Defining China: A Rising, Fragile Global Power. Forbes

Golez: I quote from the article, to help us understand China better as a society and state:

Defining China: A Rising, Fragile Global Power

Jean-Pierre Lehmann

CONTRIBUTOR

“THE ESSENCE OF TODAY’S CHINA

“The best (not suggesting it’s perfect) way I can think of is to define China as a rising global power with great ambitions, but fragile in many ways.

“A rising global power is beyond debate. It is present economically in virtually every nook and cranny of the planet. It has a growing military arsenal and expansionary ambitions – the South China Sea and increasingly the Indian Ocean. It is a nuclear power. It has a grand vision, recently articulated in the New Silk Road – inelegantly referred to as One Belt-One Road.

“But it is fragile. Its power is almost exclusively hard; its soft power is weak. It has territorial disputes with virtually all its neighbors. The strained ties with Taiwan and Hong Kong are at the very least an irritant, possibly more. The country that it was counting most upon to be its gateway to the European Union – a bit like Hong Kong was in the past the gateway to China – was the United Kingdom and now it’s gone and left the EU.

“China is rich in gross domestic product, but poor in resources, compared to its needs.

“To cite the most critical example: China has 18 per cent of the world’s population, but 7 per cent of its arable land. Ensuring not just food supply but equally importantly food security is an obsession in Beijing that is absent in the capitals of the other global powers, notably Washington.

“China has many internal contradictions. It may be relatively politically stable now. But how long can the CCP remain in power? No one dictatorial party has had a lifespan of more than 75 years, for example, the CCCP in the Soviet Union (74 years) or the PRI in Mexico (71 years).

“There is internal factionalism. Probably the most important question about the CCP is whether it can sustain political power if it cannot sustain economic growth. The environmental disaster question cannot be ignored.

“Then there are the generation gaps. A Chinese my age (70) has had a brutal existence: the end of the devastating war with Japan, then the Civil War, then the Liberation and all the purges that followed, then the Great Leap Forward, followed closely by the Cultural Revolution. So all that my Chinese contemporaries want is peace and stability.

“The upcoming millennial generations, however, have experiences that are totally different in virtually every respect, and have different expectations.

The differences are notable in respect to siblings: A Chinese my generation is likely to have had seven or even eight brothers and sisters, half of whom, perhaps more, died young. China is witnessing the rise of a generation of which almost all were single children. (I strongly recommend an excellent book on this subject: Wish Lanterns: Young Lives In New China by Alec Ash.)

“The Chinese Millennial Generation
The Chinese Millennial Generation

“Whether these demographics make China more or less fragile remains to be seen, but it certainly makes it different, adding another layer to the sui generis identity.

“China is complex. It will not become less so with time. Simplistic definitions or categorizations result in simplistic (and wrong) analysis.

“I am not claiming mine is perfect, but I think the words “rising”, “global”, “fragile” and “power” seem to capture the essence of what China is today.”