Why the West Rules--For Now (94 page)

When the leaders of the world’s twenty biggest economies met in April 2009 to craft their response to the crisis, a new wisecrack went around: “
After [Tiananmen Square in]
1989 capitalism saved China. After 2009 China saved capitalism.” There is much truth to this, but an even better analogy for 2009 might be 1918. That was the year when the sucking sound of power and wealth draining across the Atlantic, from the bankrupt old core in Europe to the thriving new one in the United States, became undeniable. Two thousand and nine may prove to have been the year when the sound of the drain across the Pacific, from bankrupt America to thriving China, became equally audible. Chimerica may have been merely a layover on the road to Eastern rule.

Needless to say, not everyone agrees with this prognosis. Some pundits point out that the United States has made itself over just as thoroughly as Scrooge plenty of times already. All too many critics wrote off the United States in the great depression of the 1930s and the
stagflation of the 1970s, only to see it to bounce back to defeat the Nazis in the 1940s and the Soviets in the 1980s. American entrepreneurs and scientists, the optimists insist, will figure something out, and even if the United States does slide into crisis in the 2010s it will get the better of China in the 2020s.

Others stress that China has problems too. Most obviously, as economic success drives up wages, China is losing some of the advantages of its backwardness. In the 1990s low-end manufacturing jobs started migrating from China’s coasts to its interior, and are now leaving China altogether for even-lower-wage countries such as Vietnam. Most economists see this as the natural course of China’s integration into the global economy, but to a few it is the first sign that China is losing its edge.

Other China bashers see demography as a bigger challenge. Thanks to low birth and immigration rates, the average age is rising faster in China than in America, and by 2040 the entitlements of the elderly may weigh more heavily on China’s economy than on that of the United States. China’s shortage of natural resources may also slow economic growth, and tensions between the booming cities and languishing countryside may get much worse. If any of these things happen, popular unrest (which is already rising) could get out of control. Ethnic revolts and protests against corruption and environmental catastrophes helped bring down plenty of Chinese dynasties in the past; maybe they will do so again in the near future. And if the Communist party does fall, the country might break apart, just as it did at the end of the Han, Tang, Yuan, and Qing dynasties. The best analogy for China in 2020 might not, after all, be the United States in 1920, soaking up the old core’s wealth, but China itself in 1920, sliding into civil war.

Then again, an influential group of Western Panglosses insists, maybe none of these guesses really matters, because all will be for the best regardless. Despite seeing wealth and power drain across the Atlantic in the twentieth century, the typical western European in 2000 is richer than his or her forebear at the height of Europe’s imperial grandeur, because the rising capitalist tide has lifted all the boats. In the twenty-first century the drain across the Pacific may lift everyone’s boats even higher. Angus Maddison, mentioned above for his calculation that China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the United States in 2020, foresees Chinese incomes tripling (to an average
of $18,991 per person) between 2003 and
2030
. He expects that American incomes will rise only 50 percent, but because they started from such a high level the typical American in 2030 will earn $58,722, more than three times as much as the typical Chinese. Robert Fogel, who thinks China’s economy will outgrow the United States’ in 2016, is even more bullish. By 2040, he says, Chinese incomes will reach an astonishing $85,000—but by that time the average American will be making $107,000.
*

Most Panglossian of all is what the journalist James Mann calls the “
Soothing Scenario
,” a claim that come what may, prosperity will Westernize the East. Asking whether the West still rules will then be a meaningless question, because the whole world will have become Western. “
Trade freely
with China,” George W. Bush urged in 1999, “and time is on our side.”

The only way to flourish in the modern global economy, this argument runs, is to be liberal and democratic—that is, more like the Western core. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore all moved from one-party toward somewhat democratic rule as they grew rich in the late twentieth century, and if the Chinese Communist Party can embrace capitalism, perhaps it can embrace democracy too. Those regions most involved in global trade may already be doing so. In Guangdong and Fujian provinces, for instance, many local officials are nowadays directly elected. National politics certainly remains authoritarian, but the rulers in Beijing have become markedly more responsive to public concerns over natural disasters, public health crises, and corruption.

Many Westerners who have spent time in the East, though, are less impressed with the idea that the East will become culturally Westernized at the very moment that it achieves the power to dominate the globe. Americans, after all, did not start acting more like Europeans after they displaced Europe as the dominant region in the Western core; rather, Europeans began complaining about the Americanization of their own culture.

China’s urban elites did find plenty to like in Western culture when they entered the American-dominated global economy in the 1980s.
They dropped the Mao suit, opened English schools, and even (briefly) sipped lattes at a Starbucks in the Forbidden City. The overpriced bars in Beijing’s Back Lakes district are as full of hyperactive twenty-somethings checking stock quotes on their cell phones as those in New York or London. The question, though, is whether Westernization will continue if power and wealth carry on draining across the Pacific.

The journalist Martin Jacques suggests not. We are already, he argues, seeing the rise of what he calls “
contested modernities
” as Easterners and South Asians adapt the industrialism, capitalism, and liberalism invented in the nineteenth-century Western core to their own needs. In the first half of the twenty-first century, Jacques speculates, Western rule will give way to a fragmented global order, with multiple currency zones (dollar-, euro-, and renminbi-denominated) and spheres of economic/military influence (an American sphere in Europe, southwest Asia, and perhaps South Asia, and a Chinese sphere in East Asia and Africa), each dominated by its own cultural traditions (Euro-American, Confucian, and so on). But in the second half of the century, he predicts, numbers will tell; China will rule and the world will be Easternized.

Extrapolating from how China has used its power since the 1990s, Jacques argues that the Sinocentric world of the late twenty-first century will be quite different from the Western world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be even more hierarchical, with the old Chinese idea that foreigners should approach the Middle Kingdom as tribute-bearing supplicants replacing Western theories about the nominal equality of states and institutions. It will also be illiberal, dropping the West’s rhetoric about universal human values; and statist, brooking no opposition to the powers of political rulers. All over the world, people will forget the glories of the Euro-American past. They will learn Mandarin, not English, celebrate Zheng He, not Columbus, read Confucius instead of Plato, and marvel at Chinese Renaissance men such as Shen Kuo rather than Italians such as Leonardo.

Some strategists think Chinese global rule will follow Confucian traditions of peaceful statecraft and be less militarily aggressive than the West’s; others disagree. Chinese history gives no clear guidance. There have certainly been Chinese leaders who opposed war as a policy tool (particularly among the gentry and bureaucracy), but there
have been plenty of others who readily used force, including the first few emperors of virtually every dynasty except the Song. Those international-relations theorists who style themselves “realists” generally argue that China’s caution since the Korean War owes more to weakness than to Confucius. Beijing’s military spending has increased more than 16 percent each year since 2006 and is on target to match America’s in the 2020s. Depending on the decisions future leaders make, the East’s rise to global rule in the twenty-first century may be even bloodier than the West’s in the nineteenth and twentieth.

So there we have it. Maybe great men and women will come to America’s aid, preserving Western rule for a few generations more; maybe bungling idiots will interrupt China’s rise for a while. Maybe the East will be Westernized, or maybe the West will be Easternized. Maybe we will all come together in a global village, or maybe we will dissolve into a clash of civilizations. Maybe everyone will end up richer, or maybe we will incinerate ourselves in a Third World War.

This mess of contradictory prognoses evokes nothing so much as the story I mentioned in
Chapter 4
of the blind men and the elephant, each imagining he was touching something entirely different. The only way to explain why the West rules, I suggested at that point in the book, was by using the index of social development to cast a little light on the scene. I now want to suggest that the same approach can help us see what the elephant will look like a hundred years from now.

2103

So let us look again at
Figure 12.1
, particularly at the point where the Eastern and Western lines meet in 2103. The vertical axis shows that by then social development will stand at more than five thousand points.

This is an astonishing number. In the fourteen thousand years between the end of the Ice Age and 2000
CE,
social development rose nine hundred points. In the next hundred years, says
Figure 12.1
, it will rise
four thousand points more
. Nine hundred points took us from the cave paintings of Altamira to the atomic age; where will another four thousand take us? That, it seems to me, is the real question. We cannot
understand what will come after Chimerica unless we first understand what the world will look like at five thousand points.

In an interview in 2000 the economist Jeremy Rifkin suggested, “
Our way of life
is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous thousand years.” That sounds extreme, but if
Figure 12.1
really does show the shape of the future, Rifkin’s projection is in fact a serious understatement. Between 2000 and 2050, according to the graph, social development will rise twice as much as in the previous fifteen thousand years; and by 2103 it will have doubled again. What a mockery, this, of history!

This is where all the prognostications that I discussed in the previous section fall down. All extrapolate from the present into the near future, and all—unsurprisingly—conclude that the future will look much like the present, but with a richer China. If we instead bring the whole weight of history to bear on the question—that is, if we talk to the Ghost of Christmas Past—we are forced to recognize just how unprecedented the coming surge in social development is going to be.

The implications of development scores of five thousand points are staggering. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that the four traits of energy capture, urbanization, information technology, and war-making capacity will each account for roughly the same proportions of the total social development score in 2103 as they did in 2000,
*
then a century from now there will be cities of 140 million people (imagine Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, São Paolo, Mumbai, Delhi, and Shanghai rolled into one) in which the average person consumes 1.3 million kilocalories of energy per day.

A fivefold increase in war-making capacity is even harder to visualize. We already have enough weapons to destroy the world several times over, and rather than simply multiplying nuclear warheads, bombs, and guns, the twenty-first century will probably see technologies that make twentieth-century weapons as obsolete as the machine gun made the musket. Something like “Star Wars,” the anti-ballistic-missile shield that American scientists have been working on since the 1980s, will
surely become a reality. Robots will do our fighting. Cyberwarfare will become all-important. Nanotechnology will turn everyday materials into impenetrable armor or murderous weapons. And each new form of offense will call forth equally sophisticated defenses.

Most mind-boggling of all, though, are the changes in information technology implied by
Figure 12.1
. The twentieth century took us from crude radios and telephones to the Internet; it is not so far-fetched to suggest that the twenty-first will give everyone in the developed cores instant access to and total recall of all the information in the world, their brains networked like—or into—a giant computer, with calculating power trillions of times greater than the sum of all brains and machines in our own time.

All these things, of course, sound impossible. Cities of 140 million people surely could not function. There is not enough oil, coal, gas, and uranium in the world to supply billions of people with 1.3 million kilocalories per day. Nano-, cyber-, and robot wars would annihilate us all. And merging our minds with machines—well, we would cease to be human.

And that, I think, is the most important and troubling implication of
Figure 12.1
.

I have made two general claims in this book. The first was that biology, sociology, and geography jointly explain the history of social development, with biology driving development up, sociology shaping how development rises (or doesn’t), and geography deciding where development rises (or falls) fastest; and the second was that while geography determines where social development rises or falls, social development also determines what geography means. I now want to extend these arguments. In the twenty-first century social development promises—or threatens—to rise so high that it will change what biology and sociology mean too. We are approaching the greatest discontinuity in history.