WPR's New Rules: Worried by China's Rise? Watch Out for its Decline

Much of what drives America’s current phobias regarding China stems from the dual -- and fantastically linear -- assumptions of America’s terminal decline and China’s perpetual ascension. We are thus led to believe that China no longer needs the United States and that America, in turn, can do nothing -- short of increasing military pressure -- to constrain the Middle Kingdom’s rise to global hegemony. On all scores, nothing could be further from the truth. China and the United States suffer a level of strategic interdependency that is vast and shows no signs of reduction. Simply put, America cannot stay rich without China, and China cannot get rich without America.

Read the entire post at World Politics Review.

Comments

[Maduka]

I think there is a lot more the US can do apart from worrying about the decline of China. The US and China are joined at the hip, so isn't this time to start considering "other Chinas"?

India is the most obvious candidate, but the Indians are almost as "Gaullist" as the French (i.e. they don't like to be told what to do and they march to their own tune), Vietnam, Turkey and Bangladesh are too small, South America is never going to be sweatshop central, the Middle East still has oil and Europe is out of the game.

The greatest unknown is Africa, and in twenty years time we'll fully understand whether the renewed Chinese push that started in the late nineties was prescient or foolhardy. Either way, China is preparing (in its own small way) for a future less dependent on the rapidly aging Europeans and on its aging demographics.

Think about it, SS Africa is on track to be a $1 trillion market. Think about African demographics - Nigeria has a population of at least 150 million, Kenya 40 million, Ethiopia 80 million. (In parts of Southern Nigeria, female literacy is more than 80%, similar statistics apply to Kenya). You'd be talking about a cumulative population of at least 500 million in these three countries alone by 2030. Guess where the Chinese are siting their special economic zones and their future factories?

Meanwhile, the US continues its usual trajectory of concentrating on one big bad enemy at a time. For much of the twentieth century it was the Soviet Union, and everything it did from supporting Mobutu, to the Marshall plan, to building up East Asian economies was in support of this one objective. When the Soviet Union collapsed, US foreign policy lacked direction until Al Qaeda came on the scene. Now the Iraq is done with and Afghanistan is about ending, we are back to China.

But old habits still persist. Africa policy is still reduced to counter-terrorism (AFRICOM), humanitarian (USAID) or energy security (AFRICOM again). Nobody seems to realise that the Chinese are changing Africa in very fundamental ways. Infrastructure, Industrialisation and Tertiary education are extremely important and if the US doesn't play there it will lose an entire generation of Africans. (They just finished building a refinery in Chad to export gas to Nigeria and they are building dams, power stations and roads like mad).

And there is South America, right next to you, that you ignore at great cost.

[sallya]

China's development is not a obstacle to others .America always want to start a war with other countries,but China never.