REFERENCES:

(6) ìNewest Export Out of China: Inflation Fears,î by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 16 April, p. A1.

(7) ìMeeker Opines on China: Former ëQueen of the Netí Sees Much Possibility for Internet Stocks,î by Geoffrey Fowler and Suzanne Craig, Wall Street Journal, 16 April, p. C16.

The Pentagonís preferred definition of future war is China invading Taiwan somewhere around 2025. That is the ìChinese threatî they understand. I have more problems with this myopic strategic vision than I can count, although my book goes out of its way to list as many of them as possible.

But my biggest gripe with that sort of ìabsurdly isolated point scenarioî approach (a subject I describe in the book) to thinking about how China might destabilize globalization over coming years is that it so dramatically ignores the range of far more likely destabilizing scenarios that can unfold between now and 2025óall of which would invariably segue into some security component of logical interest to the Pentagon. These two articles speak to the sort of triggers we should really be paying attention to, not just inside the Pentagon but throughout the entire U.S. Government.

On the issue of inflation, you might ask: just how influential is Chinaís economy anyway? No, China is not the dominating force within the global economy that some fear-meisters would have you believe. Itíll be decades before they really fight at a weight similar to the U.S. economy. But because China is a global manufacturing superpower on the low-cost end of the spectrum, they do wield an unusually influential sort of connectivity: their prices tend to set the low-cost prices for the planet.

So hereís the connectivity made real: rising energy prices means China has to raise the prices on its low-end exports, which in turn raise the price of low-end goods around the world. You want all those cheap goods at Walmart? Guess what! You can trace that price all the way back to stability and/or instability in the Middle East, and that connectivity runs through China, which is rapidly becoming, thanks to its increased marketization of its economy, a more rapid transmitter of ìboth pain and delightî (track that Star Trek reference, I dare you!) throughout the global economy.

As for the Internet boom currently raging in China, all that tells us is that China follows in our historical wake far faster than we might easily imagine, assuming it is simply a land of impoverished laborers. Remember, our Internet boom/bust in the stock markets was less than five years ago. So the current Internet stock craze in China is yet another good example of what-goes-around-comes-around in the global economy.