WHEN TITANS COLLIDE.

AuthorGoldman, David P.
PositionWORLDVIEW - Chinese economy, culture, and growth compared to the United States - Column

CHINA POSES a formidable strategic challenge to the U.S., but we should keep in mind that it is, in large part, motivated by insecurity and fear. America has inherent strengths that China does not, and the greatest danger to our country is not a lack of strength, but complacency.

China is a phenomenon unlike anything in economic history. The average Chinese person consumes 17 times more today than in 1987. In an incredibly short period of time, this formerly backward country has lifted itself into the very first rank of world economies.

Over the same period, China has moved approximately 600,000,000 people from the countryside to the cities--the equivalent of moving the entire population of Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. To accommodate those people, it built the equivalent of a new London, plus a new Berlin, Rome, Glasgow, Helsinki, Naples, and Lyon--and of course, moving people whose ancestors spent millennia in the monotony of traditional village life and bringing them into the industrial world led to an explosion of productivity.

Where does America stand in respect to China? By a measure economists call purchasing power parity, you can buy a lot more with $100 in China than you can in the U.S. Adjusted for that measure, the Chinese economy already is bigger than ours. In terms of dollars, our economy still is larger, but the Chinese are gaining on us and, in the next eight to 10 years, their economy--unlike the economies of our previous competitors--will catch up.

China, on the other hand, is an empire based on the coercion of unwilling people. Whereas the U.S. became a great nation populated by people who chose to be part of it, China conquered peoples of different ethnicities and with different languages and has kept them together by force. Whereas our principle is E Pluribus Unum, the Chinese reality is E Pluribus Pluribus with a dictator at the top.

China once covered a relatively small geographic area. It took about 1,500 years for it to reach its current borders in the ninth century. These borders are natural frontiers. China cannot expand over the Himalayas to India, while to its extreme west is desert and to its east is the ocean. So, China is not an inherently expansionist power--nor is China unified.

It has a written system of several thousand characters that takes seven years of elementary education to learn, working four hours a day with an ink brush, ink pot, and paper. Learning these characters well enough to read a school textbook or a newspaper is how the Chinese are socialized. The current generation is the first where the majority understand the common language, due to the centralization of the state and the mass media, but the Chinese still speak very different languages. Cantonese and Mandarin are as different as Finnish and French. In Hong Kong, you will see two Chinese people screaming at each other in broken English because one speaks Cantonese and the other Mandarin and they do not have a word in common.

China inherently is unstable because all that holds it together is an imperial culture and the tax collector in Beijing. It is like a collection of very powerful, oppositely charged magnets held together by super glue--it looks stable, but it is not.

Within the living memory of older Chinese, China underwent an era of national division, warlordism, civil war, starvation, and degradation. The Century of Humiliation, as the Chinese call it--which began with the opium wars in 1848 and ended with the success of the Communist Revolution in 1949--was a century in which civil war claimed untold millions of lives, and the terror of a return to those conditions is a specter that haunts leadership.

China, like Russia, responds to its past humiliation by challenging American power. It would be naive to expect the Chinese or the Russians to be our friends; the best we can hope for is peaceful competition and occasional cooperation in matters of mutual concern. However, it also is important to recognize that U.S. policy errors exacerbate their suspicion and distrust. For instance, our...

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