The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [45]
Napoleon famously, and probably apocryphally, said, “Let China sleep, for when China wakes, she will shake the world.” And for almost two hundred years, China seemed to follow his instruction, staying dormant and serving as little more than an arena in which the other great powers acted out their ambitions. In the twentieth century, Japan, once China’s imitator, bested it in war and peace. During World War II, the United States allied with it and gave it aid and, in 1945, a seat on the UN Security Council. When Washington and Beijing became foes after the Communist takeover of 1949, China slipped further behind. Mao Zedong dragged the country through a series of catastrophic convulsions that destroyed its economic, technological, and intellectual capital. Then, in 1979, things began shaking.
China’s awakening is reshaping the economic and political landscape, but it is also being shaped by the world into which it is rising. Beijing is negotiating the same two forces that are defining the post-American world more broadly—globalization and nationalism. On the one hand, economic and technological pressures are pushing Beijing toward a cooperative integration into the world. But these same forces produce disruption and social upheaval in the country, and the regime seeks new ways to unify an increasingly diverse society. Meanwhile, growth also means that China becomes more assertive, casting a larger shadow on the region and the world. The stability and peace of the post-American world will depend, in large measure, on the balance that China strikes between these forces of integration and disintegration.
When historians look back at the last decades of the twentieth century, they might well point to 1979 as a watershed. That year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, digging its grave as a superpower. And that year, China launched its economic reforms. The signal for the latter event came in December 1978 at an unlikely gathering: the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, typically an occasion for empty rhetoric and stale ideology. Before the formal meeting, at a working-group session, the newly empowered party boss, Deng Xiaoping, gave a speech that turned out to be the most important in modern Chinese history. He urged that the regime focus on economic development and let facts—not ideology—guide its path. “It doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or a white cat,” Deng said. “As long as it can catch mice, it’s a good cat.” Since then, China has done just that, pursuing a path of modernization that is ruthlessly pragmatic.
The results have been astonishing. China has grown over 9 percent a year for almost thirty years, the fastest rate for a major economy in recorded history. In that same period, it has moved around 400 million people out of poverty, the largest reduction that has taken place anywhere, anytime. The average Chinese person’s income has increased twentyfold. China, despite drawbacks and downsides, has achieved, on a massive scale, the dream of every Third World country—a decisive break with poverty. The economist Jeffrey Sachs puts it simply: “China is the most successful development story in world history.”
The magnitude of change in China is almost unimaginable. The size of the economy has doubled every eight years for three decades. In 1978, the country made 200 air conditioners a year; in 2005, it made 48 million. China today exports in a single day more than it exported in all of 1978.1 For anyone who has been