THE LIMITS OF DRAGON POWER
China may not be taking over the world but it is not headed for collapse either
Jonathan Fenby’s dizzying account of China’s glories and failures recalls Napoleon’s supposed comment about letting the Chinese giant sleep. “For when he wakes, he will move the world.” Two centuries later, the giant isn’t sleeping. But in Fenby’s vivid portrayal, he isn’t exactly wide awake either. There’s no doubt, however, that he is a giant to which the Eurozone turned last year for help. But if the giant is already the world’s banker (not just America’s, as Hillary Clinton says), it faces the danger of going bust unless clients remain actively solvent.
This inter-dependence between China and the rest of the world doesn’t receive sufficient attention. As Fenby says, Beijing is caught “in an unintended dollar trap”. Its consequences merit closer examination. But most commentators are happy to take their cue from votaries like Edgar Snow who predicted China was going to be the great story of his generation. Natwar Singh admits in My China Diary that he “immediately (became) an admirer of Mao Zedong and his formidable Long Marchers” after reading Red Star Over China. Others don’t need to read Snow. They are pragmatists like Henry Kissinger.
Fenby’s overview of China’s politics, economics, society, international relations, history, environmental issues, corruption and new leadership is all the more engaging for lacking the partisanship of a Snow or Kissinger or the academic focus of Roderick Macfarquhar or Frank Dikotter. Mercifully, he is also free of ideological bias. He is a sound reporter with a good eye for detail and has done his homework well.
Chapters like “Riding The Rail” and “The Giant Hotpot” make for delightful reading. He doesn’t fail to note that the provincial vice-governor with 46 mistresses may be carrying on the imperial tradition of concubines. Or that only a third of the millions of young Chinese who study abroad return to their booming country.
As editor of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong (which Rupert Murdoch sold as part of his plan to cozy up to Beijing), Fenby had a ringside view of events in the mainland. He also travelled extensively in remote parts of China, and bases his observations on conversations with people high and low. Hence his conclusion that though China may not be on the point of taking over the world as global Superpower Number One, it isn’t heading for collapse either.
Indian readers looking for references to Asia’s other global aspirant are doomed to disappointment. Acknowledging that analysts constantly compare the two countries “in their forecasts of which will grow fastest”, the author dismisses the illusion with a few well-chosen comparative statistics. As for the future of the leadership stakes, “the ball appears firmly on China’s side of the net”.
He also demolishes the argument, first advanced by a placatory Mao and constantly parroted by Indian propagandists, that the 1962 war was but a single blip in an eternity of blissful amity. Not so. Absence of friction doesn’t mean intimacy. As Fenby puts it, “though Buddhism travelled to China from India, the history of the Asian giants is one of distance through the centuries as they looked in different directions on either side of their 2,000-mile Himalayan frontier”.
They still do, despite the fanfare of India’s socalled Look East Policy, which, as I have described elsewhere, is rooted in factors that have little bearing on looking east. P.V. Narasimha Rao shrewdly recognised in 1991 that bankrupt India had to move close to the US, and that this could be done without provoking a hostile domestic reaction, by first establishing an entente with