Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

To be sure, there are factors that could derail China’s emergence as a major power, the most obvious of which are inadequate education and uneven development within the country. In the Republic of China on Taiwan during the 1990s, for example, the president, premier, and half the cabinet had doctoral degrees. In fact, its impressive record in producing a college-educated populace is one explanation for Taiwan’s increasingly successful transition to democracy in a context of high, reasonably equitable per capita income distribution and huge reserves of foreign currency. Such educational achievements—close to 40 percent of Taiwanese aged eighteen to twenty-one are enrolled in institutions of higher learning—are almost unimaginable on the mainland. China, with a total population of 1.2 billion, has the staggeringly low total of about 7 million college graduates to help run a massive and massively modernizing economy and society. There are a total of 1,065 institutions of higher learning in China today, with about 2.5 million students.⁷

China also sends thousands of students abroad for advanced degrees, but many of them do not come home. This means China has no access to the sort of meritocratic officialdom with which Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have managed their systems of privately owned but publicly guided enterprises. The Communist Party itself currently has a total of about fifty million members, but only some two million of them are college educated. It can compensate for this educational weakness to some extent by tapping into the talents of overseas Chinese and of interested foreign investors, but such a lack of widespread technical competence may in the long run prove a serious and potentially catastrophic constraint.

Uneven development is a potentially explosive problem. Although in times of dynastic decline or internal weakness China has been prey to strong centrifugal forces, warlordism, and regional movements for independence, this is unlikely to be a major concern in the foreseeable future. A wealthy province like Guangdong, adjacent to thriving Hong Kong, for example, has nothing to gain and much to lose in the civil war that would undoubtedly result from any attempt to separate itself from the rest of the country. The issue of the present moment is not so much keeping wealthy provinces in line as keeping poor provinces quiet and functional with not much more in the way of compensation than the promise that sooner or later the wealth of the country is bound to begin to trickle down to them.

An estimated one hundred million people, more than the entire population of Mexico, are now adrift in China, largely migrants from the interior looking for work in rich coastal areas. They represent what “trickle down” there may be for the poorest rural areas, remitting part of their meager earnings to the interior. The vast and controversial Three Rivers Dam under construction on the Yangtze River will aid interior areas more than any other part of the country by providing cheap electric power to them; for the time being, however, the migrants tend to evade taxes and ignore the country’s draconian one-family, one-child policy. There is also the danger, from the ruling party’s point of view, that they might organize. This would not only reduce their value as an ultra-cheap labor force contributing to the present export-driven boom but also raise the possibility that migrant groups could grow into a Chinese version of Solidarity, the union movement that largely dismantled communism in Poland. This would be the regime’s worst nightmare and is the primary reason for the sometimes harsh application of its otherwise soft totalitarian policies to political dissidents of all sorts, but to union organizers and religious movements in particular. Part of the unholy alliance between China’s domestic autocrats and its foreign investors is that both hate unions and any movement toward workers’ rights, even if for different reasons.