China the superpower
WHEN China must be considered a superpower has been the subject of accelerating projections. Goldman Sachs in 2007 predicted the Chinese economy would be almost the size of the US economy by 2025 and would be the largest economy in the world by 2050 when it would be twice the size of the US economy. In 2010, the date when China would overtake the US was moved forward by BNP Paribas to 2020. In 2011, the estimated that China would overtake the US six years from then. That is 2018, our current year!
Bloomberg tells us that actually China already surpassed the US two years ago, in 2016, based on purchasing power parity and surpassed it ever further based on the Big Mac scale, a Big Mac costing 1.8 times more in China.
Martin Jacques in his opus bestselling
deals with what China will be like as a superpower. It is interesting to see how his prognosis of the future has turned or proved to be, now that we are in the nascent years of China having the No. 1 economy in the world.
Effects of China’s rise
One of the more fundamental effects of China’s rise, says Jacques, is the transformation and reshaping of the international financial system. The financial crisis of September 2008 made manifest the decline of the dollar and the increasing strength of the renminbi. It showed the US no longer strong enough to underwrite the present international economic system and to sustain the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency. Nations would hence prefer to hold more of their reserves in currencies other the dollar. Given that China is the main trading partner of most, if not all East Asian countries, it will be natural for trade between them to be conducted in the renminbi. The full convertibility of the renminbi is ineluctable. Among the consequences of this shift in the financial system is that the US will find that economic sanctions against countries like Iran or North Korea will no longer carry the same threat because access to the US dollar financing will be less significant to them.
The political consequence of the decline of the dollar will be wide and deep. US military bases overseas will become markedly more expensive to finance and the American public will be less prepared to accept the costs of expensive military commitments abroad. On the other hand, China has of course long started converting its growing economic power into a mighty modern military force on land, sea, air, and, lately, even outer space. China has built up its military presence abroad first by converting South China Sea features into military bases and giving priority in its One Belt One Road initiative to ports that can serve as docking and refueling stations for their Navy and Air Force. China may in no time match the military strength of the United States as well.
Jacques’ last edition of his work was completed before Donald Trump became president. Can Trump arrest the decline of the United States? Can he make the US great again? It is doubtful if he can because he has taken directions opposite to those considered responsible for the rise of China. China has taken advantage of trade globalization while Trump has taken a negative view of free trade agreements and waged a tariff war on principal trading partners. China has assiduously cultivated its soft power on developing countries, especially those gifted with natural resources or those producing commodities that China needs. Trump has called developing countries shithole countries, treated them as coddlers of terrorists, and erected unprecedented racist immigration barriers against their citizens. The Communist Party of China has kept its country united despite the handover of territories of different political systems. Trump has made the United States of America a divided and polarized society.
( It is perhaps a sign of America’s dire financial straits or of Trump’s state of mind that Trump has insisted on building a wall on its border with Mexico and making Mexico pay for it. The Chinese emperors built the Great Wall of China without asking Mongolia or any of the barbarian neighbors to pay for it, in whole or in part. As the wiser than ever 90- year- old Mahathir reasoned out in a CNN interview, “It is his project, he should pay for it.”)
A civilization- state?
Perhaps because we Filipinos are familiar with the Chinese and their c u l t u r e, I am somewhat quizzical about Jacques’ description of China as a civilization- state to be distinguished from a nationstate. It is strange to categorize something when it is the only thing that falls into the category. China is the only ancient civilization that continues to this day. Admittedly, the ancient emperors of China were at the center of a sophisticated system of governance when the rest of mankind was in the proverbial state of nature. They introduced examinations as the way to enter the civil service. Unlike latter- day emperors, they were deposable; their mandates could be withdrawn from them by their discontented subjects. Although the compass did not make of China a maritime power and their mastery of gunpowder did not drive the white devils away, these and other inventions remain landmarks in the history of human knowledge. But continuity I do not see from Confucius to Mao other than that they represent ethical systems not driven by religious beliefs.
Maybe because of this civilizationstate mindset Jacques conceives of superpower China, ever becoming more powerful and prosperous than its neighbors, ruling over East Asia under a revival of the ancient tributary system of the Middle Kingdom. All’s well provided a country acknowledges the superiority of China. To make this acknowledgement to the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, a Sultan of Sulu in 1417 made a trip to China followed by an entourage of 300 and laden with gifts of pearls, tortoise shell, precious stones and a memorial inscribed on gold. The Sultan was accorded a royal welcome and return gifts of chinaware, gold, silver, silk and hundreds of thousands of copper coins, and when he died suddenly on his way home, was given a funeral “as formal as a Chinese king’s.” The grieving emperor ordered a mausoleum built to contain his remains and in memory of his friend. The emperor named the Sultan’s son as his successor. Sulu continued to send tributary missions in 1420, 1421, 1423, and 1424.
Is a fate worse than this possible to befall the Philippines? Is China keen on attaching the Philippines as a province? A visitor from a think- tank in Beijing pointed out to his audience at the Philippine Council on Foreign Relations that it was Spain, the United States, and Japan that invaded the Philippines, never China. Its expansionism has been confined to territories that shared the same land mass with China.
Could there be a first time of this expansionism leaping across the ocean?
We hope that China will find out that the best way to exercise their influence over their wide sphere is through the institution of the rule of law.