May 15 2008
The downside of joining the superpower club
Published: May 15 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 15 2008 03:00
Being a superpower is not all pomp and pleasure. There is more to it than attending summits, deploying aircraft carriers and overthrowing irritating regimes in the Caribbean with which you disagree. You also have to be able to handle criticism, even when you are grappling with a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or the deadly earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan province on Monday.
That China has yet to grasp the downside of its imminent superpower status is evident from a plaintive e-mail doing the rounds of internet forums. The anonymous author of the text, published and republished in various forms by Chinese patriots in response to protests over the Beijing Olympics and the Chinese crackdown in Tibet, bitterly condemns western hypocrisy about the rise of China.
“When we closed our doors, you sent gunboats and opium to open markets. When we embrace free trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs,” the message says. “When we reached a billion people, you said we’re overcrowding the planet. When we have one-child policy, you say it is human rights abuses . . .
“When we build our industries, you call us polluters. When we sell you inexpensive goods, you blame us for your deficits. When we search for oil, like you did, you call that exploitation and genocide.” The message concludes peevishly, in large print: “What do you really want from us?”
It is a good question. The thrust of the complaint is that China is damned if it does something and damned if it does not. It is worth reading in full because the depth of Chinese anger over western double standards is not always appreciated in Washington or Brussels.
Americans, however, must find it hard to suppress a wry smile. They have been mocked for decades as the citizens of a swaggering, insensitive, militaristic and ecologically destructive superpower - a superpower, furthermore, that proved pathetically incapable of dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on home soil in 2005.
Now Americans can stand aside and watch as China feels some of the geopolitical heat that has been directed exclusively at the US since the demise of the Soviet Union.
Evidence of this trend is accumulating. In an FT/Harris monthly opinion poll in Europe’s five biggest nations, conducted in March and April, Europeans for the first time ranked China as the biggest threat to global stability, ahead of the US, North Korea and Iran.
Whatever its military weaknesses, China has already made it as a superpower in the popular imagination. In a recent episode of The Simpsons , the US comedy series, schoolboy Bart Simpson is lured into “pre-enlisting” for the dangerous job of soldier in the US army, to the horror of his mother, Marge. Homer, his clueless father, is unmoved. “Yeah, big deal. By the time Bart is 18, we’re gonna control the world.” He pauses. “We’re China, right?”
The question now is not whether China will become a superpower, but what kind it will be. In the 1960s China, like the Soviet Union, was happy to export its own brand of communism. But Beijing today has no desire to spread Maoism or fight capitalism at home, let alone abroad.
In fact, modern China has a surprising number of qualities in common with the US. They include optimism and confidence, but also arrogance and a degree of ignorance about the outside world. Nationalists in the two countries even share, for the time being, a rather childish hatred of the French - the Americans because of French scepticism over the latest Iraq war and the Chinese because of French support for persecuted Tibetans.
Like all superpowers, China is associated with the crimes of its various protégés. The Soviet Union was lumbered with Fidel Castro, Mengistu Haile Mariam and the tyrants of its satellite states in eastern Europe. The US had Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein. China is forever tainted with Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha and Kim Il-sung. Now it is linked to the Burmese junta, Sudan’s Islamist regime and Robert Mugabe.
Yet even a mediocre country can acquire dubious allies. The true mark of a great nation is that the rest of the world cares what happens inside your borders. By this measure China is already a superpower.
People care first because they are directly affected: by air pollution from China, by radioactivity from Chernobyl, by Hollywood films, Russian literature and Chinese art, and indeed by wars launched from the White House, which explains the view that foreigners have a stake in US elections. People also care because superpowers tend to be respected for their strength and admired for ideals that inspire the citizens of other nations. That is why the world was shocked by the chaos in New Orleans after Katrina, and one reason attention is focused now on Sichuan.
As it happens, the early evidence suggests that the Chinese armed forces have been swift and effective in their rescue efforts, unlike their Burmese counterparts after the devastation of cyclone Nargis. But they will remain under intense scrutiny, just as the Chinese leadership will be closely watched in the approach to the Beijing Olympics.
It is no fun being a superpower, for with power come great responsibilities and the suspicion of foreigners. There is only one sensible answer to the plaintive e-mail about the injustices meted out to China: welcome to superpower status - now you know how it feels to be American.
victor.mallet@ft.com