Above photo: Middle class family in China. China Briefing.
The Chinese Dreamers vs. the U.S. Hegemon.
Do China and the US have fundamental goals that constitute a contradiction, that is, goals so profoundly at odds with one another that the goals cannot coexist? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
Such a contradiction means that one side must abandon its aims if a disastrous conflict is not to ensue. Which country should step back? Is there a moral, ethical or common-sense basis for making that call, a basis on which humankind can readily agree?
What are these contradictory goals?
China’ overwhelming objective is clearly economic development, a policy to which it has hewed closely and which it declares for its future. That is no surprise; it is the dream of every developing nation. It is “The Chinese Dream.”
If such goals were no more than words on paper, there would be no problem. But China is succeeding as is widely acknowledged now. Its economy surpassed the U.S. in terms of GDP (PPP) in November of 2014 according to the IMF and is growing faster. Over 700 million have been brought out of poverty, with extreme poverty eliminated in 2020. The middle class now comprises over 400 million people. The retail market is enormous and the ecommerce market by far the world’s largest. China is the world’s largest manufacturer and trader.
According to the World Bank, China is 7th from the top of the Upper-middle-income group as of 2020 and poised to enter the ranks of the 59 countries in the High-income group. China has a set a new goal, a standard of living enjoyed by the most prosperous countries in the West, to be achieved by 2049 the centennial of the birth of the Peoples Republic of China.
With this in mind let’s turn to the American side of the equation. The U.S. has a long history of expansion and imperialism with the inevitable appeals to Exceptionalism and racism. However, the ambition of world dominance, global hegemony, emerged consciously among the US foreign policy elite in 1941 before entry into WWII as Stephen Wertheim documents in Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Henry Luce expressed the idea in his 1941 essay, “The American Century” in which he enjoined the U.S. “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
After World War II when the U.S. colossus looked down at the rest the world prostate after the war, we heard a similar sentiment from George Kennan considered as perhaps the principal architect of postwar U.S. foreign policy:
“Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. … Our real task in the coming period is to … maintain this position of disparity …. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality. …. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
George F. Kennan
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume I, pp. 509-529
(This statement of Kennan’s is discussed in detail here.)
More recently and equally starkly at the end of the Cold War, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was enunciated by Paul Wolfowitz Under Secretary of Defense for Public Policy.
It can be summed up in a single sentence:
“We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-1999 fiscal years, dated February 18, 1992, from the office of Paul Wolfowitz.
China fits the definition of a “potential competitor”; it not only “aspires” to a larger regional role and global role but has already attained it! By the Wolfowitz principle, China must not only be “contained” but returned to a non-competitor status by whatever “mechanism” that the US can devise.
And so we come to the basic contradiction. The U.S. insists that it be the world’s greatest power, an unassailable hegemon. This means that it must be the number one economic power since all power ultimately derives from economic power.
Now assume that China’s per capita GDP is equal to that of an advanced Western country, the goal of China by 1949. Take the US as an example. Since China’s population is about four times that of the US, then it will have a total national GDP four times that of the US! The US will then be far from the dominant power; the Wolfowitz Doctrine will go up in smoke.
This does not mean that the U.S. will lapse into penury or even that its living standard will be compromised. Indeed, there is no reason that the U.S. cannot continue to be an increasingly prosperous country. In that sense the contradiction between the US and China is not a conflict of interests between the American people and Chinese people. But it is a contradiction between the U.S. governing Elite and 1.4 billion Chinese dreamers.
Even now with China on a par with the U.S. economically in GDP (PPP) terms the U.S. cannot operate as a hegemon or as an unchallenged world power.
How can the U.S. maintain its ambition of hegemony? Simply put, China’s development must be halted or reversed. Thus, the drive for U.S. superiority is a war on the aspirations of the vast Chinese population, not simply a war on the Chinese state. Will China’s people, nearly 20% of the global population, passively accept this fate?
How then are we to look at the China-US contradiction in moral or ethical terms? Given the U.S. goal of hegemony versus the Chinese dream of a Western standard of living, which has the greater claim on the support of decent humans everywhere? The 1.4 billion Chinese dreamers or a tiny U.S. governing Elite?
John V. Walsh has written about issues of peace and health care for Asia Times, EastBayTimes/Mercury News, Consortium News, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com and others. He can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com