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The Chinese government has taken these
albeit limited steps because it
increasingly cares about what the rest
of the world thinks, and is putting
“great effort into demonstrating that it
is a responsible power.” Even when there
is less outrage from the rest of the
world, there is another reason for
China’s leaders to clean up their act:
the bottom line. They are learning that
dealing with repressive kleptocrats is a
fickle business. This is why Beijing has
“recently scaled back its support for
[Robert] Mugabe’s government, even in
the absence of strong international
pressure to do so.” Inflation in
Zimbabwe tops 8,000 percent, and
“Chinese deals with the Zimbabwean
government over power stations, railways,
and coal mining are ‘a headache.’
Multibillion-dollar projects announced
with great fanfare have foundered.
Harare has defaulted on Chinese loans.”
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Free Trade
Promotes Peace |
On North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Burma, and
Zimbabwe, the CCP is acting these days a
little bit less like an enabler and a
little bit more like the “responsible
power” it seems to want to become. Is
this a sign that we should calm our
fears about China’s growing military
might and its potential future conflicts
with its neighbours and with America?
G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Politics
and International Affairs at Princeton
University, also writing
in the January/February 2008 issue of
Foreign Affairs, sees other,
more general reasons for hope: “The rise
of China does not have to trigger a
wrenching hegemonic transition. The
U.S.-Chinese power transition can be
very different from those of the past
because China faces an international
order that is fundamentally different
from those that past rising states
confronted.”
Ikenberry identifies three features of
the Western order that make it “hard to
overturn and easy to join,” and are
therefore responsible for its success
and longevity: 1) the “coalition-based
character of its leadership,” meaning
that it is led not just by the United
States, but by a whole group of advanced
liberal democracies; 2) its historically
unusual “open and rule-based” nature;
and 3) its “market openness, creating
conditions for rising states to advance
their expanding economic and political
goals within it.” It is this last
feature that is most reassuring, and
indeed, as the author goes on to point
out, “China has already discovered the
massive economic returns that are
possible by operating within this open-market
system.”
Ikenberry elaborates:
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The incentives these features
create for China to integrate
into the liberal international
order are reinforced by the
changed nature of the
international economic
environment—especially the new
interdependence driven by
technology. The most farsighted
Chinese leaders understand that
globalization has changed the
game and that China accordingly
needs strong, prosperous
partners around the world. From
the United States’ perspective,
a healthy Chinese economy is
vital to the United States and
the rest of the world.
Technology and the global
economic revolution have created
a logic of economic relations
that is different from the past—making
the political and institutional
logic of the current order all
the more powerful. |
The persuasive force of Mutually Assured
Destruction also reassures Ikenberry
(“In the age of nuclear deterrence,
great-power war is, thankfully, no
longer a mechanism of historical
change.”), and he may be right about
that, but the real strength of his
argument rests upon the
interconnectedness brought about by
globalization. The Chinese have tasted
the fruits of global capitalism, and
they simply have too much to lose to
want to overturn the liberal world order—yet
another proof, if we needed one, that
free trade promotes peace.
Ikenberry does caution that America
should do everything in its power to
bolster the various multilateral
institutions that make up the current
world order instead of flouting them, as
it has lately been wont to do. I’m not
sure how convinced I am that all of
these kinds of institutions deserve such
support—some of them just seem like
world government wannabes—but sure, it
would be great if the WTO, for instance,
could conclude the (once again stalled)
Doha Round of trade talks.
The current American financial crisis,
spawned by loose money and short-sighted
(are there any other kind?) regulations,
is yet another sign that we in the West
seem to be, in fits and starts,
abandoning the system that facilitated
our tremendous wealth increases. Paul
Tustain, director of BullionVault,
wrote on October 9, 2008, “Did you
notice? While the United States, Britain,
the Netherlands and Australia were
banning short selling on their local
stock markets, the Chinese were relaxing
restrictions on it. This is enormously
telling. Asians—suppressed by the
command economy for decades—aspire to a
world of free enterprise. Unlike us they
are now prepared to accept the costly
consequences of those repeated errors
which the free enterprise system allows
people to make.”
War is always a possibility, but if we
have anything to fear, it is not so much
that the Chinese will violently
overthrow the liberal world order,
pushing us into the gutter; it is that
we will jump into the gutter of our own
accord while they peacefully outcompete
us, trouncing us at what we used to like
to consider our own game. Writes Tustain,
“When we finally wake up under the yoke
of our new, improved and over-sized
government regulators, we will have lost
the privilege of benefiting from free
and highly profitable financial centers.
It’s the turn of Hong Kong, Mumbai,
Shanghai, and Singapore.”
So maybe it is the end of the world as
we know it, but we’ll have only
ourselves to blame if it is. It doesn’t
have to end up that way, of course. If
we embraced capitalism with half as much
enthusiasm as the Chinese are beginning
to do, the whole world could continue
growing wealthier and more peaceful. It
is something to ponder what humanity
will be able to accomplish when a
billion Chinese are all freed from the
existential worries of food and shelter.
But we will have to rediscover some of
the truths we are busily forgetting if
we are fully to partake in this
promising future. Judging from our
intemperate responses to the current
financial crisis, things will probably
have to get worse over here before they
get better.
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