itself with the right to vote and free press? Those who see economic openness leading naturally to political openness and China becoming a large Switzerland will be frustrated. After 1989, there has been a tacit pact that the Communist Party created with its citizens: a two-digit growth rate in exchange for social peace. Right now everything is going well, even though François Lenglet does not neglect to cite a number of popular revolutions in factories, often started by Mingongs, second-zone citizens of the Middle Empire who are less and less docile.

Cold War and Then?

As far as imagining a democratic China, the author is not very optimistic: “Democracy is only attractive to a few dissidents, who have an audience comparable to that of the Communist Party in the United States.” Of course, although the rare and ultra-regulated local experiments with democracy initiated by the Party were restrictive — all candidates had to belong to the Communist Party — and circumscribed to some districts, to be finally abandoned in the name of “contradictions at the core of the Party-State structures,” they were not enough to affirm that the Chinese people should definitively accept the notion of abandoning themselves to the discreet and misunderstood charms of this political system.

François Leglet barely believes in an Enlightenment made in China; however, he surmises that the “no limit” war has already been declared. In one passage of “empires,” the transition will be neither long nor peaceful, because “by increasing economic interactions with neighbors, China is more exposed to the risks of conflict.” The battle in the Pacific will take place. A Cold War? A theatrical aquatic conflict in the China Sea? An explosion in Central Asia, a key region for hydrocarbon resources? A new Opium War? Lenglet imagines several fictional scenarios à la Clausewitz.

The recent G-20 meeting in Seoul, where the two giants simulated a cordial understanding without being able to hide the absence of real and new convergences, is one illustration.

The only consolation for the United States is that the number one economic and military power has gained an enemy, and not a slight one. “We are going to do something terrible to you — we are going to deprive you of an enemy!” cried the Soviet diplomat, Georgi Arbatov, in 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Empire. History showed to what point the great Soviet Satan was ultimately useful to the Occident: the factor of cohesion and power. Will it be the same? Nothing is less certain. Under the Bush administration, China recovered this role of economic enemy before Obama tried to normalize relations with Beijing. The dawning of the real confrontation is just a question of time.