THE NEW CORE PILLAR CHINA

I realize my book will make me a lot of enemies among those within the defense community hell-bent on keeping the Pentagonís strategic focus on their favorite choice for future peer competitoróChina. I know also that my familyís decision to adopt a baby girl from China in coming months will be seen by many ìrealistsî as further evidence of my being personally soft on communist China.

Truth be told, I consider myself the ultimate realist on Chinaís future. I just define my realism in terms of economics, not ideology or the fanciful notion that national power is only truly expressed through military means. I believe China is ìrising,î and that it will be our ìnear-peerî along a wide variety of diplomatic, economic, and social means not in some distant future, but over the next ten years. I believe we are woefully unprepared for this development, allowing Chinaís myopic security fixation on Taiwan to blind our vision regarding the true nature of their rising influence not just across Asia, where the vast sucking sound known as Chinaís demand for goods and raw materials is already reshaping the regional economy, but likewise across the planet, precisely because China is not just hell-bent on synchronizing its jumbled internal rule sets with that of globalizationís ever-more solid rule sets, but intends to forge more than a few global rule sets of its ownóespecially in the realm of technology standards.

Chinaís real power on the global stage will ultimately be expressed much like Americaísóthrough its consumers. Right now, only about 120 million of Chinaís 1.3 billion can be classified as middle-class, but that number is growing by leaps and bounds. Already China boasts the worldís largest cell phone market at 269 million users, and the second-largest pool of Internet users at 78 million. In an advancing global economy defined by connectivity, China can remain greatly under-connected on a per-capita basis and still zoom past Americaís totals without breaking a sweat.

This economic phenomenon will shape the emergence of global rule sets that America has long considered its special purview to steer. Let me give you two good examples from todayís Wall Street Journal (19 March):

First is the story entitled ìThe Spam-China Link.î China is wiring itself up to the web in a very aggressive fashion, creating all sorts of connectivity but not the same adherence to our preferred rule sets regarding proper behavior. The U.S. and Europe have moved sharply in recent months to clamp down on spam. So where has global spam production moved to? China, of course. In Asia, only such long-time Old Core stalwarts as Japan and Australia have matched the Westís new stringent laws on spam, so New Core economic powerhouses like China, Taiwan and South Korea haveónone too surprisinglyóemerged as the ìcenter of Internet fraud, the way Grand Cayman or the Bahamas are havens for tax fugitives,î according to one Asian expert on spam.

This is a classic example of one of my bookís major themes: in globalizationís progressive advance, we constantly run into situations where economic rule sets get ahead of political ones, and technological rule sets leap-frog security rule sets. But instead of always assuming that such rule set divergence signals the development of long-term antagonisms leading to potential downstream military competition, we need to focus on consistently working to synchronize such diverging rule sets, making sure the resulting global rule set doesnít work to isolate potential new pillars of the Core, forcing them into exclusionary stances that limit the Coreís expansion.

Why is this important? Every instance of significant rule-set divergence holds within it the seeds of downstream conflict if left unaddressed. China is growing by leaps and bounds economically, and that growth and the greater interaction with the outside world that it generates will naturally generate strong feelings of national pride across the population, but especially among those youth most involved in enabling this growth and connectivity. Right now we are witnessing a boom in nationalist expressions within Chinaís burgeoning web community, a subject covered in another excellent Wall Street Journal article in todayís issue (19 March) entitled, ìYuppies in China Protest Via the WebóAnd Get Away With It: Nationalistic Dissidents Press For Hard-Hitting Policies On Japan, Taiwan, U.S.î

The Chinese Communist Party is betting that wiring up the country is essential to unleashing the nationís future economic potential, and theyíre right. Theyíre also betting they can control the intellectual power enabled by all that connectivity, and theyíre wrong. For now, the leadership does little to crack down on the nationalistic rumblings of their growing web community, believing it reflects a general support for the CCPís authoritarian rule because it suggests that what most Chinese Yuppies want is not another form of government, but a government that pushes the nationís agenda more forcefully in the global community of states. But this is a foolís gamble, because over time this growing technocratic elite will surely turn against the communist leadership simply because the latterís emphasis on order over efficiency will prove too much for the former to swallow as Chinaís economy matures. In short, Chinese webheads will want both order and efficiency, and while authoritarian rule can provide order, it takes genuinely free markets to produce efficiency, and while that power can be unleashed by central authorities it can never truly controlled by them.

Chinaís growing economic, technological, and even social clout (see another Journal article of 16 March entitled ìNow, Itís Hip to Be Chinese: Many Asians Flaunt Roots to China as Nation Gains Cachetî) will not only progressively shape globalizationís emerging rule sets, it will certainly upset the Westís preferred expression of many rule sets. That is why the NewRuleSets.Project that I directed in partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald was so focused on Developing Asiaís economic rise (not just Chinaís clout, but Indiaís too, for example). We saw the integration of Developing Asia into the Old Coreís long-standing rule sets as fundamentally reshaping the worldís definitions of both conflict and cooperation.

When America lets the Pentagon define ìrisingî Chinaís ìthreatî as simply the danger of Beijingís military invasion of Taiwan, we commit the sin of thinking about war only within the context of war, and not within the context of everything else. We also set ourselves up for self-fulfilling prophecies, like a China that must necessarily oppose an American-led global economic and security order. Figuring out how Americaís and Chinaís preferred rule sets dovetail into the firm enunciation of a global rule set is easily the most important task we face today in securing globalizationís future.