Why China is the REAL master of the universe By ANTHONY BROWNE - Last updated
at 23:18pm on 11th April 2008
Cecil Rhodes, the businessman-imperialist of Africa, the creator of Rhodesia,
suffered no flicker of doubt about who were the masters.
"To be born an Englishman," he mused, "Is to win first prize in the lottery of
life."
It wasn't idle boasting. In the jingoistic triumphalism of the late 19th
century, when waving the Union Jack was a simple pleasure, people sang: "Rule
Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves" without any irony. It was a statement of
fact.
A quarter of mankind lived under the British flag in the largest empire the
world had ever known.
And many of those parts that weren't under Britain's rule - such as the U.S.
- had been created by Britain.
British missionaries had opened up the Dark Continent almost unchallenged.
Eastern promise: Chinese factory workers line up for their morning roll call
The British Army found it easier to invade troublesome nations - or most
of them - than it does nowadays.
Britain was the workshop of the world, dominating science, manufacturing and
trade.
To many Victorians, unquestioning of the ideology that underpinned much
imperialism, British supremacy was a simple matter of racial supremacy -
Europeans, and the English in particular, were fated to be the masters.
The truth is that we are masters of the world no more.
The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of
debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality
that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.
What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese
security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police
about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered
athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?
It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in
the world, just as the British Government's failure to take a firm stand on
Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.
The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West
now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the
Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability
in this new world order.
The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing
its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.
The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our
country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our
manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated.
Last month, an Indian company, Tata, bought up what was once the cream of
British manufacturing - Jaguar and Land Rover.
A couple of years ago, Nanjing Automotive, a Chinese company, snapped up MG
Rover.
Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the
American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.
But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared
to what is happening now.
The U.S. was Britain's offspring, based on the same values and the same
language.
The boys in blue: Chinese security men escorting the Olympic torch on the
streets of London last weekend. Many were shocked by their heavy-handed tactics
It, too, was an Anglo-Saxon country, and passing the baton across the Atlantic
ensured the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon world order, based on democracy,
free trade and a belief in human rights, upheld through international
institutions that both powers supported.
But the world order we have grown used to - and comfortable with - over
the last century is coming to an end.
Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: "When China awakes,
she will shake the world."
After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people - twice the
population of the U.S. and EU combined - is awaking almost overnight.
And not just China. The world's second most populous country, India, is
industrialising at a historically unprecedented pace.
Their economies are growing on a long-term basis about four times the speed of
the UK's and that of the United States. Goldman Sachs, the bank, recently
predicted that by 2050, China and India would have overtaken the U.S. to be the
world's first and second biggest economies.
We have long heard about the benefits this brings, in terms of plentiful cheap
goods from toys to TVs, and huge opportunities for Western companies to sell
their wares in these booming markets.
But there are also downsides, which are becoming more apparent. Unskilled
workers in the West have become unsettled by the threat to their jobs as
production moves East.
The most vulnerable Western workers have found their wages stagnate as they
struggle to compete in an increasingly global market place.
And competition for raw materials is pitting East against West.
The economic explosion of China, and to a lesser extent India, has given them
an almost overpowering hunger for raw materials with which to build their
factories, homes and cars.
Wherever you turn, the rise of Asia is making its impact felt on our existence.
Every time you complain about the price of petrol being over £1 a litre, it is
to the Far East you have to look to find the culprits.
Traditional image: The Great Wall of China stands tribute to its turbulent
past ...
There are even reports that manholes in Britain have been disappearing to feed
the monstrous appetite for scrap steel in the other side of the world.
China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago,
and 23 times as much on copper.
As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the
world's cement and a third of its steel.
What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new
word for it - this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the
world economy of historic proportions.
When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and
oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering
Western economies.
The cost of living in Britain is now rising faster than wages, making the
British on average poorer year on year.
Asia's expansion means that its influence is starting to be felt more directly
around the world.
Asian countries are not just buying up foreign raw materials, but as their
companies try to become global leaders, they are buying up Western companies.
It is not just Land Rover, Jaguar and MG Rover. The Malaysian company Proton
owns Lotus. Indian company Tata owns Corus, once British Steel, as well as
Tetley Tea.
The hunger for raw materials is also making China lose its shyness and venture
out into the world. Like Germany and Russia, China has traditionally been a
land empire, focusing its expansionist energies on countries it had borders
with, and it eschewed the world-conquering exploits of Europe's sea-faring
maritime nations.
Europeans have, for half a millennium, been unchallenged as the global
colonisers, but last month the respected Economist magazine dubbed the Chinese
"The New Colonists".
While the Congo in central Africa was once over-run by Belgians, it is now the
Chinese that can be found wondering around its mining belts.
In Lubumbashi, the capital of the Congo's copper-rich region Katanga, the
Economist reported "a sudden Chinese invasion".
Troubled Angola recently shunned Western financial aid because of the amount of
Chinese money pouring into it, in return for commodities.
From Kazakhstan to Indonesia to Latin America, Chinese firms are gobbling up
oil, gas, coal and metals.
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... while horrific traffic jams are a sign of its present and future
Canadian authorities were recently alarmed to find the Chinese interested in
exploring the Arctic Ocean, in a bid to get a share of the minerals beneath the
thawing icecap.
In eastern Siberia, Russians worry that China is by default taking over their
empty land.
The West has long seen Africa as its backyard, but Western diplomats now worry
that not just Africa, but South America, too, is being lost to China.
And Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing.
Most worryingly, as China's brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet
shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human
rights.
>From Darfur to Myanmar, China is cuddling up to murderous dictators.
At home, it holds mass executions of criminals with bullets in the back of the
head while transplant surgeons stand by to harvest their still pulsating
organs.
Yet Western governments have been in such awe of China's looming power that
their response has not been to challenge its abuses, but to try to silence
their own protesters at home.
>From the UN to the IMF to the World Bank, the international institutions that
>attempt to govern the planet were made in the image of the victors of World
>War II. Now power is shifting from West to East, the whole liberal democratic
>world order will face its first serious challenge in decades.
Many fear that things could get ugly.
There is only one thing worse than an unchallenged superpower - it is a
superpower with a victim mentality, which feels the world owes it a favour.
And the bitter truth is that, after centuries of humiliation in foreign
affairs, there is a nationalist mood in China that the country's time has come
again, that it can again claim its rightful place as the world's most powerful
country.
Its comparative weakness over the last few centuries is, in fact, but a blip in
the last 2,000 years, during which China was the world's most economically and
culturally advanced nation.
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The launch of the Tata Nano: The Chinese company has now taken over British
manufactuing giants Land Rover and Jaguar
It is an accident of history that Europeans took advantage of their window of
opportunity in the last half of the second millennium to take over the world.
The cause was a combination of factors such as the development of maritime
technology in Europe, the competition between European countries that drove
them to look outwards and find new ways to increase prosperity, and the fact
China remained firmly locked in its agrarian, introspective past.
Now things have changed, and already the shift in the world economy is starting
to have dramatic effects on migration patterns.
The emigration of poor people from China and India to the West is slowing down,
as their citizens see more hope in their own rapidly advancing nations.
Instead, their expanding middle classes are paying large fees for their
children to enjoy a Western university education, before returning home.
There are now 60,000 Chinese students in Britain, more than from any other
country.
Westerners have become accustomed to being the only tourists in the world's
tourist hotspots, but the Chinese and Indians want to enjoy the fruits of their
labour by expanding their horizons, too.
Chinese tourists are likely to replace American tourists as popular irritants
in Britain, and replace the Germans as competitors for the ski lifts.
As the opportunities flow from West to East, so too do the people.
India is luring the global Indian diaspora back, with laws that would be
judged racist in Britain, offering visas to anyone living in the West with
Indian blood in their veins.
Even some non-Indian Westerners are heading East for opportunities greater than
they find at home.
The West's cultural supremacy is likely to be as challenged as its economic
supremacy.
Under construction: The Chinese Olympic Stadium which will be used this
summer. The event has already attracted huge controversy
As their economic confidence grows, Asians are discovering pride in their
own cultures and are less inclined to mimic Western ones.
There is an infectious confidence in Bollywood, and the price of Chinese
antiques is rocketing as the newly rich Chinese decide they want a slice of
their history. Western culture, like the dollar, will soon find its heyday
behind it.
But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political
Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness,
will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and
their supremacy slipping away.
Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to
have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a
dictatorship.
There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such
as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply
because it will no longer be affordable at present levels.
Western attitudes of superiority to China and the rest of the East will also
subside, as Westerners realise they are no longer the masters of the world.
The U.S. company Orient Express complained when Tata tried to buy it, that any
association with the Indian company would damage the Orient Express's premium
brand.
Responding, R K Krishna Kumar, a senior Tata executive, thundered that "Indian
companies ... will take their rightful place in the international arena.
"Enterprises and individuals must recognise and adapt to these fundamental
economic changes. We believe that those with a fossilised frame of mind risk
being marginalised."
In a world in which we are no longer masters, it is a warning that we ignore at
our peril.
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