** Please visit our website: http://www.africanassociation.org **

From the Opinion Journal of the Wall Street Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/mhelprin/?id=110006021

WRITTEN ON WATER
Beyond the Rim
We ignore China's growing military and economic power at our peril.

BY MARK HELPRIN
Monday, December 13, 2004 12:01 a.m.

From the beach at Santa Monica on a clear day in fall, with 3,000 miles
of this country invisible at one's back, the Pacific horizon is a
precisely etched line empty of event and set in alluring color. But
beyond the rim lie two things now tightly interwoven: China, and the
destiny of the United States.

There never was and never will be a "unipolar" world. The existence of
one pole being conditioned upon the existence of another, the notion of
such a thing is as sloppy conceptually as the thinking of the "leading
international relations specialist," recently quoted in the Washington
Post, who lamented that "The border . . . is becoming a dividing line."

The short unhappy life of whatever passed for unipolarity is
emphatically over not merely because the strategy of the moment has
allowed a small force of primitive insurgents in Iraq to occupy a large
proportion of American military energy, but because China is now
powerful and influential enough, at least as a "fleet-in-being," to make
American world dominance inconceivable. And in the longer term, China is
bent upon and will achieve gross military and economic parity with the
United States.

China is methodically following the example of Meiji Japan in moving
from a position of inferiority to one of military equality with far
superior rivals, by deliberate application of a striking phenomenon of
economics that is to the military relation between states what the
golden section is to architecture. Consider a hypothetical country of 10
million people, and a $1 billion GNP, that devotes 10% of its $100 per
capita GNP to defense. The people are left with $90/year, suffering one
day in 10 to support a $100 million military outlay. But after 18 years
of 8% economic growth and 2% population increase per annum, it becomes a
hypothetical country of 14 million souls, a GNP of $4 billion, and a per
capita GNP of $285. If the people retain only three-quarters of this,
they are still almost two and a half times richer than they were before,
and the military budget can safely rise to $1 billion. Thus, the GNP
increases by a factor of four, per capita GNP more than doubles, and
defense outlays swell by a factor of 10.

The Meiji called their variant of this, Fukoku Kyohei, "rich country,
strong arms." To contemporary Americans and Europeans accustomed to
low-single-digit economic growth and periodic recession, an 8% annual
growth rate over 18 years might seem too hypothetical. But between 1980
and the present, China's GDP has grown at an average annual rate, like
the 9.7% of 2004's first half, of just under 10%. It is probably safe to
say that any diminution of real growth as a result of inflation is
roughly offset by gains in the unreported black economy, and clearly
ironic that while in China a bunch of former Maoists appreciates the
potentiality of high growth, in America the left thinks it unworthy of
putting the nanny state at risk.

China's steady expansion is impressive enough, but of greater
significance is the 16.2% growth, in 2003, of the industrial/technical
sector that has made China a mercantile power and not only contributes
to social stability by providing consumer goods but assimilates and
replicates Western military technology. Though the data vary according
to source and time, they are all of the same complexion. In the CIA's
reasonable analysis, China's is the world's second largest economy, with
a GDP, expressed in purchasing power parity (PPP), of $6.5 trillion. The
resultant $5,000 per capita PPP GDP, given the risks of China's
transition to a market economy and the concomitant instabilities to be
avoided, leaves less room at the margin for military expenditure than if
stability were not in question, and China in 2003 devoted only 3.5% of
GDP to defense. This moderation is simultaneously an effort to preserve
social peace and a realistic view of the effective pace of military
reform and technological transformation. Nonetheless, in 2003 at least
$60 billion went to defense, thrice the expenditure of 10 years before.

That sum, while less than a fifth of American outlays other than the
costs of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, does not reflect
adjustment for PPP, which, though not as powerful a multiple as in the
civilian sector (due to the nature of military goods, and procurement
abroad) should boost equivalent Chinese military spending to at least
$100 billion. Imagine then if China, as it easily could, were to double
its GDP in the next eight or nine years, and, taking advantage of a
parallel increase in gains per capita, double the defense share of GDP.
It would then have (PPP) defense outlays roughly equivalent to ours.

China, however, moves with great deliberation, and many signs suggest
that it is aiming for parity in 20 or more years time and in synchrony
with advances in technology and military doctrine.

China is at risk if, as is its wont periodically, it runs off the rails
into civil war, anarchy, or revolution. But the true
counter-revolutionary import of the 11th Party Congress reforms of 1978
is that, unlike the former Soviet Union, China is making its transition
to the free market in careful strides so as not to be forced backwards.
Though neither ideal nor democratic, its incremental economic and policy
choices are carefully calibrated, redolent of compromise, and configured
for the survival and stability of the state. And the more time that
passes, the more the development of its internal markets will protect
its now mercantile economy from the gyrations of world markets.

With its new economic resources China has embarked upon a military
traverse from reliance upon mass to devotion to quality, with stress
upon war in space, the oceans, and the ether--three areas of
unquestioned American superiority. China is establishing its own space-
based assets and developing the means to counter others. It would
neutralize American strategic superiority as the aging U.S. arsenal is
reduced and it augments its own. Its submarine program is directed to
the deployment of its strategic force and denial of successively greater
bands of the Pacific--eventually reaching far out into blue water--to
the safe transit of American fleets. It sees America's advantage in
informational warfare both as something to be copied and as a weak link
that, by countermeasure, can be shattered. In short, it harbors major
ambitions.

When China was great, it sent out military expeditions by land and sea
into a large part of what was for it the known world, and despite
robotic protestations to the contrary it will do so again. It has
already begun what it itself might at one time have called imperial
expansion, driven not by ideology but the need for markets and raw
materials. Major crude oil importation, begun only recently, is already
one-quarter the volume of U.S. crude imports, leading China to compete
for petroleum not only in the Middle East but in South America and at
least six countries in Africa. This it can do with its immense $400
billion balance of payments reserves and ability to supply high quality
manufactured goods at all levels to its potential oil suppliers.

An example of China's growing power to interfere with crucial U.S.
interests is the new Sino-Persian $100 billion trade agreement, the
perfect complementarity of which--manufactures and military goods in
exchange for oil and Islamic endorsement--is echoed by the fact that, at
present, the chief American counter to Iranian nuclear weapons
development is the threat of a trade embargo, which China need not
observe, through the Security Council, over which China has a veto. A
clue to how the world may yet divide is China's willingness, like
America's in the Cold War, to take less-than-perfect states under its
wing without a care for their moral improvement. In fact, China must be
delighted (what rival would not be?) that America's war aims in the
Middle East are conditioned upon reordering the Islamic world, the most
inconvertible of all divisions of mankind. Although U.S. intervention is
obviously required, the nature and scope of the enterprise as stated is
a gift to China worth many years of effort.

This and a persistent blindness in regard to China's probable trajectory
are wounds gratuitously self-inflicted, for no country, ever, has had
both the mass and income at the margin that the United States has now,
but rather than anticipate, meet, and discourage China's military
development, as it easily could, the U.S. has chosen to ignore it.
America's métiers are the sea, the air, and space, and with one
exception our major allies in Asia are island nations. These factors
could be combined to keep China on the straight and narrow for
generations longer than otherwise, but America's vision has been knocked
out of focus by its ideals, and when China does develop the powerful
expeditionary forces that it will need to protect its far- flung
interests, the U.S. will probably have successfully completed
transforming its military into a force designed mainly to fight
terrorism and insurgencies.

Though the dangers of epidemics and terrorist nuclear attacks are now
obviously pre-eminent, rising behind them is a newer world yet. This
century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade.
It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its center, and challenges
in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and
crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America's
equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare
for what lies beyond the rim.

Mr. Helprin is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, a
senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and is the author, most
recently, of "The Pacific and Other Stories," just out from Penguin.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:

        http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html

AAM Website:  http://www.africanassociation.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------