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By Root 1435 0

” In predominantly Muslim Xinjiang, for example, ethnic Uighurs have more in common with neighbors across the former Soviet border than with cadres in Beijing. The central government has relied on force in the past in places like Tibet and will no doubt do the same again, especially in underdeveloped regions. In the south, however, where economic success coupled with regional autonomy is creating a natural catalyst for greater independence, the situation may be harder to contain. Moreover, the fear of “falling apart again” is deeply rooted in China’s pre-Communist history of warlordism and clan feuds, and the feuding has risen again in the provinces as Communist Party control has been loosened.16 The triple threat of secession by remote regions, clan feuds at the village level, and relative economic independence in the prospering provinces can only make the central government exceedingly anxious—whether or not it uses the language of Jihad to describe its potential adversaries.

China is of course a very special case: huge, ancient, highly civilized, Communist, traditionally hostile to foreigners and their barbarian cultures, and, though historically decentralized with a strong village culture, never at any moment in its long history really democratic. Its variations on both Jihad and McWorld are likely to have a distinctive look. What is striking is that even here where a native culture might be thought to have its greatest chances against the children of the Western Enlightenment, McWorld seems irresistible. Like Catalonia and Quebec, the provinces waging the most successful struggle for autonomy from central government interference and Communist Party busybodiness are those that have joined McWorld rather than those that fear it. Suzhou comes to look like Nanjing, Nanjing like Shanghai, and Shanghai like Hong Kong. And so, day by day, China looks more and more like it is fulfilling what the diplomat cited earlier called its dream: to become some elephantine version of Singapore where, as long as you keep your mouth shut and your politics neuter, you can do anything you want, above all make money by the boxcar.

Certainly China has been more successful in containing both internal Jihad and external McWorld than, say, Sri Lanka, where the government of what was once the island paradise of Ceylon has been kept busy by a revolt of ethnic Tamils in the north (the so-called Liberation Tigers) and by an extremist counter-Jihad among its own Sinhalese majority;17 or Indonesia, a simmering Asian Yugoslavia where 350 distinct ethnic groups, most with their own language, occupy thirteen thousand islands in an archipelago held together primarily by the military force of an authoritarian regime under the command of its founder, Suharto.18 Suharto is the efficient dictator known equally for his early liquidation of a half million Communists in the 1960s, his bloody military invasion of East Timor in the 1970s (which has been compared to Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait), and his remarkable success in jump-starting the Indonesian economy in the 1980s. While perhaps best known as a site for the cheap-labor manufacture of Western apparel and shoes (workers make $700 a year), under B. J. Habibie, the German-trained minister for research and technology, Indonesia has also decided to pursue the high-tech end of McWorld. It already manufactures small commuter planes and helicopters, and is hoping to leapfrog other industrialized nations by stepping smartly into twenty-first-century high-technology domains. With its disparate multicultures, Indonesia is less worried about McWorld’s cultural values than about Western multicultural and democratic political ideals. Demography and topography favor fragmentation so that for Suharto the struggle is to hold the parts together by economic progress and military force.

The Asian democracies Japan, India, and (recently) Korea are special cases for a different reason than China. As committed democracies, they have already acknowledged the power of Western ideology, whose ideals they prize—if only because they