What do you think?
Rate this book
China
This book offers an unique authoritative view of the development of China as a threat over 40 years.The astonishing and long predicted rise of China requires a point of view that takes in both the Maoist and modern Chinese politics. George Walden was one of the few Western diplomats in China in 1964 who spoke Chinese. In this powerful book, he shows how to understand that China's point of view is always long-term - in 1950 Mao warned Russia that its policies would bring the collapse of Soviet communism. We compare the country to Britain or the United States at our peril. The Chinese juggernaut that has launched on to the world stage is without any precedent in human history. Every year 30 million Chinese people move to the cities, and the cities themselves are the size of nations; Shanghai is larger than Japan. The only way to grasp what our future with China is going to be like for the next 30 years is to describe it on its own terms.
- GenresChina
Paperback
First published July 3, 2008
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 13, 2012
Walden has 40 years experience with China, beginning in the 60’s. He lived in the country and visited often after that. He speaks Chinese. He experienced China as a diplomat, an MP, an education minister, a journalist , a writer and a tourist. I would say his opinions are lucid. He witnessed the cultural revolution personally. While not overly pessimistic himself, he is critical of those with romantic illusions about Mao China.
“And yet there was a comic side. Were the results for the Chinese not so tragic it would be easy to write off much of the Cultural Revolution as burlesque propaganda. One example. I am the possessor of a wax mango, bought in Beijing in 1968, whose origin is as surreal as its design: beautifully modeled, it could be mistaken for the genuine thing except that, the Chinese being unfamiliar with mangoes at the time, pips rattle when you shake it.
The reason I bought it was that 1968 was the height of Mao Zedong’s personality cult, and a series of weird occurrences the mango had become his symbol. In August of that year the Foreign Minister of Pakistan…visited Beijing and presented Mao with several boxes of mangoes. Mao asked his bodyguard to distribute them to workers who had recently occupied the Qing Hua University campus, in an attempt to unify warring Maoist factions. Students were killing and maiming one another with home made spears and guns….
When the workers left the campus a mango was presented to each of their factories. Since Mao’s refusal to eat them was seen as a personal sacrifice to the proletariat attempts were made to preserve the sanctified fruits as relics by placing them in formaldehyde and displaying them as shrines. Workers filed past, bowing. At the Beijing Textile Factory the fruit rotted beneath a wax coating. It was peeled and boiled and workers filed by to drink a spoonful of water.
Similar scenes occurred throughout China as facsimile mangoes toured the country in “Mango trucks”. As well as being seen as a sacred relic there was also popular interest in what a mango looked like. In a town in Sichuan province Dr. Han, a dentist, was heard to remark that the fruit was nothing special, and resembled a sweet potato. He was arrested as a counter-revolutionary and paraded through the street on the back of a lorry before being taken outside the town and killed with a single shot to the head.”
(Have things changed so much? I can’t remember if it was the toothpaste guy or the dog food guy, but that merchant was executed.)
Mao was responsible for the deaths of @ 70 million people. By contrast the total number of people (military and civilian) killed in WWII was about 36 million. Lenin and Stalin look like good guys compared to Mao.
“The Cultural revolution shattered all sense of human decency, and left China with hollowed out values, a social and political shell. The moral vacuum it induced has been filled with a ferocious egotism, ruthless materialism, and a deeply unsentimental society. China’s period of heroic poverty was never heroic for the untold millions who hungered or starved to death, and in any case it is over. The brutalities of the capitalistic Great Leap Forward we are seeing today are evidence enough of that”. p.179
Walden has concerns about China, not least that it wasn't so very long ago that they were bonkers (to use a technical term). But he mostly seems to think war can be avoided.
I do not feel sanguine about China. The title of the book begs the question will China be a “wolf" in the world? I think so. I don’t think it bodes well for America to be a slave to China. (The borrower is the slave to the lender) China feels they should be number one on the planet and the only thing in their way is the US. China is going around the world buying off two bit dictators to get control of resources. They have no compunction about stealing intellectual property rights and have hacked into everything. The damage already is beyond what most people can imagine.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fea...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/amer...
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtrib...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/1...
http://www.wnd.com/2007/11/44681/
Our leaders seem to be quite cavalier when it comes to trusting the Chinese with national security issues. Remember the port deal the serfs had to stop? The plan with the Nafta super hwy is to off-load Chinese containers at a deep water port in Mexico (Americans make too much money). Containers won’t be inspected just given bar codes that will be scanned as containers are shipped into the country. What could go wrong?! It’s possible to bribe a Mexican with 25 cents. The government in Mexico is neck and neck with the cartels. Already shipments of guns from China headed to gangs in LA were accidentally discovered. I’d say just about anything will be getting into the country after this system is set up.
http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39197/
It’s nice to think it was American money that built China. For now they can’t kill us outright. (All it would take is dumping the dollar.) There were riots in China at the beginning of our financial crisis when orders were cancelled. Workers trashing offices and smashing computers because they were losing their jobs was certainly noted. As the dollar continues to lose value the Chinese are going to want something for their money. They are buying into banks and companies. And even parts of states now. I don’t see things improving on the American side of the equation because the money power in our country is determined to kill the middle class.
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-...
As a further caution against expecting to see China clamber onto the international stage like some amiable giant panda, it is worth posing a simple question: what modern example is there of a newly powerful nation, or in China’s case an old one re-born, failing to assert itself in a forceful way, especially if it had colonial and cultural scores to settle, as China does? P250
“Is the West in for trouble? If we put the question the other way around-will China’s integration into global affairs run smoothly?-the answer appears obvious. Given the historical and racial background, and the way others have behaved before them, how can we expect the Chinese to refrain from the misuse of their economic power in their national interest? If they were to do so it would be a first for the world.” P.268
China does have significant problems. “The Coming China Wars” covers those more comprehensively. It is interesting that even in China their globalists are a force for evil.
“Zhao Ziyang By the time of his death in 2005, however, he feared that a corporate elite now ran China, a tight-knit group that would defend its own interest to the last. Nor was he sanguine about a younger generation of managers: even leaders who have studied abroad and been influenced by the West had been ‘co-opted into this mutual interest group made part of the power elite.” P.183
"It is amazing how often in supposedly egalitarian, meritocratic China top people turnout to be someone’s son or daughter. 90% of the richest Chinese are said to the offspring of Party cadres and government servants." P.188 (amazing?!)
I think Mark Steyn makes a cogent point in his book “After America”. It is wise to consider the character of the country most likely to replace us as the dominant power.
“But, as noted earlier, when money drains so does power-and very quickly, as the British learned after World War II. Today, money is draining across the Pacific. China Minmetals is a fortune 500 company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic. By the way read that sentence again and imagine what an H.G. Well’s time traveler from the early Sixties, from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution , would make of it. Yet in the fortune Top Ten there are three Chinese companies against two from the United States. And China Minmetals is serious business: they own the Northern Peru Copper Company in Canada, and the Golden Grove copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold mines in Western Australia, and the mining rights to a huge percentage of Jamaican bauxite. China’s Sinopec bought up Calgary’s Addax petroleum and 9 percent of the Alberta oil sands business Syncrude, and have massively expanded oil production and development and development in Sudan and Ethiopia. China’s Sinochem took over Britain’s’ Emerald Energy. You remember all the “No Blood for Oil” chants back in 2003? Relax, it’s our blood, their oil. The biggest foreign investor in post-war Iraq is the developer of the Ahdab oil field, the China National Petroleum Corporation.
Think of it as the first settlers did vis a vis the Indians: the ChiComs sell us trinkets in exchange for our resources. Lenin boasted the “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” His fellow communists in Beijing inverted the strategy to lethal effect: they sell us the rope, and sit back to watch us hang ourselves.
And, where money flows, power follows. Having turned resource nations in Africa into defacto protectorates, China has moved on to the developed world, and bailed out Portugal for $100 billion in exchange for significant stakes in their national utility companies. Beijing is also the biggest foreign investor in post-bailout General Motors: they bought 18 percent of the Obama administrations IPO in 2010. If the Obama approved Chevy volt isn’t environmentally friendly enough for you, wait for the Chevy Rickshaw. Can you still as Dinah Shore sang, see the USA in your Chevrolet? The Chinese can.
Like America, China has structural defects. It’s a dictatorship whose authoritarian policies have crippled its human capital. It has too many oldsters and not enough youth, and among its youth it has millions surplus boys and no girls for them to marry. If China were the inevitable successor to America as global hegemon, that would be one thing. But the fact that it is incapable of playing at that role is likely to make things even messier, more unpredictable, and far more destabilizing. P.100-101
("The surest way to overthrow an existing social order is to debauch the currency." Lenin )
As always, Britain’s’ decline started with the money. When Europe fell into war in 1939, FDR was willing to help London fight it, but he was determined to exact a price: not just a bit of quid pro quo (American base rights in British colonies) but a serious financial and geopolitical squeeze. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended in September 1946. London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during a war fast fading from living memory. Look at how Britain shrank during those six decades. In 1942, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” But in the end he had no choice. The money drained to Washington, and power and influence followed.
In terms of global order, the Anglo-American transition was so adroitly managed that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place. Some scholars like to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943. One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next, the American had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised-although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: to take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base-just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: from U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance Down Under to Canadian officers at Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with it’s empire were assumed by the United States, and life and global order went on.
…Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, same legal inheritance, and same commitment to liberty, is one of the least disruptive transfers of global dominance ever.
Think it’s likely to go that way next time ‘round? By 2027 (according to Goldman Sachs) or 2016 (according to the IMF), the world’s leading economy will be a Communist dictatorship whose legal, political, and cultural tradition are as foreign to its predecessors as could be devised. Even more civilizationally startling, unlike the Americans, British, Dutch, and Italians before them, the pre-eminent economic power will be a country that doesn’t use the Roman Alphabet.
They have our soul who have our bonds and the world was more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later. Britain’s eclipse by its wayward son was a changing of the guard, not a razing of the palace, By contrast, the fall of America would mark the end of a two-century Anglophone dominance of geopolitics, of trade, of the global currency (sterling, and then the dollar), and of a world whose order and prosperity most people think of as part of a broad universal march of progress but which in fact, derives from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it.
According to Lawrence Summers, America and China exist in a financial “balance of terror”- or, in Cold war terms, on a trigger of Mutually Assured Destruction. You could have said the same for London and Washington in March of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, back when Lend-Lease began. Without American money and material, Britain and the Commonwealth would have been defeated. On the other hand, if Britain and the commonwealth had collapsed, German-Japanese world domination would not have proved terribly congenial to the United States, not least the Vichy regimes in Ottawa and the Caribbean. But, as the British learned, and balance shifts over time-and so does influence: by 1950, for Britannia’s lion cubs in Canada and Australia, getting a friendly ear in Washington mattered more than one in London.
The Sino-American “balance of terror” is already shifting, and fast. By 2010, China was funding and building ports in Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. They, too, are Britannia’s lion cubs, part of London’s Indian Empire. Yet all four went from outposts of the British Raj to pit-stops on Chinese manufacturing‘s globalization superhighway within a mere sixty years. Ascendant powers take advantage of declining ones: FDR and his successors used Lend-Lease and the wartime alliance to appropriate much of the geopolitical infrastructure built by Britain. China, in turn, will do the same to the United States-initially for trade purposes, but eventually for much more. Here’s just a few things London didn’t have to worry about Washington doing: In recent years, Beijing has engaged in widespread intellectual-property theft and industrial espionage against the West; attempted multiple cyber-attacks on America’s military and commercial computer systems; blinded U.S. satellites with lasers; supplied arms to the Taliban; helped North Korea deliver missiles to Iran and Pakistan; assisted Teheran with it’s nuclear program; and actively cooperated in a growing worldwide nuclear black market.
In response, American “realists” keep telling themselves: Never mind, economic liberalization will force China to democratize, Lather, rinse, repeat.
If there is any single event that marked the end of Britain as an imperial power of global reach, it’s the Suez Crisis of 1956. Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and London intervened militarily, with the French and Israelis, to protect what it saw as a vital strategic interest, a critical supply line to and from the Asian and Pacific members of the Commonwealth. In the biggest single disagreement between Britain and America since the Second World War, Washington opposed the invasion. We can argue another day about what prompted Nasser to seize the canal and whether the American reading of the situation helped lead to the late twentieth-century fetid “stability” of the Middle East and, among other things, 9/11. But for now just concentrate on one single feature-what Eisenhower opted to do to the Brits once he’d decided to scuttle the Suez operation. He ordered his Treasury Secretary to prepare to sell part of the U.S. Government’s Sterling Bond holdings (that is, the World War II debt). (bankers came up with this plan!)
In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, reported to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, that Britain could not survive such an action by Washington. The sell-off would prompt a run on the pound, and economic collapse, very quickly. Britain, humiliated, withdrew from Suez, and from global power.
It starts with the money, but it won’t end there. It never does.
And this was the friendliest shift of global hegemony-the one between family, from an elderly patriarch to its greatest scion, two great powers speaking the same language and with a compatible worldview.
…Next time round is already under way. And one day Washington will be on the receiving end of Beijing’s Suez moment.”
Yes, I did get carried away with this review!
“And yet there was a comic side. Were the results for the Chinese not so tragic it would be easy to write off much of the Cultural Revolution as burlesque propaganda. One example. I am the possessor of a wax mango, bought in Beijing in 1968, whose origin is as surreal as its design: beautifully modeled, it could be mistaken for the genuine thing except that, the Chinese being unfamiliar with mangoes at the time, pips rattle when you shake it.
The reason I bought it was that 1968 was the height of Mao Zedong’s personality cult, and a series of weird occurrences the mango had become his symbol. In August of that year the Foreign Minister of Pakistan…visited Beijing and presented Mao with several boxes of mangoes. Mao asked his bodyguard to distribute them to workers who had recently occupied the Qing Hua University campus, in an attempt to unify warring Maoist factions. Students were killing and maiming one another with home made spears and guns….
When the workers left the campus a mango was presented to each of their factories. Since Mao’s refusal to eat them was seen as a personal sacrifice to the proletariat attempts were made to preserve the sanctified fruits as relics by placing them in formaldehyde and displaying them as shrines. Workers filed past, bowing. At the Beijing Textile Factory the fruit rotted beneath a wax coating. It was peeled and boiled and workers filed by to drink a spoonful of water.
Similar scenes occurred throughout China as facsimile mangoes toured the country in “Mango trucks”. As well as being seen as a sacred relic there was also popular interest in what a mango looked like. In a town in Sichuan province Dr. Han, a dentist, was heard to remark that the fruit was nothing special, and resembled a sweet potato. He was arrested as a counter-revolutionary and paraded through the street on the back of a lorry before being taken outside the town and killed with a single shot to the head.”
(Have things changed so much? I can’t remember if it was the toothpaste guy or the dog food guy, but that merchant was executed.)
Mao was responsible for the deaths of @ 70 million people. By contrast the total number of people (military and civilian) killed in WWII was about 36 million. Lenin and Stalin look like good guys compared to Mao.
“The Cultural revolution shattered all sense of human decency, and left China with hollowed out values, a social and political shell. The moral vacuum it induced has been filled with a ferocious egotism, ruthless materialism, and a deeply unsentimental society. China’s period of heroic poverty was never heroic for the untold millions who hungered or starved to death, and in any case it is over. The brutalities of the capitalistic Great Leap Forward we are seeing today are evidence enough of that”. p.179
Walden has concerns about China, not least that it wasn't so very long ago that they were bonkers (to use a technical term). But he mostly seems to think war can be avoided.
I do not feel sanguine about China. The title of the book begs the question will China be a “wolf" in the world? I think so. I don’t think it bodes well for America to be a slave to China. (The borrower is the slave to the lender) China feels they should be number one on the planet and the only thing in their way is the US. China is going around the world buying off two bit dictators to get control of resources. They have no compunction about stealing intellectual property rights and have hacked into everything. The damage already is beyond what most people can imagine.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fea...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/amer...
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtrib...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/1...
http://www.wnd.com/2007/11/44681/
Our leaders seem to be quite cavalier when it comes to trusting the Chinese with national security issues. Remember the port deal the serfs had to stop? The plan with the Nafta super hwy is to off-load Chinese containers at a deep water port in Mexico (Americans make too much money). Containers won’t be inspected just given bar codes that will be scanned as containers are shipped into the country. What could go wrong?! It’s possible to bribe a Mexican with 25 cents. The government in Mexico is neck and neck with the cartels. Already shipments of guns from China headed to gangs in LA were accidentally discovered. I’d say just about anything will be getting into the country after this system is set up.
http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39197/
It’s nice to think it was American money that built China. For now they can’t kill us outright. (All it would take is dumping the dollar.) There were riots in China at the beginning of our financial crisis when orders were cancelled. Workers trashing offices and smashing computers because they were losing their jobs was certainly noted. As the dollar continues to lose value the Chinese are going to want something for their money. They are buying into banks and companies. And even parts of states now. I don’t see things improving on the American side of the equation because the money power in our country is determined to kill the middle class.
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-...
As a further caution against expecting to see China clamber onto the international stage like some amiable giant panda, it is worth posing a simple question: what modern example is there of a newly powerful nation, or in China’s case an old one re-born, failing to assert itself in a forceful way, especially if it had colonial and cultural scores to settle, as China does? P250
“Is the West in for trouble? If we put the question the other way around-will China’s integration into global affairs run smoothly?-the answer appears obvious. Given the historical and racial background, and the way others have behaved before them, how can we expect the Chinese to refrain from the misuse of their economic power in their national interest? If they were to do so it would be a first for the world.” P.268
China does have significant problems. “The Coming China Wars” covers those more comprehensively. It is interesting that even in China their globalists are a force for evil.
“Zhao Ziyang By the time of his death in 2005, however, he feared that a corporate elite now ran China, a tight-knit group that would defend its own interest to the last. Nor was he sanguine about a younger generation of managers: even leaders who have studied abroad and been influenced by the West had been ‘co-opted into this mutual interest group made part of the power elite.” P.183
"It is amazing how often in supposedly egalitarian, meritocratic China top people turnout to be someone’s son or daughter. 90% of the richest Chinese are said to the offspring of Party cadres and government servants." P.188 (amazing?!)
I think Mark Steyn makes a cogent point in his book “After America”. It is wise to consider the character of the country most likely to replace us as the dominant power.
“But, as noted earlier, when money drains so does power-and very quickly, as the British learned after World War II. Today, money is draining across the Pacific. China Minmetals is a fortune 500 company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic. By the way read that sentence again and imagine what an H.G. Well’s time traveler from the early Sixties, from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution , would make of it. Yet in the fortune Top Ten there are three Chinese companies against two from the United States. And China Minmetals is serious business: they own the Northern Peru Copper Company in Canada, and the Golden Grove copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold mines in Western Australia, and the mining rights to a huge percentage of Jamaican bauxite. China’s Sinopec bought up Calgary’s Addax petroleum and 9 percent of the Alberta oil sands business Syncrude, and have massively expanded oil production and development and development in Sudan and Ethiopia. China’s Sinochem took over Britain’s’ Emerald Energy. You remember all the “No Blood for Oil” chants back in 2003? Relax, it’s our blood, their oil. The biggest foreign investor in post-war Iraq is the developer of the Ahdab oil field, the China National Petroleum Corporation.
Think of it as the first settlers did vis a vis the Indians: the ChiComs sell us trinkets in exchange for our resources. Lenin boasted the “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” His fellow communists in Beijing inverted the strategy to lethal effect: they sell us the rope, and sit back to watch us hang ourselves.
And, where money flows, power follows. Having turned resource nations in Africa into defacto protectorates, China has moved on to the developed world, and bailed out Portugal for $100 billion in exchange for significant stakes in their national utility companies. Beijing is also the biggest foreign investor in post-bailout General Motors: they bought 18 percent of the Obama administrations IPO in 2010. If the Obama approved Chevy volt isn’t environmentally friendly enough for you, wait for the Chevy Rickshaw. Can you still as Dinah Shore sang, see the USA in your Chevrolet? The Chinese can.
Like America, China has structural defects. It’s a dictatorship whose authoritarian policies have crippled its human capital. It has too many oldsters and not enough youth, and among its youth it has millions surplus boys and no girls for them to marry. If China were the inevitable successor to America as global hegemon, that would be one thing. But the fact that it is incapable of playing at that role is likely to make things even messier, more unpredictable, and far more destabilizing. P.100-101
("The surest way to overthrow an existing social order is to debauch the currency." Lenin )
As always, Britain’s’ decline started with the money. When Europe fell into war in 1939, FDR was willing to help London fight it, but he was determined to exact a price: not just a bit of quid pro quo (American base rights in British colonies) but a serious financial and geopolitical squeeze. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended in September 1946. London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during a war fast fading from living memory. Look at how Britain shrank during those six decades. In 1942, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” But in the end he had no choice. The money drained to Washington, and power and influence followed.
In terms of global order, the Anglo-American transition was so adroitly managed that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place. Some scholars like to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943. One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next, the American had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised-although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: to take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base-just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: from U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance Down Under to Canadian officers at Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with it’s empire were assumed by the United States, and life and global order went on.
…Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, same legal inheritance, and same commitment to liberty, is one of the least disruptive transfers of global dominance ever.
Think it’s likely to go that way next time ‘round? By 2027 (according to Goldman Sachs) or 2016 (according to the IMF), the world’s leading economy will be a Communist dictatorship whose legal, political, and cultural tradition are as foreign to its predecessors as could be devised. Even more civilizationally startling, unlike the Americans, British, Dutch, and Italians before them, the pre-eminent economic power will be a country that doesn’t use the Roman Alphabet.
They have our soul who have our bonds and the world was more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later. Britain’s eclipse by its wayward son was a changing of the guard, not a razing of the palace, By contrast, the fall of America would mark the end of a two-century Anglophone dominance of geopolitics, of trade, of the global currency (sterling, and then the dollar), and of a world whose order and prosperity most people think of as part of a broad universal march of progress but which in fact, derives from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it.
According to Lawrence Summers, America and China exist in a financial “balance of terror”- or, in Cold war terms, on a trigger of Mutually Assured Destruction. You could have said the same for London and Washington in March of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, back when Lend-Lease began. Without American money and material, Britain and the Commonwealth would have been defeated. On the other hand, if Britain and the commonwealth had collapsed, German-Japanese world domination would not have proved terribly congenial to the United States, not least the Vichy regimes in Ottawa and the Caribbean. But, as the British learned, and balance shifts over time-and so does influence: by 1950, for Britannia’s lion cubs in Canada and Australia, getting a friendly ear in Washington mattered more than one in London.
The Sino-American “balance of terror” is already shifting, and fast. By 2010, China was funding and building ports in Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. They, too, are Britannia’s lion cubs, part of London’s Indian Empire. Yet all four went from outposts of the British Raj to pit-stops on Chinese manufacturing‘s globalization superhighway within a mere sixty years. Ascendant powers take advantage of declining ones: FDR and his successors used Lend-Lease and the wartime alliance to appropriate much of the geopolitical infrastructure built by Britain. China, in turn, will do the same to the United States-initially for trade purposes, but eventually for much more. Here’s just a few things London didn’t have to worry about Washington doing: In recent years, Beijing has engaged in widespread intellectual-property theft and industrial espionage against the West; attempted multiple cyber-attacks on America’s military and commercial computer systems; blinded U.S. satellites with lasers; supplied arms to the Taliban; helped North Korea deliver missiles to Iran and Pakistan; assisted Teheran with it’s nuclear program; and actively cooperated in a growing worldwide nuclear black market.
In response, American “realists” keep telling themselves: Never mind, economic liberalization will force China to democratize, Lather, rinse, repeat.
If there is any single event that marked the end of Britain as an imperial power of global reach, it’s the Suez Crisis of 1956. Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and London intervened militarily, with the French and Israelis, to protect what it saw as a vital strategic interest, a critical supply line to and from the Asian and Pacific members of the Commonwealth. In the biggest single disagreement between Britain and America since the Second World War, Washington opposed the invasion. We can argue another day about what prompted Nasser to seize the canal and whether the American reading of the situation helped lead to the late twentieth-century fetid “stability” of the Middle East and, among other things, 9/11. But for now just concentrate on one single feature-what Eisenhower opted to do to the Brits once he’d decided to scuttle the Suez operation. He ordered his Treasury Secretary to prepare to sell part of the U.S. Government’s Sterling Bond holdings (that is, the World War II debt). (bankers came up with this plan!)
In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, reported to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, that Britain could not survive such an action by Washington. The sell-off would prompt a run on the pound, and economic collapse, very quickly. Britain, humiliated, withdrew from Suez, and from global power.
It starts with the money, but it won’t end there. It never does.
And this was the friendliest shift of global hegemony-the one between family, from an elderly patriarch to its greatest scion, two great powers speaking the same language and with a compatible worldview.
…Next time round is already under way. And one day Washington will be on the receiving end of Beijing’s Suez moment.”
Yes, I did get carried away with this review!
May 25, 2015
Excellent book. A real treat.
November 6, 2021
This is not a good book by many different measures. The structure of the book is randomly derived, it reads like he simply wrote a few essays and then mashed them together.
He doesnt really bother referencing anything and the entire book reads more like a very long opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph as opposed to a serious piece of literature.
He makes the same points over and over again without really elucidating things any further. He accuses everyone of things he himself is clearly guilty of. It's a waste of time. Don't bother reading it, you'll get just as much from reading a Telegraph Op Ed on China and it will be much shorter and less repetitive.
He doesnt really bother referencing anything and the entire book reads more like a very long opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph as opposed to a serious piece of literature.
He makes the same points over and over again without really elucidating things any further. He accuses everyone of things he himself is clearly guilty of. It's a waste of time. Don't bother reading it, you'll get just as much from reading a Telegraph Op Ed on China and it will be much shorter and less repetitive.
September 6, 2013
This is a very authoritative, well written and researched book, as it should be since the author is a sinologist of some standing. Walden takes a broad brush to the culture, politics and economic factors of China today and how it was in Maoist times, looking at amongst other things sexuality, history, foreign policy and foreigners views of China through the prism of a young and mature student.
There is some discussion of ancient China but it is more in relation to modern times and attitudes which Walden claims are intrinsic to the Chinese.
If you are wanting to develop your knowledge about the people and government of this country and where they may be heading in the future you cannot go too wrong with this book.
There is some discussion of ancient China but it is more in relation to modern times and attitudes which Walden claims are intrinsic to the Chinese.
If you are wanting to develop your knowledge about the people and government of this country and where they may be heading in the future you cannot go too wrong with this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews