China
is on the cover of Newsweek. The big fat question is posed: "Does the future belong to China?" Fareed Zakaria’s essay is very much worth reading, despite some problematic points. Of course he talks about China’s size, it’s phenomenal economic growth, including its internal politics and stability. But it is paragraphs like this that make you ruminate:
There have been two great shifts in global power over the past 400 years. The first was the rise of Europe, which around the 17th century became the richest, most enterprising and ambitious part of the world. The second was the rise of the United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it became the single most powerful country in the world, the globe’s decisive player in economics and politics.For centuries, the rest of the world was a stage for the ambitions and interests of the West’s great powers. China’s rise, along with that of India and the continuing weight of Japan, represents the third great shift in global power—the rise of Asia.
Of course, to simply say
the rise of Asia" doesn’t tell us everything. It doesn’t tell us that Japan will have something to say about China’s rise, and we are allied with them and are encouraging them to rearm. It doesn’t tell us that India is now an ally, and much freer than it has ever been. India is a natural geopolitical opponent of China, as are Korea and Vietnam; and one could hope that both Indonesia and the Phillipines will become stronger actors.
And, do not fail to note that President Bush was called a guest of "special importance" by
Russia’s Putin.
Russia will continue to show interest in China’s power-surge. I also note in passing our especially good relations with Mongolia.
If you read nothing about China for the next year. Read this article.
An insanely accurate and well-written article for the average fear-mongering, shock-value journalism that usually covers "The Big Red Scare." ;-)
Read. It. All.
Zakaria’s article is amateurish beyond words, completely uninformative. Is the writer as stupid as he appears? Probably. And that is the problem with the modern media. It is incapable of attracting perceptive and intelligent writers.
Nuclear proliferation is alive and well, no little thanks to China. China is cleverly playing its muslim card while steadily developing its military using dual use technologies, which show up in the budget as something other than defense spending.
China’s growth has been sufficient to cover its underlying fiscal corruption, but that will not be true indefinitely. As long as China is floating in cash from foreign trade, its leaders, who are still communist by the way, will use a bit of restraint. But they are biding their time, waiting for the right moment to expose the dragon’s fangs and dragon fire.
In the last 50 years, the MSM has nominated first Germany, then Japan and now China (or Asia) to become the next superpower. My, how they hate the success of the U.S. of A.
It sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the article’s author. Asian century? Not likely. Europe and the anglosphere are struggling with the pension problem, ineffectually, but still trying. China and India are pretending that such problems don’t exist. That is going to bite them in the posterior in a serious way.