China doesn't own the future
By Walter Russell Mead
Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007
Overall growth in Asia will balance any threat China may pose to U.S.
prominence.
The conventional wisdom is that China is rising and the United States is on its
way down. According to this view, the 21st century challenge for U.S. foreign
policy is to manage our inevitable decline as gracefully as possible as the new
superpower of the East reaches for the stars.
The conventional wisdom almost always sounds smart -- and is almost always
wrong. The U.S. doesn't need to contain China, and it doesn't need to fight
China either. Nor does it need to prepare to gracefully let China replace the
United States as the world's leading power.
The first reason is simple. The rise of China is only part of a much bigger
story -- the rise of Asia. China isn't ascending in a vacuum, destined to
dominate its region the way the U.S. dominates the Western Hemisphere -- or the
way Germany once tried to dominate Europe.
China is rising, but so is India. So are Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea
(where South and North may be united before too much longer). Japan will remain
a powerful economic, military and technological force for the foreseeable
future. Taiwan is not sinking into the sea; Hong Kong is not under the control
of China. Australia is prospering as never before. Bangladesh is beginning to
industrialize; even Myanmar, or Burma, may possibly follow the road to
prosperity through global economic integration that has made East and South Asia
growth rates the envy of the world.
Some Americans look at this picture and think that the other rising Asian powers
can help the U.S. contain China. This is a mistake not only because other Asian
countries are uninterested in hostile relations with a rich and powerful country
like China but because it looks less and less as though the U.S. will need to
contain Beijing.
The new Asia taking shape is too big, too diverse, too independent and too rich
for one country to rule. Not China, not the United States, not India.
Asia's Big Three -- China, India and Japan -- are in rough balance. Any two of
them are economically and militarily strong enough to prevent the third from
dominating the region. India and Japan could balance China. China and Japan
could balance India. And Japan's dreams of dominating the Pacific died in 1945.
With the U.S. also prepared to defend the balance of power in Asia, it seems
unlikely that China, or any other nation, will waste time and money in the
effort to overturn it.
China will continue to modernize its military and test the limits of its power.
But for it to build armed forces that could overcome the combined might of the
U.S., India and Japan is not now, and probably never will be, a feasible
project.
In terms of world power, there will be five big players -- the U.S., the
European Union and the Asian Big Three. But of these, the U.S. will continue to
play a unique role because it will be a vital part of the Asian balance of power
as well as of the European one.
In looking to Asia's future, it's important to realize that numbers aren't
everything. In 1700, China, India and France all had more people and bigger
economies than Britain -- but it was Britain that became a world power. The U.S.
today is bigger, stronger and richer than Britain ever was; our share of world
gross domestic product is three times Britain's share at its peak.
Thanks to the one-child policy, China's population may have peaked -- and the
U.S. is still rapidly growing. If demographers are correct, by 2050 there will
be about 1.4 billion Chinese (up from 1.3 billion) and about 400 million
Americans (up 100 million).
The comparison between the two countries is even more dramatic in terms of labor
forces. Today, there are about 948 million working-age people in China and about
202 million in the United States. Because of the one-child policy, China's
population will age faster than in the U.S. and, in 2050, there will be about
248 million working-age Americans -- and 860 million Chinese.
Preoccupied with their own problems and concerns, Americans often miss how
serious other countries' problems are. China's population crisis means that it
will face a greater crisis caring for an elderly population with a smaller
workforce. The country's other problems are formidable as well and will keep it
busy for decades: cleaning up its environment, developing a financial system
that can keep pace with a modernizing economy and creating an effective
healthcare system. Then there is the question of devising a system of government
strong enough to administer a country the size of China yet flexible enough to
meet local needs -- and that allows dissent and political competition, and
permits East Turkistan, Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong to gain independence from
China.
There is one other factor at work. Ever since the U.S. moved to rebuild
relations with China under President Nixon, it has been trying to persuade China
to engage with the international system -- to behave more like a "normal"
country. That policy over time has been a spectacular success. Although the
transition is not yet complete, China has come to believe that its interests are
best served by participating in regional organizations and summits and by
joining such organizations as the World Trade Organization.
China's pride at hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics is a sign of how far this
transformation has gone. Just 40 years ago, it was news when the Chinese invited
a group of Americans to play ping-pong. Now China has the ability -- and the
will -- to host the most high-profile, expensive and complex festival in the
world of international sport.
Promoting the peaceful development of Asia, ensuring that smaller countries are
not threatened by their large neighbors and helping the Asian superpowers to
find a set of economic and security relationships that can keep the region
peaceful as it passes through the greatest economic and social transformation in
world history -- those should be the goals of U.S. policy in Asia this century.
If the U.S. gets that right, and if the U.S. preserves the social dynamism at
home that is the basis of American global role, the U.S. will promote the rise
of democracy and prosperity in Asia and build a better world for the future.
Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the
author of "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World."