Some details on the economic boom from the NY Times magazine.

The Chinese Century

July 4, 2004 By TED C. FISHMAN

China used to be far away, the country at the bottom of the world. Certainly that must be how it seemed just 20 years ago in a place like Pekin, Ill., a city of 34,000 residents on the Illinois River that took its name from the Chinesecapital in the 1820's. According to local legend, Pekin is directly opposite Beijing on the globe. The high-school teams there were still called the Chinks until 1981, when they were renamed the Dragons. A smart and forward-looking decision, it turns out: as is happening throughout the United States, the Pekinese have in their own local ways grown inextricably linked to the Chinese of today. They are now connected not by an imaginary hole through the earth but by the world's shipping lanes, financial markets, telecommunications networks and, above all, the globalization of appetites.

Follow the corn, for example. Trade deals struck between the U.S. and China in April will, farmers around Pekin hope, lead China to lower its import barriers and buy half a million metric tons of American corn this year. Illinois corn farmers get higher-than-usual prices for their exports because they have ready access to river transportation and in turn to big ports. Pekin is also home to the plant of Aventine Renewable Energy, the nation's second-largest producer of ethanol, a fuel derived from corn. (Ten percent of the American corn crop is converted to fuel.) China recently passed Japan as the world's second-largest consumer of petroleum, and growing Chinese demand has lately been pushing up oil prices worldwide. That makes ethanol an increasingly attractive alternative. And, indeed, ethanol prices climbed 40 cents a gallon this spring, dragging up U.S. corn prices as a result, a boon to Pekin's farmers and industry.

Then there's Excel Foundry and Machine, a local factory that makes parts for machinery used in heavy construction and mining operations. Doug Parsons, the current head of this family-owned business, has already relocated 12 percent of the company's production to China in order to hold onto business that would otherwise be lost to China's huge, cheap foundries; during the next decade he may well have to move much more of his production offshore. Parsons has China on his mind for other reasons too: over the past few months, the prices of copper and iron, like those of oil, have skyrocketed in response to Chinese demand,driving up Excel's costs as a result. At the same time, however, his international mining customers have been buying more Excel products in order to feed that same Chinese appetite for commodities. And Parsons himself recently started a new company that he says will build and service advanced rock-crushing machines -- in part to take advantage of the frenzied construction boom under way in China. (One measure of just how big this boom is: China currently has more than 15,000 highway projects in the works, which will add 162,000 kilometers of road to the country, enough to circle the planet at the equator four times.)

Even something as all-American as Pekin's new Wal-Mart Supercenter spreads China's influence around town. Because 12 percent of China's exports to the U.S. end up on Wal-Mart's shelves, and because Wal-Mart's trade with China accounts for 1 percent of that country's gross domestic product, the company exerts tremendous downward pressure on prices. Its buying power enables it to dictate, in effect, what a Chinese manufacturer will get for producing goods that American consumers want. By selling Chinese-made portable DVD players with seven-inch L.C.D. screens for less than $200, for instance, Wal-Mart helped to cut the price of these trendy devices in half over the last year. Competitors have to match the chain's prices or go under. Nearly every shopper in Pekin will therefore save money by shopping at Wal-Mart -- which is to say he or she will profit from the retailer's China connection. Of course, this very connection may also contribute to Wal-Mart's ability to drive other Pekin-area stores out of business.

In short, Pekin, Ill., is not so different from lots of American places. China is everywhere these days, influencing our lives as consumers, providers, citizens. It has by far the world's most rapidly changing large economy, and our reactions to it shift just as quickly. China is at one moment our greatest threat, the next our friend. It siphons off American jobs; it is essential to our competitive edge. China is the world's factory floor, and it is the world's greatest market opportunity. China's industrial might steals opportunities from the developing world, even as its booming economy pulls poorer countries up (lately it has been getting credit for helping Japan out of its slump too). China exports deflation; it stokes soaring prices. China will boom; it will bust. Or perhaps the country's economy is feeling its way right now to the soft landing that will prevent another Asian economic crash, and all the recent record numbers on trade, industrial output, consumer spending and debt are simply now in scale with China's size. The truth about China is that, like all big countries, it is full of real contradictions.

Another truth is that the current feelings about China do not fully reflect today's reality. The U.S. economy is about eight times the size of China's. Our manufacturing sector is bigger than the entire Chinese economy. Americans, per capita, earn 36 times what the Chinese do. And there is no shortage of potential roadblocks in China's path, either. Its banks may collapse. Its poor and its minorities may rebel. Uppity Taiwan and lunatic North Korea may push China to war. The U.S. could slap taxes on everything China ships to us.

Still, barring Mao's resurrection or nuclear cataclysm, nothing is likely to keep China down for long. Since 1978, its gross domestic product has risen fourfold; in straight dollar terms, China's economy is the world's sixth-largest, with a G.D.P. of around $1.4 trillion. It has gone from being virtually absent in international trade to the world's third-most-active trading nation, behind the U.S. and Germany and ahead of Japan. Tom Saler, a financial journalist, has pointed out that 21 recessions, a depression, two stock-market crashes and two world wars were not able to stop the U.S. economy's growth, over the last century, from $18 billion ($367 billion in 2000 dollars) to $10 trillion. In constant dollars, that is a 27-fold increase.

China is poised for similar growth in this century. Even if China's people do not, on average, have the wealth Americans do, and even if the United States continues to play a strong economic game and to lead in technology, China will still be an ever more formidable competitor. If any country is going to supplant the U.S. in the world marketplace, China is it.

Mao as Proto-Capitalist

Mornings at Wanfeng automotive factory outside Shanghai begin with a neat line of employees doing calisthenics to martial music broadcast over a P.A. system. The blue-uniformed workers, nearly all of them young men, make for a clean-cut, well-pressed company line. The Japanese introduced courtyard exercises and company songs to the world back in the 70's, when that nation appeared to have the world's best industrial jobs. Today, Japan is just stumbling out of a long malaise, and its dwindling pool of young laborers seem to lack the compulsion to work like hell.

But the striving Japan of old still sets a good example for would-be worldbeaters, as Wanfeng's management knows -- only the Chinese manufacturer goes one better. Its employees regularly have their spirits revved at company

boot camps run by People's Liberation Army drillmasters who inculcate the twin virtues of patriotism and hard work. The results are impressive. Ten years ago, Wanfeng was hammering out motorcycle wheels by hand in a Chinese garage; a few years later it was the No. l seller of aluminum-alloy motorcycle wheels, first in China and now in Asia. The company soon became a top national and global

seller in alloy automobile wheels too.

Wanfeng may have received some breaks on the way up: the company-produced video that describes its rapid ascent does not identify the early contracts that  enabled Wanfeng to grow so fast, nor whether Wanfeng had insider connections to state-run companies in the motorcycle and car businesses. There is nothing in the company literature about how the private company secured its financing, either. Nonetheless, Wanfeng today is still scrappy, aggressive and capable. It now turns out about 60,000 vehicles a year that, if you squint just a little, appear to be remarkably like Jeep Grand Cherokees. They look great, come with every modern luxury, including leather seats and DVD video systems, and purr when driven.

Yet Wanfeng's factory itself is a bare-bones machine. Most tellingly -- this goes a long way toward accounting for China's current status as an economic juggernaut - there is not a single robot in sight. Instead, there are hundreds  of young men, newly arrived from China's expanding technical schools, manning the assembly lines with little more than large electric drills, wrenches and rubber mallets. Engines and body panels that would, in a Western, Korean or Japanese factory, move from station to station on automatic conveyors are hauled by hand and hand truck here. This is why Wanfeng can sell its hand-made luxury versions of the Jeep (to buyers in the Middle East, mostly) for $8,000 to $10,000. The company isn't spending money on multimillion-dollar machines to build cars; it's using highly skilled workers who cost at most a few hundred dollars a month -- whose yearly pay, in other words, is less than the monthly pay of new hires in Detroit. Factory wages in the country's booming east coast cities can be $120 to $160 a month and half that inland, according to Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies, an affiliate of Kurt Salmon Associates, a consulting firm.

Wanfeng is hardly the first to mobilize Chinese labor as a stand-in for machinery. Mao Zedong believed that China could leapfrog other developing countries by employing an effectively unlimited supply of human labor. Chinese

peasants and urban laborers would take the place of the expensive machines that the Western industrial powers had spent 100 years developing; China's wealth, Mao reasoned, lay in its abundant population.

He was right, though China failed disastrously to execute his Great Leap Forward in the late 50's. Most famously, Mao exhorted the Chinese to build backyard furnaces to melt down their iron implements, all in service of his goal to have China outproduce Great Britain in steel and to surpass the British economy in size in 15 years. Instead, the people were left without the few tools, pots and pans they had started with. And they starved: the Great Leap Forward was the direct cause of the famine that killed 30 million people, among the deadliest man-made disasters in history.

But even as the Communists pauperized the nation and continued to exercise complete control over the deployment of labor -- determining, for example, who would be moved out of the countryside and into the cities -- they also primed China for the capitalist successes to come. Prasenjit Duara, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Chicago, acknowledges the paradox: ''TheCommunists made the work force docile and organized labor to be a managed entity that could be continuously mobilized,'' he says. ''A Marxist might see China under Mao as producing the conditions of capitalism.'' (Duara adds that the institutions created by the Communists to provide housing, education and medical care later saved capitalists the price of developing the work force.) An obedient labor force keeps management costs down too. Despite the enormous numbers of workers in Chinese factories, the ranks of managers who supervise them are remarkably thin by Western standards. Depending on the work, you might see 15 managers for 5,000 workers, an indication of how incredibly well self-managed they are.

''There is a reason why the world is so impressed by  Chinese workers,'' Weingrod says. ''Culturally, the Chinese put a very high premium on not losing face. In manufacturing, that translates into not making mistakes on the production line. Their self-discipline and their ability to adapt are key factors driving Chinese competitiveness.'' And for every worker disinclined or unable to apply himself with energy and concentration, there is always another poor Chinese worker waiting to escape the farm or adrift in the so-called floating population of the underemployed, willing to take his place.

Still, it's not only cheap labor that drives China's economy. ''If you look just at low wages, you overlook the talents of Chinese manufacturers to drive their costs down,'' Weingrod says. The best operations are as efficient and as responsive as the world's elite manufacturers.

China's miracle economy can come at you in a lot of ways. By now most of us know that China is the factory floor of choice for the world's low-road manufacturing: it assembles more toys, stitches more shoes and sews more garments than any other nation in the world. But moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the world's largest maker of consumer electronics, like TV's, DVD players and cellphones. And more recently, China is climbing even higher still, moving into biotech and high-tech computer manufacturing. No country has ever made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. Behind China's rapid economic ascendancy over the last 25 (and especially last 10) years is the basic fact of China's huge population. China is home to close to 1.5 billion people, probably, which would make the official census count of 1.3 billion too low by an amount equal to roughly the population of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. China has 100 cities of more than a million people. Since economic liberalization began in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese have started tens of millions of businesses. The number of Chinese who have left farms and now trawl the cities for work probably exceeds the entire work force of the United States.

China is not home to the cheapest work force in the world. Even at 25 cents an hour, Chinese workers cost more than laborers in the poorer countries of Southeast Asia or Africa. In the world's miserable corners, children carry

rifles and walk mine fields for less than a dollar a day. China is the world's workshop because it sits in a relatively stable region and offers manufacturers a reliable, pliant and capable industrial work force, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline.

The other great contributing factor is the migration of hundreds of millions of peasants from the countryside now that the government makes it easier for them to leave. Indeed, the country's embrace of market capitalism over the last decade and the government's insistence that farmers fend for themselves are combining forces to all but evict peasants from the land. The plots allotted to farm families are on average 1.2 acres but can be as small as an eighth of acre; in hundreds of millions of cases these farms fail to generate enough money for a family. Average city incomes, according to the Chinese government, are $1,000 a year, which is three times what they are in the countryside. That disparity has set in motion the largest human migration in history. By 2010, nearly half of all China's people will live in urban areas.

What these numbers mean is that China's people must be regarded as the critical mass in a new world order. The productive might of China's vast low-cost manufacturing machine, along with the swelling appetites of its billion-plus consumers, have turned China's people into probably the greatest natural resource on the planet. How the Chinese (and the rest of the world) use that resource will shape our economy (and every other economy in the world) as powerfully as American industrialization and expansion has over the last hundred years.

We Have Created a Monster

In the political debate over trade and jobs, China is the place where the world's companies choose to exploit low-cost manufacturing. The framing of this debate implies that American consumers and businesses have strong choices in the market; in fact, China, supplying ever more goods as it does, in ever more varieties and at  ever better prices, is straitjacketing the choices of American businesses. China's size does not merely enable low-cost manufacturing; it forces it. Increasingly, it is what Chinese businesses and consumers choose for themselves that determines how the American economy operates. The American political debate on China's economic threat overlooks this dynamic entirely.

The experience of Motorola, the U.S. telecommunications giant, offers a lesson in how China's size changes the rules of competition and consumption there and everywhere else. Every month, five million new subscribers sign up for mobile-phone service in China. The country's 300 million mobile-phone users make China by far the largest such market in the world (and hundreds of millions more accounts are up for grabs). Hence the world's makers of handsets need to be in China. It gives them a chance to grow at a time when the big European and U.S. markets are saturated. Not that it's a seller's market: for equipment makers, China is also the most competitive and protean environment in the world. New manufacturers appear out of nowhere; new phones materialize daily at big-city stores. There are 800 current handset models to choose from. Young urban consumers change phones on average after only eight months -- they sell them to someone else or pass them to family members. Mobile phones in the hands of migrant construction workers, whose annual wages might not cover the cost of a phone, are a common sight in Shanghai and Beijing. And this mobile-phone market in China is one that Motorola invented.

For Robert Galvin, the company's former and longtime chief executive, China in the early- to mid-80's promised a market that could more than make up for Motorola's having been foiled in Japan for years. But first the company had

to develop a top-drawer telecommunications infrastructure. In an unscripted bold stroke at a dreary state ceremony during a tour of the country, Galvin turned to the minister of railroads and asked him whether he wanted to do a good job as minister and be done with it or whether he wanted to create a world-class society. In doing so, Galvin tapped a thick vein of economic patriotism.

Motorola's company archives on its move into China are deep and open. They show that Galvin and his team knew that eventually the transfer of technology to China would sow formidable Chinese competitors. Nevertheless, Motorola decided its best strategy was to get into China early. Before long, Motorola's reports to China's political leaders -- infused with the same missionary vocabulary on industrial quality that had made the company a model for American manufacturers -- were soon parroted by China's leadership. Galvin also brought Motorola's best technology to China. The proof today is in the size and efficacy of the  country's mobile communications network: calls get through to phones in high-rises, subway cars and distant hamlets -- connections that would stymie mobile phones in the U.S.

What no one at Motorola saw was that the Chinese market would become the most competitive one of all. Nokia and Motorola now battle for market share in the Chinese handset business. German, Korean and Taiwanese makers figure strongly. And all these foreign brands are now facing intense competition from indigenous Chinese phone makers. ''Competition goes through a cycle in China,'' says Zirui Tian, a researcher at Insead, the French business school. ''At first the foreigners can make things at much lower cost than the Chinese. But as local companies come along to supply the multinational companies, the supply network expands very fast. Then local Chinese manufacturers can start to source their parts in China and drive the prices of their products far lower than the multinationals.''

One of Motorola's most important suppliers is the battery maker BYD Company Ltd., based in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. In only a decade, the private company has gone from virtual invisibility to owning more than 50 percent of the global market in mobile-phone batteries. Before BYD, phone batteries were made in highly automated plants, like those run by Sanyo and Sony in Japan. But BYD, like Wanfeng, stripped robots and other machines out of the manufacturing process and replaced them with an army of workers. By paying for Chinese salaries, and not for million-dollar American, German or Japanese machines, BYD slashed the price of batteries. Initially the company could not meet Motorola's quality demands, but the American company sent a team of engineers to work with the upstarts, and six months later BYD earned a Six Sigma certification, a universally recognized badge of quality (which Motorola itself invented). The fact that in China machines can be replaced by people for huge cost savings and without sacrifice in quality changes the competitive landscape of the global

marketplace. When Motorola and Nokia were pressed to lower their prices by Chinese competitors, they turned to BYD.

One of the biggest challenges facing Motorola and other global manufacturers is that Chinese suppliers are getting too good. Their quality, low-priced parts have helped create new, homegrown and extremely aggressive competitors. More than 40 percent of the Chinese domestic handset market now belongs to local companies like Ningbo Bird, Nanjing Panda Electronics, Haier and TCL Mobile. Ningbo Bird will produce 20 million handsets in 2004 and is likely soon to nudge its way into the ranks of the top 10 mobile phone makers in the world. Yet Motorola can't exactly exit the Chinese market. If it did, says Jim Gradoville, Motorola's vice president of Asia Pacific government relations, the Chinese companies that emerged from the crucible of their market would be the leanest and most aggressive in the world, and a company like his would have no idea what hit it. So Motorola stays. Already the largest foreign investor in China's electronics industry, Motorola plans to triple its stake there to more than $10 billion by 2006.

More Power to the Chinese Consumers

Generalizing about Chinese business always raises exceptions. The country's crazy quilt of state-owned, village-owned, private and hybrid businesses was stitched together over 25 years of rocky reforms. Peasant entrepreneurs, opportunistic officials, government planners, new urban sophisticates and foreign investors all created operations that best fit the moment they stepped into the evolving market economy. And yet, looking at the marketplace from the broadest perspective, one overwhelming fact stands out. Ninety percent of everything made in China is in oversupply; in other words, nearly every manufacturing industry has surplus capacity. And instead of using cheap labor to push their profit margins higher, Chinese companies use cheap labor to drive down prices to the sweet spots for the great mass of Chinese consumers.

A Chinese family can live a life comfortably close to that of the American middle class for a fraction of the cost. Though China claims urban per-capita income is $1,000, ''the government numbers on incomes don't tell nearly the

whole story on the consumer class, especially not in the eastern cities,'' says Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies. Weingrod, working with Linsun Cheng of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, surveyed incomes in Shanghai and several other cities in industrial centers. ''People tend to have two and three jobs, with many taking in short-term assignments here and there,'' he says. ''Real income in Shanghai, for instance, is close to $2,500 per capita, $5,000 per household.'' The Chinese can, on average, buy nearly five times in goods and services per dollar what an American can with the same dollar in the U.S. ''If you multiply income against China's purchasing power parity,'' Weingrod says, ''Chinese urban incomes approach the buying power of Americans making $12,500 a year. For working couples, that's the equal of $25,000. Do the math, and you can understand why Shanghai looks as prosperous as it does and why it seems like everyone is out shopping all the time.''

According to Weingrod's and Cheng's research, China now has  100 million people who are comfortably middle class. They buy (in reduced measure) what the  American middle class buys. The allure of China's market is obvious: the huge volumes of potential sales mean even products with the most modest of margins can earn lots of money. 

Wilf Corrigan, the chairman and C.E.O. of LSI Logic, an American company in the Chinese video player market, says that Chinese manufacturers have short-circuited one of the most predictable trends in consumer electronic manufacturing. ''Typically,'' he says, ''a new technology would be released at $1,000 in Japan, and it would take two years to drop below $1,000 and make it to the U.S. and Europe, and it would take a total of five to seven years for it to make it into the mass market.'' As features were added, prices rose. Now China's low-cost labor and the vastness of its consumer population are combining to bring bargain electronics into homes in record time. Chinese companies build sophisticated goods with components produced locally and rush them by the millions into their huge domestic market. New companies arise. Competition shrinks the time it takes for new products to appear. New features are added while prices are likely to drop. Anything to pump sales.

Corrigan's company is now supplying Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers with the chip sets they need to make digital video recorders, machines that record DVD's and that are displacing VCR's on retail shelves. Currently, the Japanese and Korean brand-name giants have consumers' attention. Corrigan, however, sees no reason DVR's won't go the way of DVD players, plummeting in price as the Chinese enter the competition. Expect the recorders to be on sale for $100 within the next two years.

Collective I.Q.

'Look, China is the most exciting place in the world right now to be a manufacturer,'' says Mark Wall, president of the greater China region for G.E. Plastics. His operation sells the plastic pellets used to make everything from

DVD's to building materials. Within two years G.E. will sell $1 billion in advanced materials, including plastics, in China. Wall, who came to China from G.E. Plastics, Brazil, describes a country in love with manufacturing like no other, where engineers come in excited and readily work long days. Where  University students clamor to get into engineering and applied sciences. Like many American manufacturing executives in China, Wall talks about working

in China with the delight that young computer whizzes felt when they found cool in Silicon Valley. There's no going to a cocktail party and then trying to talk around the fact that you make things in factories. Wall says he feels at home. He loves it. G.E. has every plan to capitalize on the local zeal for  Manufacturing. It recently opened a giant industrial research center in  Shanghai, and by next year will it employ 1,200 people in its Chinese labs. The

company has also set up scholarship programs at leading Chinese technical universities. It will have no shortage of good candidates.

The government is pouring resources into creating the world's largest army of industrialists. China has 17 million university and advanced vocational students (up more than threefold in five years), the majority of whom are in science and engineering. China will produce 325,000 engineers this year. That's five times as many as in the U.S., where the number of engineering graduates has been declining since the early 1980's. It is hard to imagine Americans' enthusiasm for engineering sinking lower. Forty percent of all students who enter  universities on the engineering track change their minds.

The case for the ability of American industry to stay ahead of its international competition rests on the national gifts and resources that the U.S. devotes to innovation. Certainly, the confidence of big American companies like Motorola, General Motors and Intel, all of which have billion-dollar-plus stakes in China, is based on the brainpower they have at home. The research gap between the U.S. and China remains vast. In December, Washington authorized $3.7 billion to finance nanotechnology research, a sum the Chinese government cannot easily match within a scientific infrastructure that would itself take many more billions (and years) to build. Yet, when it comes to more mainstream, applied industrial development and innovation, the separation among Chinese, American and other multinational firms is beginning to narrow.

Last year, China spent $60 billion on research and development. The only countries that spent more were the U.S and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion respectively. But again, China forces you to do the math: China's engineers and scientists usually make between one-sixth and one-tenth what Americans do, which means that the wide gaps in financing do not necessarily result in equally wide gaps in manpower or results. The U.S. spent nearly five times what China did, but had less than two times as many researchers (1.3 million to 743,000).  For now, the emphasis in Chinese labs is weighted overwhelmingly toward the ''D'' side -- meaning training for technical employees and managers. Nevertheless, foreign companies are quickly moving to integrate their China-based labs into their global research operations. Motorola has 19 research labs in China that develop technology for both the local and global markets. Several of the company's most innovative recent phones were developed there for the Chinese market.

Motorola's newest research center is located 40 minutes from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, a province in southwestern China. Sichuan is slightly larger than California, but three times as populous. There are around 90 million people in the province, 43 universities and 1.2 million scientists and engineers. Sichuan's fragmented transportation system prevents Chengdu from rivaling the eastern powerhouses as a manufacturing center, but the city is promoting the advantage of its plentiful, relatively low-cost brain pool with its new research corridor, the West High-Tech Zone. And Motorola regards its building -- subsidized generously by the development zone -- as a world center for software engineering. The company now employs more than 150 developers there and has plans to add hundreds more. That will pit it against a growing number of the world's top research-driven enterprises taking advantage of Chengdu's largess: Intel, Ericsson, D-Link, Siemens, Alcatel, Mitsui & Company and Fuji Heavy

Industries of Japan and more than 200 other firms in one of the area's special tech districts.

In all, foreign companies have been involved in establishing between 200 and 400 of their own research centers in China since 1990. China's People's Daily has reported that 400 of the world's transnational corporations have set up research and development projects in China. In part, tax incentives attract such financing. But the biggest incentive of all, of course, is access to China's consumers. The Chinese government knows that foreign tech companies can be coaxed into sharing technology and training in exchange for easier access to the Chinese marketplace. The World Trade Organization forbids formal bargains that demand international tech transfers, but it does not police winks and nudges.

The likely outcome of all this R.&D. investment in China? Even more overcapacity. Just as China's abundant unskilled workers feed the world more shoes and more gadgets than it needs -- or at least more than it can absorb without forcing prices down -- China's abundance of newly skilled industrialists threatens to swamp the world's most highly prized, high-tech markets. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that in the past three years foreign investors have invested or pledged $15 billion to build 19 new semiconductor factories. China imports 80 percent of the semiconductor chips it needs, $19 billion worth, and the government has made it a point of national pride to end the country's dependence on foreigners. Industry observers seem to agree that China will be able to compete with the world's leading semiconductor makers in a decade, but even before that it may exert strong downward pressure on chip prices. Will there be a 2005 recession in the chip market? Morris Chang, the influential founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, asked an industry gathering last September. ''Yes, I think there will be,'' he said. And who will cause it? China, thanks to all the capacity it's building.

The China Price

China now offers the world a labor supply with depth unlike anything ever seen. In a recent policy brief for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sandra Polaski, a former State Department special representative for international labor affairs, writes that to put things in perspective, ''if all U.S. jobs were moved to China, there would still be surplus labor in China.'' That fact highlights what is most sobering about China's booming economy: it can force down the value of work in any job that is at all transferable.

In American business this is called the ''China price.'' It is the price American suppliers to other American businesses have to match to keep their customers. It is the price at which Chinese manufacturers can deliver the same goods and services. Last November, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank noted the complaints that ''automakers have reportedly been asking suppliers for the 'China price' on their purchases.'' It also observed that U.S. suppliers had been asked by their big customers to relocate production to China, or to find subcontractors there.

The bellwether of American industry may very well be its foundries. Casting is one of those unsexy industries that rarely get top mention in personal ads. But no amount of buzz could overstate its importance. Without metal casting, the United States would boast hardly any industry at all. The U.S. Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy notes that more than 90 percent of all manufactured goods and capital equipment use metal castings, or are made with equipment that uses them. The American casting industry is the world's largest, with more than $25 billion in annual sales. Nearly 3,000 foundries are spread across the country, and are especially concentrated in the Midwest. Most are small businesses, with fewer than 100 employees who, on average, outearn their counterparts everywhere else in the world. The metal-casting industry once had generous trade surpluses with the rest of the world, but imported castings have increased their share of the American market by 50 percent since the mid-1990's; they now have 15 percent of the market. Imports from China are growing at between 7 and 10 percent a year, and worldwide by volume China is now the top producer of castings. The effect has been severe

pressure on American foundries, 140 of which closed their doors in 2002, the last year for which the American Foundry Society has figures.

Bob Schuemann is executive vice president and part owner of Signicast Corporation, a privately held casting business located at the edge of Hartford, Wis. Hartford is one of the state's many midsize towns whose roads are shared by farm tractors and semitrailer trucks making their way to the loading docks of manufacturers that since the 1970's have stayed competitive by migrating out of the urban Midwest and into the more economical countryside. Schuemann, like many, now lives under the sword of the China price. His company owns proprietary technology for producing metal machine parts with extremely high precision. Yet the network effect means that the company's fate is tied in part to the economic vitality of its business community. Wisconsin lost roughly 90,000 of the 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs that disappeared over the last four years. Signicast survived with automation. Robots fill its factory, moving everything from thumb-size precision parts to the boxes in the warehouse. Workers are scarce. Walking through the plant is a lesson in how the hardware business has become a software business. The whole plant seems to be run by smart ghosts.

Even so, the company feels the gravity of China's growing influence in manufacturing. Schuemann says some of his corporate customers also want the company to make the move to China and have offered to help cover the costs of doing so. The company won't move. Schuemann fears the Chinese will usurp Signicast's processes and thus its strength. Schuemann knows too that his company's selling points evaporate quickly when overseas investment casters

drastically undercut the price of its parts. ''We don't need to match the China price dollar for dollar,'' he says. ''If we stay within 20 percent of their price, our customers will stay with us.'' It's getting harder to keep

them anyway, however. The company used to have livelier business with a big local power tool maker, but the customer moved production to China and found jerry-built substitutes for Signicast's high-quality parts. ''Our part was one sturdy piece, and their new one is two inferior pieces,'' Schuemann says. ''Theirs will break more easily, but it's a lot cheaper.''

The business cards of executives at Milwaukee Valve Company Ltd., located in Wuxi, a city of more than four million outside Shanghai, list the company's address at ''End of Guangrui Road.'' By the outward appearance of the trio of

decades-old, corrugated-tin roofed industrial buildings that make up the small factory, ''end of the road'' might seem an apt description. Along the interior of a wall at the back of the factory yard is a pile of wooden kindling that is used to stoke the factory's large furnace when the local electric grid is out of power, which lately has been often. Inside one of the barns, the furnace's orange glow heats and dimly lights a shop that looks little different than that of a foundry early in the last century. Sandboxes with molten brass are assembled manually and set end to end in the black earth floor to cool.

While the method looks primitive -- the Chinese have been making castings for 2,500 years -- workers in Wuxi manage to produce quality castings comparable to those made in spiffier factories in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Milwaukee Valve is a family-owned company whose manufacturing is still anchored in the United States. Its management entered China 20 years ago, soon after economic liberalization began. The company's valves are critical components in pipelines used in many industries. A faulty valve produced by one of the company's Chinese suppliers several years ago nearly ended the relationship with China. But that mistake, according to the company's management, is what made this Chinese manufacturer a ''world-class operation.'' Engineers from both countries redesigned the valve and changed the production process. Since then, Milwaukee Valve has stationed five Chinese quality-control engineers as roving inspectors at all of its factories in China. Apply this learning-curve experience at the Wuxi plant to China's manufacturing economy generally, and you get a sense of how the country is moving up the manufacturing feeding chain so quickly. (Of course, no one would be interested in seeing the Chinese improve if the cost of high quality were not still a bargain.)

Out in front of the valve factory is another telling symbol of China's competitiveness. It is a small $2,000 truck, a circus car of a truck, and one of many quaint but operable models still turned out by China's state-owned vehicle

factories. In the U.S., cheap trucks prone to failure and always in need of new parts would wreck production and delivery schedules by causing down time and burden bottom lines with $50-an-hour mechanic bills. But in China, mechanics can tend such cheap trucks the way pit crews tend Indy cars -- and for less than a dollar an hour. Chinese factories can take advantage of all sorts of machinery that is one, two or three generations past its usefulness in more expensive economies, because the Chinese can afford to run them and fix them. Thus China wrings further cost savings from the manufacturing process, and American companies are forced to go there to get them.

''First there was the wholesale price, then the retail price and now there is the China price, and it is very real,'' says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. Big manufacturers, Shenkar says, come into their American suppliers with the China price in hand and present ultimatums, often veiled, that the price be met.

The China Savings

No politician declares it. There is no Association of Big Box Store Customers beating the drum. But, as nearly any shopping trip in America will teach you, China saves American consumers enormous amounts of money.  The worry that Chinese producers are hurting American businesses and eliminating American jobs misrepresents the problem -- at least geographically. While the U.S. trade deficit with China is growing, most of the goods from China, between 60 and 75 percent of them, simply would have been imported in past years from other countries. Still, because the China price forces manufacturers the world over to drop their own prices, the jobs that have not moved have been shaken up all the same, in the U.S. and in other countries. In Mexico, for example, which has lost nearly half a million manufacturing jobs and 500 maquiladora manufacturers, workers earn four times what their Chinese counterparts do. So for Mexican factories to stay competitive, they must get by with fewer hands or smaller

profits.  

Americans who would demonize China also have a local problem: the China price is a boon to American consumers. Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, has done some rough math that shows how. ''From time immemorial,'' Hufbauer says, ''most American and Japanese businesses have been reluctant to move their manufacturing to new locales unless they can save at least 10 to 20 percent with the move.'' For the $152 billion worth of goods coming in from China last year, those savings have already been realized.

The multiplier effect on the rest of the world's manufacturers, however, dwarfs the savings that come directly from China. Hufbauer figures some $500 billion in goods come from countries that are China's low-wage competitors, and another  $450 billion in goods come from China's American and Japanese competitors. That means savings on nearly a trillion dollars of goods. If the savings on that non-Chinese trillion dollars' worth of trade are just 3 to 5 percent, rather than the 20 percent the Chinese can deliver, Hufbauer calculates further savings starting at $500 for the average American household. And people who spend more, get more back. Have a drawer full of $3 T-shirts, a DVD player in every room, a Christmas tree annually encircled with piles of toys? You probably have tons more stuff -- and additional savings -- thanks to the China price.

This inexorable downward pressure on prices now shows up even when the prices of raw materials rise, costs that in the past were hurriedly passed on to consumers. The Chinese industrial boom has, for example, pushed up the cost of

copper, aluminum, nickel, plastics and nearly every other important industrial commodity. Chinese demand has caused the price of steel to rise 20 percent this past spring.  (China is now the world's top steel producer, by the way, while the U.K. has dropped out of the top 10.) Nevertheless, the price of cars, which reflect nearly the entire commodity index, has been weak. In April, cotton climbed to its highest price at this time of year in seven seasons, but the price of clothing declined.  American firms can find it hard to compete. ''China hits domestic U.S. manufacturers twice,'' Oded Shenkar says. ''They drive down the price of goods, but they drive up the price of raw materials. It's a wholly different environment.'' And yet it's a good one for Americans too.

The efficiencies forced on the market by Chinese factories also hold U.S.  inflation in check. Lower inflation means the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low, making money more freely available for investment in new and

stronger industries. Chinese competition forces American businesses -- Signicast, for example -- to use capital as efficiently as possible. And to run their plants full tilt. And to find ways to save on labor costs. The Americans who lost manufacturing jobs over the last three years, and the millions more who are expected to see their white-collar jobs migrate overseas, may have not only China to blame, but also the very economic benefits that China has provided for them.

And that's to say nothing of what happens once the Chinese countryside, thinned of its oversupply of farmers, turns into efficient farms. Already the Chinese have their eyes on cash crops. Though it has only recently begun exporting apple juice, China already produces seven times as many apples as the U.S., enough to cause a depression in the price of apple juice worldwide. Whole apples for exports are individually wrapped by hand in a foam sock. Given the Country's wealth of manual labor, it can assert dominance in crops that must be tended by hand.

In a stable China, where its great resource, its people, are allowed to work and spend money in a reasonably well functioning market economy, the growing place of China in a global economy cannot be legislated away with tariffs, quotas or tax incentives for struggling industries. China's strengths cannot be altered by changes in the value of its currency or by restricting the flow of foreign investment into the country. By having changed itself, China is changing the world.

That doesn't necessarily mean things will be worse for Americans as the century -- the Chinese century -- unfolds. Following World War II, the nations of Western Europe, Japan and the so-called tiger countries of Asia rose from

the ruins, aided, not thwarted, by the strength of the American economy. In turn, those economic booms fed our own.

So perhaps we will be as Europe is to us today, and China will be our America.

Imagine Pekin, Ill., a few decades from now. It may, like innumerable small Chinese cities today, be accustomed to a stream of foreign business managers. Perhaps the regional boss for a Wanfeng Automotive dealership is there to be

host of a ''dig to China contest'': the team that gets closest in 40 minutes might win one of the company's hot new red-and-gold Lucky 8 hybrid sports coupes, worth $4,000. As a promotion, Wal-Mart's new World Store is rolling prices back to 2004 levels for the day - shoppers are grabbing the steaks and fish, whose prices Chinese consumers have driven up fourfold since then. Wal-Mart might have competition, however, perhaps from a new giant outpost of Homeworld, a Chinese retail giant that has learned to exploit its proximity to Chinese suppliers and beat Wal-Mart on price. A big event scheduled for the evening might get knowing smiles from the town's old-timers. The Foreign Devils, a high-school basketball team from Manhattan, a new suburb of Beijing, is due in for an exhibition game. Provided its flight, on an all-new Chinese jumbo jet, arrives on time.

**********************************************************

Some of the environmental effects of Chinas new industry and prosperity..

China emerges as global consumer

Thursday, 17 February, 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4272577.stm

China has "eclipsed" the US as a consumer nation

China has overtaken the US in the consumption of basic agricultural

and industrial goods, a survey has found.

With a booming economy and 1.3bn people, it is now the world's

largest consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel, said the Earth

Policy Institute.

But China's insatiable demands are putting ever more pressure on the

country's natural resources.

Air and water pollution are already serious problems, and there is

talk of a looming ecological crisis.

China is well ahead of the US in the consumption of goods such as

television sets, refrigerators and mobile phones, according to the

Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

However, per capita consumption in China - the world's most populous

country - remains far below that of the US.

According to the report:

64m tons of meat were consumed in China in 2004 compared to 38m tons

in the US

258m tons of steel were used in China in 2003 compared to 104m in the

US

China's factories and homes burned 40% more coal than in the US

The number of PCs in China is doubling every 28 months.

The latest official figures for the Chinese economy, the

sixth-largest in the world, show it is growing at an even faster rate

than expected.

It expanded by 9.5% in 2004, its highest rate for eight years, the

figures show.

"China's eclipse of the United States as a consumer nation should be

seen as another milestone along the path of its evolution as a world

economic leader," Lester Brown, the institute's president, said.

"China is no longer just a developing country," he said. "It is an

emerging economic superpower, one that is writing economic history".

Illegal timber

The report said China's massive appetite for goods ranging from grain

to platinum had placed it "at the centre of the world raw materials

economy".

60% of Chinese cities have serious air pollution problems

One of these raw materials is wood - and the illegal trade in stolen

timber is stripping Asia of its last substantial forests, according

to a report by the US and UK-based Environmental Investigations

Agency and Indonesian campaigning group Telapak.

Indonesia is now suffering the fastest rate of deforestation in the

world, losing a wooded area the size of Switzerland every year.

According to investigators, Chinese factories process one stolen

Indonesian log every minute of every working day.

Deforestation is not the only unwanted consequence of China's huge

consumption of natural materials, says the BBC's Louisa Lim in

Beijing.

Coal-fired power plants supply much of the country's energy and

according to government estimates, 60% of Chinese cities have serious

air pollution problems, she says.

The Kyoto Protocol considers China a developing nation, and it is

currently exempt from cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts also say that more than three-quarters of the water flowing

through China's cities is unsuitable for drinking because of

pollution from industrial waste, according to our correspondent.

Scores of rivers have dried up and water tables are getting ever

lower.

An official from the Chinese environmental watchdog, Panyue, said the

nation's resources and its environment had already reached the limits

of their capacity to cope.

Initial moves are now being taken to enforce environmental laws, but

moves in this direction could ignite new tensions between government

agencies and big business.

*************************************8

Not all Chinese are happy with the changes..

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1565554,00.html

Chinese farmers riot over crop poisoning

BY CLIFFORD COONAN IN HUAXI

Factories built during the country's new economic boom have sparked a violent backlash

THOUSANDS of Chinese farmers overturned buses, smashed cars and attacked policemen during a riot in a village in eastern China against chemical plants that they say are destroying their crops.

Villagers said that 3,000 police officers armed with electric batons and teargas descended on the village of Huaxi before dawn on Sunday to clear roadblocks that villagers had set up to stop deliveries to and from chemical plants built on land where rice and vegetable farms once stood.

The scene yesterday was one of complete devastation and anarchy: 40 buses lay smashed in the grounds of a local school and 14 cars were piled upside down in an alley, some draped with police uniforms. There were unconfirmed reports that two of the elderly protesters died during efforts to disperse them, and more than a hundred people were treated for minor injuries in hospital.

In a country where dissent normally brings swift retribution, the weekend riots were just the latest clashes between local authorities and farmworkers, who feel marginalised by the extraordinary growth of China's economy and the expansion of its industrial base deeper into rural areas.

The 13 chemical plants in Zhejiang, built during the current economic boom and operational since 2002, produce fertiliser, dyes and pesticides. Farmers say that waste from the factories is poisoning the wells that provide their drinking water and that the plants periodically release clouds of stinging gas. They also claim that the effluents are causing stillborn babies and birth defects.

"I'm afraid my children won't live to reach my age. I want my land back, I want my food back and I want my water back," said one 60-year-old woman, who, like a third of the 30,000 villagers, has the surname Wang. She was speaking at a makeshift shelter put up by the local old people's association, which displayed police riot shields, identity cards and helmets, as well as machetes and scissors, which the locals said had been used against them.

Elderly women were eager to talk about the night that they drove the police out of the village. The atmosphere was jubilant.

Soon after I left the village, I was stopped on the road to the county town of Dongyang and detained by government officials for almost six hours.

Chen Qixian, a Dongyang government spokesman, said that 1,000 officials had taken part in the operation to remove the roadblocks, which were set up on March 24 and had stopped production at the chemical plants. Hospitals treated 128 people, of whom 36 were still inpatients. Of these, three were villagers and the rest police or cadres. Five were seriously injured. The factories have suspended operations as many labourers are too frightened to report for work.

In China, farmers do not own the land; they receive 30-year leases from the State that allows the Government to reallocate the land for industrial use without the consent of the farmers if it is approved by the village committee.

Farmers have been given compensation, but for many this is not enough. "It's not compensation we want, we don't want these plants beside us," Wang Weikang, a smallholder, said.

"I tried to grow cauliflower last year, but the plant didn't grow bigger than a walnut before it shrivelled and died. The groundwater is completely poisoned."

Landgrabbing and rural land rights are big political issues in China and the government has made public commitments to bridge the gap between urban rich and rural poor.

Recent riots in China have often been sparked by demonstrations of public anger with local corruption or abuse of privilege. More than three million people staged about 58,000 protests nationwide in 2003, according to the latest available official figures. The number of demonstrations jumped 15 per cent from the previous year.

In widespread demonstrations against Japan, sparked by Tokyo's approval of a revised history book in schools, rocks were thrown at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and Japanese students were beaten up. The textbook is said to whitewash Japan's brutal wartime colonisation of Asian nations.

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How does teh government of Tiannemen Square keep dissent under control..... 

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=8&u=/ap/20050414/ap_on_re_as/china_internet_censorship

China Soups Up Internet Censoring Filters

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK - The Chinese government has become increasingly sophisticated at controlling the Internet, taking a multilayered approach that contributes to precision in blocking political dissent, a report released Thursday finds.

The precision means that China's filters can block just specific references to Tibetan independence without blocking all references to Tibet. Likewise, the government is effective at limiting discussions the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and other topics deemed sensitive, the study from the OpenNet Initiative finds.

Numerous government agencies and thousands of public and private employees are involved at all levels, from the main pipelines, or backbones, hauling data over long distances to the cybercafes where many citizens access the Internet.

That breadth, the study finds, allows the filtering tools to adapt to emerging forms of communications, such as Web journals, or blogs.

"China has been more successful than any other country in the world to manage to filter the Internet despite the fast changes in technology," said John Palfrey, one of the study's principal investigators and executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Saudi Arabia, for example, largely controls the Internet by having all traffic flow through a central agency, where it can be monitored. Visitors trying to access a banned site get a message saying it has been blocked, Palfrey said.

"China is much more subtle than that," Palfrey said. "You don't know what you don't know. It's more effective than if you see it but know you can't access it."

With filters at multiple points, including some search engines, content is simply removed rather than replaced with a notice, he said.

Google Inc. has acknowledged its Chinese-language news service - introduced on a test basis last fall - leaves out results from government-banned sites, though the company says that is done so users won't end up clicking on links that lead nowhere because of the Chinese filters.

Palfrey added that Chinese filtering methods are effective because they constantly change, keeping its users off-balance.

China, which has the world's second-largest population of Internet users behind the United States, promotes Internet use for business and education, while trying to curb access to political dissent, pornography and other topics the communist government deems sensitive. Many users do find ways around the controls - for instance, using "proxy" servers that mask a site's true origin.

It is through similar proxy servers and long-distance calls that researchers outside China managed to test what users inside China see. The researchers also employed volunteers inside the country to conduct more extensive testing.

The researchers deployed software and physical equipment called packet sniffers to monitor the flow of traffic and try to gauge where content gets dropped. Palfrey would not elaborate on techniques, other than to say many Internet systems have security flaws through which outsiders can sneak in software.

Funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute, the OpenNet Initiative is a collaboration of researchers at Harvard, the University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto working on issues of Internet censorship and surveillance.

Their testing determined that:

Though some dissidents complain that e-mail newsletters sent in bulk are sometimes blocked, individual messages tend not to get filtered.

Much of the filtering occurs at the backbone, but individual Internet service providers sometimes deploy additional blocking. Cybercafes and operators of discussion boards also control content proactively under threat of penalties.

Filtering tends to be triggered by the appearance of certain keywords, rather than a visit to a specific domain name or numeric Internet address. The keyword-based filters also allow blogs to keep people from completing posts containing banned topics.

"You can filter much more precisely at a keyword level," Palfrey said. "China wants to be able to enable its citizens to use the Internet and grow its economy. Shutting down all blog servers doesn't seem like a great idea, but it doesn't want to let through all forms of political dissent."

*****************************************************************************

Finally how likely is China to start flexing its muscle on the international stage

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2740&print=1

Clash of the Titans

By Zbigniew Brzezinski, John J. Mearsheimer

Is China more interested in money than missiles? Will the United States seek to contain China as it once contained the Soviet Union? Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Mearsheimer go head-to-head on whether these two great powers are destined to fight it out.

Make Money, Not War - By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Today in East Asia, China is rising—peacefully so far. For understandable reasons, China harbors resentment and even humiliation about some chapters of its history. Nationalism is an important force, and there are serious grievances regarding external issues, notably Taiwan. But conflict is not inevitable or even likely. China’s leadership is not inclined to challenge the United States militarily, and its focus remains on economic development and winning acceptance as a great power.

China is preoccupied, and almost fascinated, with the trajectory of its own ascent. When I met with the top leadership not long ago, what struck me was the frequency with which I was asked for predictions about the next 15 or 20 years. Not long ago, the Chinese Politburo invited two distinguished, Western-trained professors to a special meeting. Their task was to analyze nine major powers since the 15th century to see why they rose and fell. It’s an interesting exercise for the top leadership of a massive and complex country.

This focus on the experience of past great powers could lead to the conclusion that the iron laws of political theory and history point to some inevitable collision or conflict. But there are other political realities. In the next five years, China will host several events that will restrain the conduct of its foreign policy. The 2008 Olympic Games is the most important, of course. The scale of the economic and psychological investment in the Beijing games is staggering. My expectation is that they will be magnificently organized. And make no mistake, China intends to win at the Olympics. A second date is 2010, when China will hold the World Expo in Shanghai. Successfully organizing these international gatherings is important to China and suggests that a cautious foreign policy will prevail.

More broadly, China is determined to sustain its economic growth. A confrontational foreign policy could disrupt that growth, harm hundreds of millions of Chinese, and threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. China’s leadership appears rational, calculating, and conscious not only of China’s rise but also of its continued weakness.

There will be inevitable frictions as China’s regional role increases and as a Chinese “sphere of influence” develops. U.S. power may recede gradually in the coming years, and the unavoidable decline in Japan’s influence will heighten the sense of China’s regional preeminence. But to have a real collision, China needs a military that is capable of going toe-to-toe with the United States. At the strategic level, China maintains a posture of minimum deterrence. Forty years after acquiring nuclear-weapons technology, China has just 24 ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. Even beyond the realm of strategic warfare, a country must have the capacity to attain its political objectives before it will engage in limited war. It is hard to envisage how China could promote its objectives when it is acutely vulnerable to a blockade and isolation enforced by the United States. In a conflict, Chinese maritime trade would stop entirely. The flow of oil would cease, and the Chinese economy would be paralyzed.

I have the sense that the Chinese are cautious about Taiwan, their fierce talk notwithstanding. Last March, a Communist Party magazine noted that “we have basically contained the overt threat of Taiwanese independence since [President] Chen [Shuibian] took office, avoiding a worst-case scenario and maintaining the status of Taiwan as part of China.” A public opinion poll taken in Beijing at the same time found that 58 percent thought military action was unnecessary. Only 15 percent supported military action to “liberate” Taiwan.

Of course, stability today does not ensure peace tomorrow. If China were to succumb to internal violence, for example, all bets are off.

If sociopolitical tensions or social inequality becomes unmanageable, the leadership might be tempted to exploit nationalist passions. But the small possibility of this type of catastrophe does not weaken my belief that we can avoid the negative consequences that often accompany the rise of new powers. China is clearly assimilating into the international system. Its leadership appears to realize that attempting to dislodge the United States would be futile, and that the cautious spread of Chinese influence is the surest path to global preeminence.

Better to Be Godzilla than Bambi - By John J. Mearsheimer

China cannot rise peacefully, and if it continues its dramatic economic growth over the next few decades, the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war. Most of China’s neighbors, including India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, and Vietnam, will likely join with the United States to contain China’s power.

To predict the future in Asia, one needs a theory that explains how rising powers are likely to act and how other states will react to them. My theory of international politics says that the mightiest states attempt to establish hegemony in their own region while making sure that no rival great power dominates another region. The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the system.

The international system has several defining characteristics. The main actors are states that operate in anarchy—which simply means that there is no higher authority above them. All great powers have some offensive military capability, which means that they can hurt each other. Finally, no state can know the future intentions of other states with certainty. The best way to survive in such a system is to be as powerful as possible, relative to potential rivals. The mightier a state is, the less likely it is that another state will attack it.

The great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest great power, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—the only great power in the system. But it is almost impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony in the modern world, because it is too hard to project and sustain power around the globe. Even the United States is a regional but not a global hegemon. The best outcome that a state can hope for is to dominate its own backyard.

States that gain regional hegemony have a further aim: to prevent other geographical areas from being dominated by other great powers. Regional hegemons, in other words, do not want peer competitors. Instead, they want to keep other regions divided among several great powers so that these states will compete with each other. In 1991, shortly after the Cold War ended, the first Bush administration boldly stated that the United States was now the most powerful state in the world and planned to remain so. That same message appeared in the famous National Security Strategy issued by the second Bush administration in September 2002. This document’s stance on preemptive war generated harsh criticism, but hardly a word of protest greeted the assertion that the United States should check rising powers and maintain its commanding position in the global balance of power.

China is likely to try to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, China will strive to maximize the power gap between itself and its neighbors, especially Japan and Russia, and to ensure that no state in Asia can threaten it.

It is unlikely that China will go on a rampage and conquer other Asian countries. Instead, China will want to dictate the boundaries of acceptable behavior to neighboring countries, much the way the United States does in the Americas. An increasingly powerful China is also likely to try to push the United States out of Asia, much the way the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Not incidentally, gaining regional hegemony is probably the only way that China will get back Taiwan.

Why should we expect China to act differently than the United States? U.S. policymakers, after all, react harshly when other great powers send military forces into the Western Hemisphere. These foreign forces are invariably seen as a potential threat to American security. Are the Chinese more principled, more ethical, less nationalistic, or less concerned about their survival than Westerners? They are none of these things, which is why China is likely to imitate the United States and attempt to become a regional hegemon. China’s leadership and people remember what happened in the last century, when Japan was powerful and China was weak. In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

It is clear from the historical record how American policymakers will react if China attempts to dominate Asia. The United States does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the United States will seek to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of dominating Asia. In essence, the United States is likely to behave toward China much the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

 Nukes Change Everything - Zbigniew Brzezinski responds.

As an occasional scholar, I am impressed by the power of theory. But theory—at least in international relations—is essentially retrospective. When something happens that does not fit the theory, it gets revised. And I suspect that will happen in the U.S.-China relationship.

We live in a very different world than the one in which hegemonic powers could go to war without erasing each other as societies. The nuclear age has altered power politics in a way that was already evident in the U.S.-Soviet competition. The avoidance of direct conflict in that standoff owed much to weaponry that makes the total elimination of societies part of the escalating dynamic of war. It tells you something that the Chinese are not trying to acquire the military capabilities to take on the United States.

How great powers behave is not predetermined. If the Germans and the Japanese had not conducted themselves the way they did, their regimes might not have been destroyed. Germany was not required to adopt the policy it did in 1914 (indeed, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck followed a very different path). The Japanese in 1941 could have directed their expansionism toward Russia rather than Britain and the United States. For its part, the Chinese leadership appears much more flexible and sophisticated than many previous aspirants to great power status.

Showing the United States the Door - John J. Mearsheimer responds.

The dichotomy that you raised between theory and political reality is an important one. The reason that we have to privilege theory over political reality is that we cannot know what political reality is going to look like in the year 2025. You mentioned that you traveled to China recently and talked to Chinese leaders who appear to be much more prudent about Taiwan than the conventional wisdom has it. That may be true, but it’s largely irrelevant. The key issue is, What are the Chinese leaders and people going to think about Taiwan in 2025? We have no way of knowing. So today’s political realities get washed out of the equation, and what really matters is the theory that one employs to predict the future.

You also argue that China’s desire for continued economic growth makes conflict with the United States unlikely. One of the principal reasons that China has been so successful economically over the past 20 years is that it has not picked a fight with the United States. But that logic should have applied to Germany before World War I and to Germany and Japan before World War II. By 1939, the German economy was growing strongly, yet Hitler started World War II. Japan started conflict in Asia despite its impressive economic growth. Clearly there are factors that sometimes override economic considerations and cause great powers to start wars—even when it hurts them economically.

It is also true that China does not have the military wherewithal to take on the United States. That’s absolutely correct—for now. But again, what we are talking about is the situation in 2025 or 2030, when China has the military muscle to take on the United States. What happens then, when China has a much larger gross national product and a much more formidable military than it has today? The history of great powers offers a straightforward answer: China will try to push the Americans out of Asia and dominate the region. And if it succeeds, it will be in an ideal situation to deal with Taiwan.

America’s Staying Power - Zbigniew Brzezinski responds.

How can China push the United States out of East Asia? Or, more pointedly, how can China push the United States out of Japan? And if the United States were somehow pushed out of Japan or decided to leave on its own, what would the Japanese do? Japan has an impressive military program and, in a matter of months, it could have a significant nuclear deterrent. Frankly, I doubt that China could push the United States out of Asia. But even if it could, I don’t think it would want to live with the consequences: a powerful, nationalistic, and nuclear-armed Japan.

Of course, tensions over Taiwan are the most worrisome strategic danger. But any Chinese military planner has to take into account the likelihood that even if China could overrun Taiwan, the United States would enter the conflict. That prospect vitiates any political calculus justifying a military operation until and unless the United States is out of the picture. And the United States will not be out of the picture for a long, long time.

It’s Not a Pretty Picture - John J. Mearsheimer responds.

If the Chinese are smart, they will not pick a fight over Taiwan now. This is not the time. What they should do is concentrate on building their economy to the point where it is bigger than the U.S. economy. Then they can translate that economic strength into military might and create a situation where they are in a position to dictate terms to states in the region and to give the United States all sorts of trouble.

From China’s point of view, it would be ideal to dominate Asia, and for Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico to became a great power and force the United States to concentrate on its own region. The great advantage the United States has at the moment is that no state in the Western Hemisphere can threaten its survival or security interests. So the United States is free to roam the world causing trouble in other people’s backyards. Other states, including China of course, have a vested interest in causing trouble in the United States’ backyard to keep it focused there. The picture I have painted is not a pretty one. I wish I could tell a more optimistic story about the future, but international politics is a nasty and dangerous business. No amount of good will can ameliorate the intense security competition that will set in as an aspiring hegemon appears in Asia.

That's all Folks

Colin