"So China, which had been forecast to overtake America in 2019 by the IMF, will be crowned the world's pre-eminent country by the end of this year according to The Economist’s calculations. The American Century ends, and the Pacific Century begins."
You can expect the Economist to tilt this way, but it feels a little over-eager and glib to me (even considering the source). Yes, by one important economic metric, China wins. So therefore, China is "crowned the world's pre-eminent country". (Who makes these crowns, anyway? Wait, let me guess -- they're made in China, but awarded by a London-based committee.)
We've done this one before. Hitchens (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-06-17/entertainment/...) used to call it "Our Greece to their Rome" -- the wise British counselors would advise the Americans how to run their Empire. It's like the committee decided to trade in for someone else to advise.
And "the Pacific Century begins". What does this even mean? Is it just to goad page views and comments? "Crowning the Dragon"? Really? Why so eager to reach for that metaphor? Do we have to search around for something to put a crown on?
So there are a lot of interesting things that come with being the largest economy on the planet. Not the least of which is pricing power over the other economies. There is also the ability to project force. In a number of analyses of WWII what "won" it for the allies was the US economy, and the ability for that economy to out produce war material than the axis powers combined.
Not that we would, but should the US and China engage in endless WW2 style battles of attrition, the larger economy wins that engagement. Because at the end of the day the ability to replace assets trumps any initial tactical advantage.
A number of well respected economists have debated the 'reality' of the Chinese economy and the UN has tried to get a qualitative measure that avoids over reliance on government supplied numbers.
There is always the possibility that China will stumble again, unable to balance its form of governance against its population's outrage, but if it does not, well its going to be able to push around more people without being overly concerned about the US being able to pressure others to resist. The way that works is as follows.
Country A taunts country B, country C tells country D to push back on them or their relationship with C will be in jeopardy, maybe C tells D, E, F, and G to make a fuss. They comply because they are economically dependent on C. Country A backs down. B is grateful. But if country C taunts country B, and Country A doesn't have the influence to get anyone else to push back on that taunting. Country C gets its way. How those scenarios play out is very dependent on the relative sizes of Country A's economy and Country C's economy. Politicians are particularly afraid of biting the hand that trades with them.
> Not that we would, but should the US and China engage in endless WW2 style battles of attrition, the larger economy wins that engagement. Because at the end of the day the ability to replace assets trumps any initial tactical advantage.
I don't think it is quite this simple. You could argue that the country that can sustain the higher defense budget will win [1], which is actually the United States. Reason being that China's population is 4x that of the United States, so significant parts of GDP need to just go to keeping everyone alive.
[1] In the past; these days the US' technology superiority over China is so large that short-term budget changes still couldn't give China the edge.
In response to your footnote, this was an interesting quote I read about Germany in WW2 :
"Historians have generally thought of the Type XXI—along with other systems like the Me 262, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Tiger tank—as an example of Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons. Since 1945 many have fixated on the revolutionary
military technologies that the Third Reich developed in the last two years of the war. The cultural impetus behind the concept, as implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by historians in the uneven and largely enthusiastic literature on the subject, was an irrational faith in technology to prevail in operationally or strategically complex and desperate situations. a conviction amounting to a disease, to which many in the Third Reich were prone in the latter years of the Second World War. To the extent that it shaped decision making, faith in the Wunderwaffen
was a special, superficial kind of technological determinism, a confidence in the power of technology to prevail over the country’s strategic, operational, and doctrinal shortcomings"
When I read it, it reasonated with a lot of the narrative I hear in policy circles about China as a military power. The reasoning goes like this; The US as an insurmountable technological edge over China, todays wars are technology heavy, therefore the US has an insurmountable military edge over China.
Personally, I expect that reasoning to prevail until the Chinese are sending people to the Moon and getting them back alive. Such a situation will deny that China is just "re-using old soviet gear" and "they can't mount a complex technological development program" in one stroke (both arguments I hear from the 'paper tiger' camp). Interesting times.
I agree if you mean that US military technology is better than China's.
For technology in general, is that true? I don't know, but if you look at good journal articles on computer science topics, it seems like the US is loosing mojo, and big time.
For general tech, the rest of the world combined invests so much more than we do now. This is the cost of our military spending. On the other hand, if we didn't have the world's strongest military (we spend about 50% of all money spent on military in the world), then the US dollar would probably not be the reserve currency and our economy would greatly suffer. Complicated...
edit: the reason why we are losing mojo, my reasoning: in the 1970s the vast majority of ACM journal articles were from US citizens, AFAIR. Not the case today.
edit 2: re: US military preserving reserve status of US dollar: I got this from a recent interview with Katherine Austin Fitts (she was in the H. Bush administration) who I personally respect.
I actually don't think it's quite that simple either. In total war, that might be right, but I think any opposing non-democratic power only needs to maintain a force/budget large enough to cause enough damage that will lead to war fatigue within the democratic power. Our war tech may be far superior, but I highly doubt it's superior enough for a snap victory as seen against Iraq. China has demonstrated real anti-satellite capability, as well as significant theoretical anti-ship capability (DF-21), both of which would eliminate a large portion of the US's edge (which has not demonstrated how much of an edge it has without those technologies).
Even after the trudging warfare is done with, supposing the US did win decisively (which I'm a bit skeptical of), post-war financial and political costs would be quite significant as well.
- Much of the military might that Beijing buys every year gets directed inward and never projects externally.
- Even after decades of expensive rearmament, China is a paper dragon.
- The same demographic wave that has gifted China with an abundance of labor will soon also transform the country into the world’s biggest retirement home.
You are being reasonable and measured, which I appreciate. But I have to forcefully object.
I don't think these observations, which are obvious, and which have obvious rejoinders given nearby, move the conversation forward. Repeating them whenever some metric or other (and the metric in the article is cooked, by using purchasing power) exhibits a US/China crossover is just not interesting. Doing so in this bizarre horse-race style ("who is winning") is ridiculous and deserves to be condemned as intellectually vacuous.
What would it look like to actually move the conversation forward? Good question.
Maybe the actual cause for celebration should be lifting millions of Chinese out of poverty. (Exclusive of considerations relating to the US!). Or maybe the interesting phenomenon would be when Chinese start using their new purchasing power to get political influence over decisions affecting their lives.
Viewing this as some kind of horse race forces a mostly inherently-Chinese phenomenon (that we should all observe with interest and pleasure) into a perverse "I mostly care about this because it knocks me off my #1 rank." Which I feel is missing the point in a deep way.
That is certainly one way of looking at the situation, but it misses the point.
I claim that the Chinese politburo cares as much about "lifting millions of Chinese out of poverty" as the US Government cares about "reforming the campaign contribution process." What those two, apparently disjoint topics, have in common is that both are a threat to power of the people currently in power in the respective governments.
The whole 'crowning' or 'we're number 1' sort of stuff that you were asserting was so mystical and unnecessary is in fact, in the world policy arena, the only point. This point cannot possibly more clearly illustrated than the shenanigans going on in Ukraine at this very instant. Russia of five years ago would never have made as provocative move as they did had they not believed the US and its allies incapable of responding. Russia, in the form of Vladimir Putin, feels very much like someone who can get away with annexing a neighboring country for the same reasons that Hitler was ok with annexing his neighboring countries. The belief that the will to act would not overcome the potential cost of acting.
An emergent China will annex Taiwan and it will not be so that they can lift up the Taiwanese citizens, it will because they can, citizens be damned. They will also annex large regions of the border with India, same reasoning. They will do this, and potentially succeed in doing so, by virtue of their place as the pre-eminent economy on the planet. Defy them and they don't have to fire a shot to take out your economy, they just have to cut trade with your economy and blammo, recession if not depression time.
In grade school, the class doesn't get together and elect the class bully. The class bully takes that position by beating up or intimidating everyone else. Basically being the baddest actor in the set of possible actors. What the Economist alludes to with their pithy "Pacific Century" is that the China, as the largest economy, gets to be the boss. Not because they were elected, but because they can punish folks who don't toe the line, just as the US has repeatedly done to people over the last 50 years. I could give you lots of examples real or hypothesized, but the key is the weaker economy risks more in a showdown than the stronger one does, and that has been the basis for world governance and policy since 1948.
The one line summary of the Economist article is "When China's economy exceeds that of the US, China will be calling the policy shots on the world stage, not the US." It is that ability to shape world policy that will make them the new 'boss' not some imagined contest between horses.
My guess is that you should care in a deep way because China has a different opinion on what constitutes 'human rights' than the current world order does.
It's not just the US that is enforcing norms like the ones you mention. It will also be the rest of the world, and, we can hope, the citizens of China.
If we can officially crown a new era, it's the era of pat catchphrases and clickbait. "The Pacific Century" has a nice ring to it; it's memorable; it's a strong catchphrase. So it makes the cut, no matters its inanity. Even serious journalism, academic research, and industry white papers are coming under intense pressure to adopt the methods of punditry.
I'd say this is less about pageviews and comments, and more about acute awareness of hashtags. "The Pacific Century," "Crowning the Dragon," and other such phrases are conscious attempts to create hashtag-ready hooks for the article.
The Economist blog content tends to be pretty lightweight and casual, a little daily snack in between the weekly full-course meal of the print edition (whether or not you read it on paper).
I'm a bit torn. On the one hand, the fact that China was the world's biggest economy until 1890 wasn't very significant in terms of its influence on world history. I don't mean this in a Eurocentric way, but in terms of the fact that China stayed largely within its own borders and wasn't in intense technological competition with the West; the size of the economy was largely a function of its huge population, which remains somewhat true today.
On the other hand* population can't be the whole story, or India would have a similarly-sized economy. Chinese GDP per capita may lag behind the west, but there is no question that the country has profited hugely from becoming the modern 'workshop of the world.' These profits must be set against the negative externalities of chronic pollution and a increased internal political pressures, but it's impossible to ignore China's enormous strategic advantage in this area.
How they will leverage this is another question, as the country is facing an intense demographic squeeze that will leave it with a disproportionate number of elderly people within the next couple of decades, but without a strong social safety net or high levels of education. Obviously China's leaders have no intention of allowing the country to enter a Japanese-style economic stagnation, but how they will address that challenge is anyone's guess.
* Harry Truman once demanded that he be sent a one-armed economist who would supply him with one opinion instead of two.
In its defense, the Economist has been known for its handsome catchphrases since before the modern clickbait era began. Take their covers for example. I don't think they're bowing to pressure -- just doing what they do.
That's fair. I've been reading The Economist for quite awhile, and to your point, it's never short on clever catchphrases and headlines. I do, however, think the use of catchphrases within a text (as opposed to the headline) has been growing over the years. Especially in recent years. Not just in The Economist, but in general. To wit: the headline "Crowning the Dragon" feels very typically Economist; the catchphrase "The Pacific Century" feels more like a conscious attempt to coin a meme.
This depends very much on who you're doing business with and how much you like them. You might not prefer that the slightly shady guy you're forced to do business with on occasion become a big-name mobster with a protection racket.
China also has nearly 3 times the USA's population, as well as significantly less land. They may be making more money, but they also have more people they have to divide it between. They're far less wealthy in that sense.
Maybe GP was referring to Christopher Hitchens' article "Our Greece to Their Rome", which appeared as chapter 1 in his book Blood, Class, and Nostalgia?
Even if not, I have to recommend the book. Like all early Hitchens, this is an occasionally dazzling and very entertaining book, written by someone with the same pedigree as the wits at the Economist, but with a lot more originality, and more interesting ideological commitments.
You can expect the Economist to tilt this way, but it feels a little over-eager and glib to me (even considering the source). Yes, by one important economic metric, China wins. So therefore, China is "crowned the world's pre-eminent country". (Who makes these crowns, anyway? Wait, let me guess -- they're made in China, but awarded by a London-based committee.)
We've done this one before. Hitchens (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-06-17/entertainment/...) used to call it "Our Greece to their Rome" -- the wise British counselors would advise the Americans how to run their Empire. It's like the committee decided to trade in for someone else to advise.
And "the Pacific Century begins". What does this even mean? Is it just to goad page views and comments? "Crowning the Dragon"? Really? Why so eager to reach for that metaphor? Do we have to search around for something to put a crown on?