THE CHINESE MARATHON
Sanya, Hainan Island, South China Sea. This is China’s Florida, where Chinese Snowbirds escape from freezing their tuches off suffering Beijing’s winter. I am at Howard Johnson’s Sanya Resort eating a cheeseburger and listening to a local rock band playing Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman, singing the lyrics in English.
The place is gigantic with 1,000 rooms, and packed with Chinese – I am the only Westerner here. The band now launches into an enthusiastic Beatles’ Obla-dee-obla-dah, which brings back a flood of memories when I first heard it, dancing with my Hawaiian girlfriend Vonnie at a Honolulu night club in 1969[1].
The Red Guards were rampaging through China back then, egged on by Mao, while millions of Chinese were starving to death. The scene before me now would have been considered a madman’s hallucination in 1969.
Then Mao finally died in 1976, and his successor, Deng Xiao Ping created a "birdcage economy" as the way for China to grow into an economic superpower yet retain a Communist Party monopoly of power.
The Chinese people were allowed to be songbang, unleashed and free to fly around in the cage to make money – but never allowed to escape from the Party’s cage itself. They accepted the bargain offered them – prosperity in exchange for loyalty – and the result was the most massive increase in national wealth in the shortest time in human history.
It has been simply mind-boggling to witness this over the past 36 years since Deng started songbang by telling peasants they could now "grow food and make money."
In January 1979 when I was first in China, it was the Land of the Blue Ants, where everyone (except Party apparatchiks) dressed the same in blue cotton pants, coat and hat, and dreamed of someday having the ultimate luxury of "the three rounds and a sound" – a watch, a bicycle, a sewing machine, and a radio.
Traveling through China today seems like another planet compared to 1979. Especially when you’re at any tourist site surrounded by swarms of Chinese each laden with several thousand dollars’ worth of state of the art cameras, lenses, and hi-tech gear for photos to post on their personal websites.
Yet the constant observation of the TTPers with me on Hidden China III has been the stunning juxtaposition of incredible wealth everywhere – homes, cars, shops, malls, restaurants – right alongside incredible poverty just as ubiquitous – dirt-floor tenements, barefoot farmers plowing fields with oxen, countless thousands of acres of rice and wheat harvested by hand.
Further, there were "ghost projects" all over the place – huge apartment complexes, office buildings, hotels unoccupied and empty – right alongside huge new construction projects building more of the empty same. All evidence of the most gigantic pile of "stranded capital" the world has ever seen, trillions of dollars’ worth.
It’s fully recognized by now that China’s economy has slowed to a crawl. Even Paul Krugman figured that out back in mid-2013 when he wrote in his NYT column that China’s "whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits."
One reason is that the whole skyrocketing economy was built on the sands of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), subsidized to the hilt and comprising over 48% of China’s GDP to this day. Their purpose is to serve the Party’s political objectives, not market forces.
Of the over 90 Chinese companies on Fortune Magazine’s Global 500 list, almost every one is a SOE, with Communist Party Central Committee bureaucrats picking all key SOE executives, most all of whom are military or intelligence officers.
Thus China’s economy is not capitalist, which is based on private property. Six hundred million Chinese farmers, for example, still do not own their land – they can neither buy nor sell it as it’s owned by the State.
Last October, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote about China’s Catch-22 – the impossible contradiction of current leader Xi Jinping’s policies: end the suffocating corruption of the SOEs and leap to a hi-tech consumer society, while at the same time double down on a one-party one-ideology authoritarian state.
And double down he has. Every media outlet in the country is geting a constant stream of directives from the Central Propaganda Department on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing saying what they can and cannot write or talk about. If you disobey, the consequences are exceedingly unpleasant.
Week before last (3/05), Ambrose wrote about China’s Fiscal Cliff – the economy is in virtual recession, and more credit will just be pushing on a string.
This means the bargain between the Chicoms and the Chinese people – greater economic freedom for little or no political freedom – is breaking down. The Party needs a new rationale for its monopoly of political power – and has found it in that most lethal of tyrant excuses, jingoistic nationalism and demonization of a foreign devil.
Guess who that is. That’s why at least 16 spy units of the Peoples Liberation Army composed of hundreds of thousands of computer hackers are waging constant unrelenting cyberwarfare against the Pentagon, US defense contractors and corporations.
One of the units, called Hidden Lynx, specializes in attacking tech companies like Google and Apple. Others specialize in stealing intellectual property.
Which brings me to what I’m looking at right now. Sanya is a beach resort on the sea – so as I’m listening to the lady singer of the band croon the Shirelles’ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, I’m looking out over the South China Sea.
I’ve been writing about the South China Sea for years – such as in the HFR from last August which has this map:
Note where Hainan is. Sanya is at the southern tip of the island – and right nearby is a major submarine base of the PLA Navy. As you can see, China claims the entire sea as its own territorial waters.
This comes as no surprise once you understand the way the Chicoms see the world. This was first explained over 10 years ago in The Tyranny of China’s History (December 2004):
Duping oneself into thinking that history is actually repeating itself in any given context is an incredible mistake – and very dangerous when the context is the national security and military strategy of one’s country.
Specifically, the geniuses who run China’s military believe that the "Warring States Era" or Chan-Kuo experienced by China from 475 to 221 BC is being repeated today on a global stage. Typical is the assertion of the head of China’s National Defense University’s Strategy Department, Liu Chungzi, that the world today is "amazingly similar" to Chan-Kuo.
So – a collection of seven barbarian tyrannies led by petty warlords (the "states" of Han, Wu, Zhao, Chu, Chi, Yan, and Chin) thousands of years ago all trying to bloodily conquer each other for no other reason than lust for power, in a world totally lacking in individual freedom and democracy (remember: there has never been a war between two genuine democracies), nor international law and organizations applying treaties and rules accepted by nations world-wide, is "amazingly similar" to America’s War on Terrorism and our contemporary "clash of civilizations."
The repetition of history, Chunzi and his colleagues argue, is that the most powerful of the seven warring states at the beginning (Wu) ended up the biggest loser, while the weakest at the start (Chin) won out at the end, with Chin warlord Shihuangdi becoming China’s first Emperor and bestowing the name "China" upon the unified country. Thus mighty America will eventually succumb to China.
Believe it or not, this is the way these guys think. What’s "amazingly similar" is how their minds run in the same ruts as the warlords of millennia ago. Foreign countries are rivals to be conquered or made to submit: not just America, but Russia, Japan, and India.
Just last month (February 2015), Mike Pillsbury, whom I knew back in the Reagan days and is now head of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Chinese Strategy, has written an entire book expanding on this "repetition of the Warring States" Chicom thinking: The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.
Pillsbury’s marathon is the 100 years between the founding of Chicom China by Mao in 1949 and 2049, by which time they plan to have replaced America. The evidence he amasses for the Chicoms’ fanatically pursuing this strategy is impressive.
One aspect of this Chinese Marathon I wish Mike had discussed, however, is the complete dovetailing of the Warring States meme with the Chicom’s Marxist view of how reality works.
As discussed in Marx and Mohammed (September 2005):
That reality is contradictory is the basic tenet of Dialectical Materialism – the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – and of philosophical Islam, for which it is blasphemous to claim Allah is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction as that would limit and bind him in the chains of logic.
If reality is contradictory and logic is an illusion, then you are left with only one way to resolve conflicts and disagreements: violently. For Marxists and Moslems, change in the world consists of contradictory opposing forces – exploiters and exploited, believers and infidels – overcoming or being overcome.
Thus both Marx and Mohammed are advocates of apocalyptic totalitarianism.
For both, "nothing is private," as in Lenin’s famous dictum. The state, whether under the Communist "dictatorship of the proletariat" or Islamic Shari’a law, has the moral right and duty to control every aspect of an individual’s life.
For both, there are no moral absolutes: morality is whatever serves to further the interests of the exploited over the exploiters, the believers over the infidels. To assert the end does not justify the means is "bourgeois morality" for Marxists, a perverse denial of the Will of Allah for Moslems.
For both, the only moral question is: Who conquers whom? Kto-Kovo? as Lenin asked, Who-Whom? For both, reality is zero-sum with no compromise, no mutual cooperation between proletariat and bourgeois or believers and infidels to mutual benefit. For one to win, the other must lose. There can be no other way.
So it is with the Chicoms – the Warring States had to fight each other for centuries until one dominated and subjugated all the others. Just look at their claim of the entire South China Sea. No sharing, no cooperation, no compromise, just they win and everybody must bow down and lose.
That was the Soviet mentality as well, of course. With the adoption of the Reagan Doctrine, President Reagan decided to apply their Win-Lose rules against them. Thus the Cold War was won with the actual extinction of the Soviet Union as a nation-state.
This is not going to happen with China, which has existed for over 2,000 years and has a homogenous Han Chinese population of well over a billion people who are smart, ruthless, and determined (there are some 200 million non-Han, divided into dozens of "ethnic minorities"). With Chicom China, we are up against an opponent vastly more serious and dangerous than Russia.
Yes, Chicom China has serious weaknesses and vulnerabilities which we can exploit. One direction of China that’s greatly in our favor is towards Christianity, which we should obviously do everything to encourage.
It may turn out, however, that the key level on which the China vs. America game is played is philosophical. That is, we have to convince Chinese that playing win-win is in their interests, rather than win-lose. That’s hard to do if you insist on a monopoly of power and will do anything to maintain it.
So we have to shame them into doing it. China, you see, has been from time immemorial a shame culture. We, along with most Western cultures, are a guilt culture. Our morality is private based on conscience, what you think of yourself; theirs is public based on humiliation or recognition, what others think of you. The Chinese call this "face."
Chicoms feel they can tell any lie however bald-faced, demand everyone accede to it, and have a temper tantrum if you deny it. We have to shrug their temper tantrums off and not give a damn about their face.
In countless speeches in public fora like the UN, they are always proclaiming how they are cooperative and "win-win." We must respond that we don’t care about what they say, we only care about what they do. They must act win-win – such as start sharing the South China Sea with the other nations that border it and stop behaving like children in Kindergarten who haven’t learned to share.
We must do this relentlessly at every opportunity – plus make a constant honest effort to get them to grasp the concept of win-win, of mutual benefit instead of reality being necessarily adversarial.
A world dominated by a Chicom China would be an awful place. A world in which a strong prosperous America and China both exist and get along is possible — especially if Chicom China starts morphing into Christian China.
That second possibility is the goal of the marathon we should be running. We’ll need leadership the precise opposite of what we have now, so let’s make sure we get it in 22 months. Then we need to gear up for a long marathon with China – a race that neither of us has to lose.
[1] . Vonnie, with whom I started Students for Laissez-Faire back in 1968 at the University of Hawaii, has become an internationally recognized artist of extraordinary talent. She has taken "photo-realism" to a whole new level. Her paintings look like photographs from a distance, but a gifted painting close up. View her paintings of the Fine Art of Realism at vonniebrennocameron.com.
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