The New China Threat:  A Classic Example of Crying Wolf?

  Projecting statistical trend lines indefinitely, as Andrew Messing does in the Washington Times’ edition of May 2, 2005, is a clever way to pump up the China balloon into a global military threat.  The CIA and the military-industrial complex used to do this with the Soviet Union, which supposedly was going to exceed U.S. military power and put America in the dustbin of history.  China is increasing its military spending at 10% a year, which would project out very impressively over a couple of decades, but the total is still only a tenth of America’s and may not exceed a fifth even a generation from now..

  Other analysts have begun to say that China cannot keep up its spectacular economic momentum of GNP growth averaging 9% a year for twenty-five years, which has made it possible for China to move 300,000,000 people out of poverty and quadruple the average person’s income.  Some even forecast that China is riding for a fall and that its bubble economy may soon collapse, just as Japan’s did a decade ago?  Remember Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, the world’s leading global forecaster, who projected in the 1960’s that Japan would surpass the United States in economic clout by the Year 2000?

  Regardless of the economic facts, the key variable is neither military nor economic but strategic vision, which is not easily quantifiable.  The cover story of the May 9th, 2005, Newsweek by the Muslim, Fareed Zakaria, entitled “Special Report: China’s Century,” forecasts that China’s long-range strategy as an “asymmmetrical power” is to use its economic dominance and its political skills to avoid conflict and manipulate the coalition of forces to create a global environment that inevitably favors China as a global superpower.  History shows that empires dedicated to expansion through brute force always fail in the end.  Hitler was on the way to conquoring all of Europe economically and even turning Moscow into an economic satellite of Berlin, but he failed to see the root of power in economic productivity and in moral leadership.

  The Chinese leaders are not concerned about moral leadership, at least in the American sense, but they do intend to build a model for other nations by showing how the agendas of other nations can benefit from supporting the agenda of China.  This is called “grand strategy.”  The ancient Chinese strategic thinker, Sun Zu, founded the art of grand strategy with his dictum that, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”  The doomsday crowd in Washington who see threats rather than opportunities seem to be fighting the old Cold War with the Soviet Union rather than adapting to a world where moral leadership based on peace, freedom, and democracy through justice is more powerful than all the world’s weapons of mass destruction.

  Trend projection of quantifiable observables is a staple of long-range forecasting, because it is so simple, but the so-called exogenous variables, especially the qualitative or soft ones not considered by the forecasters, often prove to be decisive.  Of the dozen global forecasts in the 1950s and 1960s not a single one foresaw the rise of religion and its exploitation by alienated political extremists as a factor, much less gave it any weight, in the global future.

  It is a little like deja vu to watch the hype on China, perhaps coming in part from military dissidents and industrialists who miss the funding on strategic warfare and do not like Rumsfeld’s emphasis on low-intensity conflict.  We can’t do both without destructive deficit spending that would cause hyper-inflation, the collapse of the American economy, and the global shift of the financial commanding heights to other countries, including China.  All politics involves dilemma, but on the single issue of military programs Secretary Rumsfeld’s focus on new weapons and techniques for really old-fashioned warfare may be more soundly based than the paranoia of the new China Cold Warriors, who, like the Cold Warriers of a generation ago, thrived on crying wolf. 

  The threat for the future is not China but rather is the arrogance in thinking that America can run the world alone by relying on band-aid coalitions of the willing and by ignoring the collapse of America’s moral authority evident in the universal condemnation of what has been perceived to be its unconditional support for extremists in Israel.  In his full-page op-ed piece on August 12th, 2002, in The Washington Post, Kissinger was the only high-level insider who publicly identified the need to support Israel’s security as justification for an immediate attack on Iraq.  Few of America’s allies then or now took the other stated reasons seriously, because over the years America had already lost much of its credibility as a country interested in any higher goals than its own power.

  Although President Bush opposes the very existence of the International Criminal Court, opposes such international initiatives as the Kyoto global warming treaty, and is trying to impose a skeptic about its future as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he probably is sincere in wanting to promote freedom and democracy in Iraq and everywhere in the world.  The problem is that most of the world has noticed that not once has he ever associated freedom and democracy with the higher vision of justice that motivated America’s founders, who listed justice as their highest goal in the Preamble of the American Constitution and listed freedom as the last of five.  This misreading of America’s own tradition and of the outer world beyond the Beltway is why most of the world equates American calls for freedom and democracy with the old British imperial concept of the white man’s burden, which eventually lost its appeal even in England. 

  China has one great weakness.  This is its militantly secular paradigm that ignores the individual person and idolizes the collective.  Its economic strategy is to rely on trickle-down economics by focusing on macro economic indicators and its political strategy is to motivate its own citizens and impress others by its Great China nationalism as the source of sovereignty.  Such secularism, as well as the perversion of religion into its defacto secular twin, has been the downfall of all great civilizations of the past. 

  The potential future of the American civilization and of its potential Islamic partner in much of the world will depend on the extent to which they can revive their classical wisdom.  This wisdom begins in the bedrock conviction that the ultimate sovereignty both in and beyond the physical world lies in the Divine Creator and Sustainer, Who bestows inalienable rights in the individual person.  All other levels of sovereignty derive from and are subordinate to that of the human person.  This inalienable sovereignty of the person confers on every man, woman, and child basic responsibilities to respect and advance universal justice in the form of inalienable human rights for all others.

  These responsibilities and the resulting human rights are universal because they are enshrined in the universal principles of natural law and in the transcendent law of every world religion.  This universal code of human respnsibilities and rights forms the basis for the paradigm of human dignity that gave rise to the American Revolution.  This same code was the principal product of centuries of intellectual effort also by the best minds in Islam, who wrote whole libraries of books in support of their view that justice is simply the Will of God for the universe and that this Will for humans requires freedom of association for the common good in order to secure seven universal purposes of all law, though many preferred a cut-down version of only five or six.  These seven, known as the maqasid al shari’ah, are respect for religion (haqq al din); life (haqq al haya and nafs); family and community (haqq al nasl); private property rights in society’s wealth-producing assets (haqq al mal); self-determination through political freedom (haqq al hurriya); gender equity (haqq al karama); and the pursuit of knowledge (haqq al ‘ilm).

  The first of these guiding purposes, respect for religion, requires respect for freedom of religion, which, in turn, requires respect for true pluralism, not mere tolerance of diverse beliefs and spiritual paths.  Such pluralism acknowledges the legitimacy of different faith traditions in the plan of God so that members can benefit from each other’s wisdom in order to advance everyone’s spiritual life, moral development, and fullest creative potential.

  Respect for life requires the pursuit of peace through justice.

  Respect for the family requires support of the nuclear family as the bedrock of society and respect for the communities that derive their value not from allegedly higher sovereignty but from the families that compose them.

  Respect for individual private ownership requires institutional means to promote economic justice and material well-being.  The key to respecting the universal right to private ownership in the means of production is the role of money as an engine of broadened capital ownership.  This requires the redesign of monetary systems to remove the barriers to credit based on future wealth in order to level the playing field so that those will not be unduly advantaged who rely on their past accumulations of capital.

  Respect for the self-determination of persons, communities, and of the nation requires political institutions to secure representative government (shura), community self-governance (ijma), and an independent judiciary.

  Respect for knowledge requires freedom of thought, speech, and association, subject to the other human rights in the universal code that emerges from natural law as conceived in the Mind of God and in the mind of His receptive creatures.   

  China has no claim to such universal moral leadership and does not seek it.  The United States of America still has reason to claim such leadership, but it must recognize and more wisely apply its true strengths in the moral order of reality, because once a nation has lost its moral leadership, it is difficult to regain it, even at home. 

  Projecting a Chinese bugaboo may be a clever way to rally the troops for a battle, but it won’t help if the real war is being waged and lost somewhere else.  The classical thought of America’s founders, which has been gradually disappearing, and the classical thought of Islam, which largely disappeared six centuries ago, can and must be revived by those who, like their predecessaors, appreciate that the transcendent source of truth and justice is the soundest framework for all global strategy.

Dr. Robert D. Crane
Director of Global Strategy
Institute for Peace Through Justice
P.O. Box 40711
Washington, D.C. 20016
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