China After Twenty Years

The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no worker in the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of his nostrils.

–Jack London

Feng-Wang-Cheng, Manchuria

June 1904

Though not having lived in there for two decades, I would venture that the People’s Republic of China's game plan has remained pretty much the same, especially when one takes into account the rapidity with which the country has been industrialized. A number of my Chinese colleagues at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages - some being hardcore Communist Party members - were candid about their nation’s goals and objectives. On many, many occasions they expressed fear that Mao's Cultural Revolution had gravely hindered China’s economic development– so hindered it in fact that their country might never again be great, might never compete with the industrial behemoths: Japan, the United States, and the European Union.

I cannot underscore this enough– this great fear amongst educated Chinese that, after thousands and thousands of years of sustained, high-end civilization, their country would at last come up short. These same Chinese friends also shocked me with the assertion that they were more than willing to subject a generation of Chinese workers to ungodly, slave labor practices in order to stop this from happening.

To be frank, I never thought the Chinese could pull off this transformation, especially being hampered at that time by two currencies: Renminbi (RMB) and Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC). And I told them so. I was then told that FEC was just a temporary economic gimmick– a currency whose sole purpose was to make life in China more comfortable for foreigners, that once China became potent strong RMB ("the people's moolah") would become the national standard.

I was further instructed not to dwell on currency (after all wasn’t it nothing but “silly paper?”) and give more thought to production and territory. I cannot reveal, in this short space, all that I learned or all that was said to me. Nonetheless here, in a nutshell, is what the Chinese Economic Resurrection Plan (my phrase) appeared to be in the early 1990s.

1) Transform the cities into modern entities without any regard to environmental protection, labor practices, and work conditions. This has been accomplished, thanks to the mixed use of massive manual labor, modern machinery, and totalitarian directives.

2) Make Mandarin Chinese the official language of instruction throughout the country. This was met with great resistance from the South where Cantonese was then dominant and ubiquitous. Still the Communist Party stuck to its guns and prevailed. Most young Chinese can now orally communicate with their compatriots, whereas before they could only do so through written expression. Take note of this when you examine the present Xinziang situation where a perceptive observer will note both a clash of cultures and a clash of languages. Also, it does not hurt to apply it to Quebec with its wasteful English/French policy and parts of the United States where Spanish has supplanted English.

3) Take back Hong Kong when the lease expired with Great Britain. The Hong Kong Chinese did not want to be ruled by the mainland. Why on earth should they? They had many more freedoms and a much higher standard of living, with the exception of those in the slums. I often quipped, "The People's Republic of China should not take over Hong Kong but Hong Kong should take over the People's Republic of China." Some of my Chinese coworkers were not amused.

4) Get Taiwan back by hook or by crook. Now this is where it gets dicey for about the only scenario that would allow this to happen will be a weakened and vulnerable United States. Japan, though desirous of a sovereign Taiwan, is no match for China militarily and knows it. Again, I cannot underscore how much China wants to reclaim Taiwan. A Westerner can only understand this after talking in depth with the Mainland Chinese since Taiwan is more than a cerebral wish: it is an emotional desire. Put simply, the Chinese mind cannot grasp the idea of freely giving up territory as the United States did after World War II. In this regard the Chinese are much like the Russians, the greatest land-grabbers of all-time. The ongoing Kuril Islands dispute with the Japanese government illustrates this perfectly. Russia seized the Kuril Islands from the Japanese during the last weeks of World War II. To this day, despite international law favoring their return to Japan, Russia continues to control the Kurils. The Chinese, like the Russians, have a visceral attachment to the land– one that is difficult for the Western mind to comprehend. This visceral attachment is not only part and parcel with Chinese history but part and parcel of the Chinese soul as well.

5) Become the dominant economic power in the world. Such a statement really sounded insane back in the 1990s. The modernization of the cities, the taking back of Hong Kong, even an eventually power grab for Taiwan– all made sense. This did not. For this to occur too many ducks would have to line up:

Duck #1 would have to be a positive result from the massive slave labor used in modernization. We all know what happened here– the Chinese stunned the world and pulled it off.

Duck #2 would have to be not just a short-term weakening of Japan but a long-term erosion of its economic structure. How could this possibly happen? Heck, twenty years ago there were bestselling books being published with such titles as Japan as Number One. Then in the 1990s the Japanese real estate market collapsed. (Sound familiar?) Unbeknownst to most Westerners, China pounced and pounced repeatedly demanding and receiving special trade agreements and extended reparations due to Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Duck #3 would have to be a resurgent Russia, a country that would again distract Western Europe and the United States. This didn't seem in the cards either. After all, weren't the new Russian capitalists having a good old time with their criminal enterprises, their villas, and their lavish lifestyles? Moreover, the Communists had been silenced and were nothing more than a political flicker. Then slowly but surely the rank-and-file Russian became sick and tired of all the corruption and embraced the communist sweetheart to end all communist sweethearts: Vladimir Putin.

But even if those three ducks lined up perfectly (which they subsequently did!), there was no way Duck #4 - the United States - would oblige. Still, the Communist Chinese went to work to undermine and exploit American big business. The plan was multifaceted but had two key components: (1) make labor costs so attractive in China that American greed would dismantle its domestic industrial plant and move to China for the short-term kill and (2) lower the true value of the Chinese Yuan, thus accelerating a favorable balance of trade.

The first was sheer sacrifice; the second was raw mercantilism. This was not easy to pull off. Still, the Chinese had a few things going for them. First, American big business knew little to nothing about the Chinese people and the Chinese culture. Nor did it want to. All it could see was a billion plus people hungry for Western goods. The Chinese, on the other hand, saw themselves as producers and in the long run winners of this economic war.

On the surface Chinese and American business practices appear to be contradictory. One needs to remember however that a chief tenet in Chinese philosophy is the belief in contradictions. Sure, winning over venal American entrepreneurs was a no-brainer. All the Chinese had to do was buy them off and – surprise, surprise - they sold out at bargain basement prices.

Honest American businessmen however were another matter. They had to won over by diplomacy, smarts, and stealth. I cannot count the times, for instance, that I witnessed one unsuspecting American businessman pitted against four Chinese businessmen. I never saw a one-to-one negotiation, always one against four– with the headman forever feigning ignorance of the English language when indeed he usually spoke English quite well. Why such a ruse? Well, this gave the headman time to think while the translation was in progress– an old trick commonly utilized by the late prime minister Chou En Lai.

China nonetheless needed external help. But where could that possibly come from? Well, 9/11 wasn't all that shabby. It started the United States down the War-on-Terror Road: first Iraq, then Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Then our economy tanked due to (1) people living beyond their means and (2) the wedded corruption of our federal government to many of our key financial institutions.

In the end I could not have been more mistaken. Indeed I had been wrong every step of the way. The ducks have lined up pretty much as China hoped and prayed they would– perhaps even better. I really don't know if world domination is possible. Conceptually it could come to pass via a bizarre marriage between of the capitalistic power centers of the West and the socialistic power centers of the East, with China in the starring role. That would mark the end of nationhood and the emergence of what today is dubbed a “New World Order” whose genesis dates back to H. G. Wells’ little book World Brain. Yes, the idea is that old.

Of greater likelihood is the usurpation of English as the dominant language of the world.

That, I suppose, would be Duck #5.