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General News    H3'ed 6/20/13

Pepe Escobar, The Tao of Containing China

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, the predictions are in.  By 2016 (or 2030?), China will have economically outpaced the U.S.  So say the economic soothsayers.  And behind them lie all those, in the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington, who secretly fear that, if nothing is done to contain it, China will within decades be dominant in the Pacific, the overlord of Asia, and perhaps later in the century the -- to steal a phrase -- "sole superpower" of planet Earth.

The first signs of things to come, it's believed, are already there, including the way China has been building up its military and has started nudging its neighbors about a set of largely uninhabited islands in energy-rich areas of the Pacific, not to speak of recent more informal claims to a large, heavily inhabited, very militarized island in the region -- Okinawa.  Like the previous global superpower, China, it is believed, has designs on turning the Pacific into its own "lake" and possibly even setting up military and other bases ("a string of pearls") through the Indian Ocean all the way to Africa.

It's a great story, but hold your horses!  As that peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar indicates in today's vivid plunge into China's roiled waters, that country faces potentially staggering problems.  After all, contradictions -- to use a classic Marxist word -- abound: a Communist Party leading a capitalist revolution with its own stability as a ruling elite dependent, above all, upon ever greater economic growth.  And yet this isn't the nineteenth century.  China is on an imperiled planet.  Every economic move it makes has potentially long-term negative consequences.  For all we know, there may be no twenty-second-century superpower on planet Earth and if there is, don't necessarily count on China.

As Escobar explains, to spur the staggering levels of growth that keep the country and the Party afloat, the Chinese leadership is embarking on a kind of forced urbanization program that may have no historical precedent.  It is guaranteed to destabilize the countryside, while yet more peasants flood into the cities.  It's seldom acknowledged here (though the Chinese leadership is well aware of it) but China has a unique, almost two-thousand-year-long record of massive peasant uprisings (often religiously tinged) sweeping out of the countryside and upsetting established rule.  The last of them was Mao Zedong's peasant revolution that established the present People's Republic.

Mass protest in China has been on the rise.  Environmental conditions are disastrous.  Let the Chinese economy falter and who knows what you'll see.  This is not a formula for an expansive imperial power, no less the next master of planet Earth, whatever Washington's fears and militarized fantasies may be. Tom

The Chimerica Dream
Two Nations, Two Dreams, One Pacific
By Pepe Escobar

Sun Tzu, the ancient author of The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Obama and President Xi Jinping. "Know your enemy" was, it seems, the theme of the meeting. Beijing was very much aware of -- and had furiously protested -- Washington's deep plunge into China's computer networks over the past 15 years via a secretive NSA unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (with the apt acronym TAO). Yet Xi merrily allowed Obama to pontificate on hacking and cyber-theft as if China were alone on such a stage.

Enter -- with perfect timing -- Edward Snowden, the spy who came in from Hawaii and who has been holed up in Hong Kong since May 20th. And cut to the wickedly straight-faced, no-commentary-needed take on Obama's hacker army by Xinhua, the Chinese Communist Party's official press service. With America's dark-side-of-the-moon surveillance programs like Prism suddenly in the global spotlight, the Chinese, long blistered by Washington's charges about hacking American corporate and military websites, were polite enough. They didn't even bother to mention that Prism was just another node in the Pentagon's Joint Vision 2020 dream of "full spectrum dominance."

By revealing the existence of Prism (and other related surveillance programs), Snowden handed Beijing a roast duck banquet of a motive for sticking with cyber-surveillance. Especially after Snowden, a few days later, doubled down by unveiling what Xi, of course, already knew -- that the National Security Agency had for years been relentlessly hacking both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese computer networks.

But the ultimate shark fin's soup on China's recent banquet card was an editorial in the Communist Party-controlled Global Times.  "Snowden," it acknowledged, "is a "card' that China never expected," adding that "China is neither adept at nor used to playing it." Its recommendation: use the recent leaks "as evidence to negotiate with the U.S." It also offered a warning that "public opinion will turn against China's central government and the Hong Kong SAR [Special Administrative Region] government if they choose to send [Snowden] back."

With a set of cyber-campaigns -- from cyber-enabled economic theft and espionage to the possibility of future state-sanctioned cyber-attacks -- evolving in the shadows, it's hard to spin the sunny "new type of great power relationship" President Xi suggested for the U.S. and China at the recent summit.

It's the (State) Economy, Stupid

The unfolding Snowden cyber-saga effectively drowned out the Obama administration's interest in learning more about Xi's immensely ambitious plans for reconfiguring the Chinese economy -- and how to capture a piece of that future economic pie for American business. Essential to those plans is an astonishing investment of $6.4 trillion by China's leadership in a drive to "urbanize" the economy yet further by 2020.

That will be the dragon's share of a reconfigured development model emphasizing heightened productivity, moving the country up the international manufacturing quality ladder and digital pecking order, and encouraging ever more domestic consumption by an ever-expanding middle class. This will be joined to a massive ongoing investment in scientific and technological research.  China has adopted the U.S. model of public-private sector academic integration with the aim of producing dual-use technologies and so boosting not only the military but also the civilian economy.

Beijing may, in the end, spend up to 30% of its budget on defense-related research and development. This has certainly been a key vector in the country's recent breakneck expansion of information technology, microelectronics, telecommunications, nuclear energy, biotechnology, and the aerospace industry. Crucially, none of this has happened thanks to the good graces of the Goddess of the Market.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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