Conrad Black: Much ado about China
Posted: August 22, 2009, 9:30 AM by NP Editor
Conrad Black, Full Comment
Overblown announcements heralding the supposed coming of the Age of China have become a staple of journalistic futurism in recent years. When Maclean's magazine banners across the top of its cover "When China Rules the World," as it did last month -- and it is not a Monty Python send-up of swarms of incomprehensible people in Mao suits -- I know it is time to raise a peep of dissent.
Does any of this sound familiar? It was not even 20 years ago that the same was being said about Japan, when U. S. president George H. W. Bush went to Tokyo and was patronized by the Japanese prime minister for being at the head of a declining power. At an official dinner, the president vomited and returned to his embassy in an ambulance (but explained privately that his indigestion was the consequence of eating plain fish while facing Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca for two hours).
And it was only 15 years before -- during the Carter doldrums, following the Kennedy assassinations and the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate -- that the world was abuzz with predictions that the U. S. S. R. would surpass the United States.
In fact, the most serious threat came from the Nazis. The official borders of Germany at the end of 1940, including Austria, Bohemia (the Czechs), Moravia, most of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Benelux and the Atlantic coast of France, gave the Reich 130 million people, the same population as the United States, and almost equivalent industrial potential. This was why Roosevelt ran for a third term, determined to help keep Britain (and Canada) in the war, and to assist all who resisted the Nazification of Europe. The Nazi threat was so serious that it required the entire combat strength of the British Commonwealth, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to defeat it.
In the Cold War that followed, the Soviet challenge simply imploded, crumbled, after 40 years of containment by a U. S.-led alliance, in which no fire was exchanged between the major powers. As for Japan, it simply ran out of steam, lost a whole decade in financial stagnation while its stock market declined by 90% -- even though it continued, to this day, to be a brilliant manufacturer and marketer of automobiles and many sophisticated products from cameras to television equipment.
None of this means that China won't continue to rise, or that the U. S. won't again have to prove its staying power as a world force. But matter-of-fact assertions, complete with timetables, of an imminent Chinese assumption of world leadership, are rubbish.
The takeaway message on the failure of the brief era of U. S. unipolarity that followed the demise of the U. S. S. R. is not that the U. S. is finished as the world's leading country, but that multipolarity, not the hegemony of a sole superpower, will replace the bipolarized Cold War. There are about 40 reasonably important countries in the world (of a total of 192), and the major powers will compete to build relations within that group.
The theory of the inevitable rise of China is similar to the recent theory of the inevitable end of the U. S. as a mainly Caucasian country: It is based on the extrapolation of current statistics that will not continue, and that in the case of the Chinese economy, are a fiction anyway.
China has a centrally directed economy, and calculates growth rates as a function of production, not spending; and production is deemed to occur when it is commissioned by the state. Thus, all Chinese predictions of economic growth are self-fulfilling: The central economic leadership orders production of toasters or submarines and announces construction of roads and sports stadiums, and the anticipated costs are added to the GDP at once. (In western countries, by contrast, GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending and exports.)
The government monitors the progress of state construction and inventory levels, but doesn't release these numbers. It regularly claims 15% annual retail sales increases, but that reflects shipments to retail outlets, not sales, and even less, sales revenue. Such a system preserves some aspects of the catastrophic Soviet-style command economy. There are reports of consumer goods being virtually given away at point of sale, i. e., at below their cost of production.
All outsiders can do to judge the progress of demand is to see what the central bank does with credit and the money supply. The country has had a 21% decline in exports this year, so to achieve its 8% economic growth for 2009, there will have to be a 15% to 17% increase in domestic economic activity. There has been a strenuous effort to increase domestic demand, and the much-ballyhooed US$586-billion Chinese stimulus plan was really an excuse for the relaxation of credit and the redesignation of categories of already approved expenses.
The money-supply increase for this year is a very audacious 34.5%, to stimulate domestic demand. The two Shanghai stock exchanges almost doubled (before a recent 20% downturn) and major city residential prices are up around 13% so far this year. So bubbles are clearly developing. The country's claimed savings rate of 50% is not real, because it includes provision for all health care, retirement benefits and other social spending that is provided by the state in most western countries.
China claims to be expanding health care and other social services, but has not allocated realistic amounts to accomplish this. The country also has no credible legal system, and is rife with corruption (as evidenced by the shoddily built schools -- used as shelters during the recent earthquakes -- which were built on the cheap with no structural steel, and then collapsed, killing thousands of people). It has one billion peasants who largely live as they did 3,000 years ago. Almost every great urban development attracts swarms of expropriated people throwing rocks at bulldozer drivers, and the Chinese navy regularly steals the catches of commercial fishermen. The one-child-per-couple policy is creating an ageing and male-unbalanced population. It is a rough country, oscillating between near chaos and Tiananmen-like exertions of authority.
The rise of China is impressive and an objectively good thing, and the United states is labouring. But the U. S. has a functioning, if conspicuously imperfect, political and legal system, formidable resources, an incomparably productive work force, nearly four times China's GDP, and a popular culture that dominates the world. It must put its house in order, which will be painful, but a trifle compared to the challenges facing China. The United States has seen off greater challenges than this.
National Post
