g-Think | Issue 16 | The Fear of China

Just as the fear of the Soviet Union’s rise and reach was deeply embedded in the U.S. national psyche in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s, the same thing is occurring now. This time it’s China that’s the object of the fear. Most people are familiar with the sobering statistics: sometime in the 2020s, China’s total GDP will overtake that of the United States. And, depending on whose statistics you trust, China has just overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of harmful carbon dioxide. The scary thing is that (depending on where you’re coming from) China has only just begun its long march to middle-class consumer nirvana. All the things we love, the Chinese will want too, and who’s to deny them?

While China’s per capita GDP will take several decades to catch up to U.S. levels, the fact that as an economic unit China will outstrip the United States in just a few short years is a sobering thought. The entire ball game will be different. The power stakes for the United States couldn’t be higher. We will have to get used to another superpower breathing down our neck. Our influence, our reach and our ability to sway world opinion will be (and are now) impacted by China’s inexorable rise.

While China’s insatiable hunger for raw materials, technology and know-how is now obvious, less clear are the mechanisms contributing to this surging growth. James Kynge, in his insightful book China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation, helps explain all this and focuses a lot of his attention on U.S. (and other Western) consumers. He postulates that for years the United States and China have been in a symbiotic relationship: American consumers’ craving for ever more “stuff” at cheaper prices has meant that “local jobs went out to China and returned in the form of cheap manufactured goods, which were bought by the very people who had paid with their jobs in the first place.”

All this points to a profound knowledge gap among U.S. consumers: we want the stuff, but we don’t realize the inevitable loss of power and prestige (both economic and political) that this insatiable consumer demand is helping bring about.

A similar process is at work with the fear of global climate change. Fingers are pointing to China (and to India) as the monsters du jour when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. But what’s actually happening is that the United States is “exporting” much of these greenhouse gas emissions to China. China is manufacturing the consumer goods that we are gobbling up.

And another sobering thought: In 2001, Americans consumed more than eleven times as much oil per person as their Chinese counterparts (despite the fact that so much of our manufacturing base has gone to China). According to Kynge, “If the Chinese were ever to consume as much oil per person as in the United States, they would need to guzzle more than three times the world’s total consumption.” Now that is a truly scary thought.

Kynge, who is an award-wining journalist and long-term resident of China, has written a vivid and enlightening account of China’s rise to the status of economic superpower. His accounts of the explosive growth of the country’s cities and massive environmental degradation paint a picture of growth out of control—a headlong rush into the future that is “changing how the world works.” Just a few weeks ago, China stated that it would not sacrifice economic growth for reductions in CO2 emissions. This is perhaps the biggest clue yet as to what our future will be.