Thomas P.M. Barnett: Expect Improved Sino-American Relations in Years to Come

In a Fondo Libre interview, Thomas P.M. Barnett, a foreign policy consultant to U.S. leaders on national security issues discusses China, globalization, and why we shouldn’t fear a rising Chinese middle class. Barnett taught at the Naval War College, worked at the Department of Defense as the Assistant for Strategic Futures, and is now Senior Managing Director at Enterra Solutions. His research focus is the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world in the Post Cold War Era and 9/11 attacks. He is the author of Great Powers: America and the World after Bush, he writes a column for Esquire, and maintains a fascinating blog you should definitely read.

MZ: You wrote recently that Africa is China’s and India’s economic frontier but you also talked about some obvious economic asymmetries. Why shouldn’t we view the Chindian presence in Africa as the latest face of colonialism?

Barnett: First off, that’s just tossing in a loaded term for effect. China has no interest in running anybody’s political system; they’re too easily freaked out about their own (see Falun Gong, Tibet, Xinjiang and the Uighers). They do require unprecedented access to raw materials and energy and because going to the more stable providers isn’t nearly enough for their requirements, they’ve been forced by their growth trajectory (that whole one-out-of-every-five-humans thing) to go to all the truly unstable ones as well—ones without governments up to the challenge of resisting corruption. And so the Chinese, who are the most ruthless and unprincipled capitalists on the planet right now (I know, it’s weird to type that, having myself been a child when Mao ruled), take advantage whenever and wherever they can. But I don’t see any desire or attempts or capability to run—even by proxy—puppet states, so colonialism is a term better left to the past.

Are the Chinese mercantilists? When given the chance. Then again, so were the Japanese with our market for a long time. How did we cure the Japanese? There’s a story I like to tell about my current home, Indiana. Twenty years ago, if you had a Honda(HMC) or Toyota (TM), it often got keyed in parking lots. Why? This was solely Detroit Big Three territory: they had the factories, the Japanese had none—and so they were hated. Honda and Toyota solved such popular resistance (and name-calling) by plopping factories here. We forced Toyota to become the globally integrated enterprise (IMB Sam Palmisano’s term) it is today: sources local, R&Ds local, employs locals, builds local, and sells local. That was good for us and good for Toyota.

China in Africa is meeting a similar build-up of friction, and the good news is, China is already responding on many levels—as is fellow “riser” India. Read the World Bank report, “Africa’s Silk Road” to see a description of how Indian and Chinese FDI aims to capture cheap African labor and slot it into buyer-driven and producer-driven supply chains—in effect using it to build goods for Africa, for their home countries, and for advanced Western markets. It’s small for now, but there’s a clear direction and it’s building fast.

Some will definitely call that colonialism and they’ll be engaging in 19th-century name-calling. I don’t think Africans are so stupid they need us to pick their fights. They will complain and resist as appropriate, and the Chinese will—and are—being forced to change.

Again, the Chinese are in a ruthless phase. They have about 700m rural poor to lift out of poverty. Imagine the United States’ landmass with everyone from the Western Hemisphere crowded in. Imagine how “practical” we might become in our economic development strategy to deal with all that poverty amidst real plenty.

One of the reasons why my company, Enterra Solutions, is pioneering its “connect-up” development strategy called Development-in-a-Box™–now in Iraq but expanding rapidly to Asia—is that we see a big chunk of what we call the Non-Integrated Gap (regions poorly connected to the global economy and where all the mass violence occurs) that’s being rapidly penetrated by globalization’s advance—often in the form of the Chinese. These countries typically lack the counterparty capacity (know-how, rules, institutions, etc.). to negotiate and execute proper deals and need some help filling that skill space. We think if such help can be provided, on a temporary basis until indigenous talent is raised, we force the Chinese to play up to a better level of rules, yielding more fair outcomes. And frankly, we’ve found there are large Chinese companies that think the same way. They know they have to do better, and they want to.

MZ: We have a democratic system and we promote free markets. In contrast, China continues to have a repressive one-party system. Yet, China’s economic performance is stellar. Are Chinese leaders more focused or is an authoritarian regime better suited to rule a billion plus people?

Barnett: Authoritarian systems may be better suited to rule populations undergoing extensive economic growth (simply add more resources), but there is no evidence in history—along with loads of counter-evidence—to prove that authoritarian systems are better at managing intensive growth (involving more innovation and higher productivity). Indeed, the economic statistics here are very clear: when all things are equal, democracies routinely outperform authoritarian regimes. The “unequal” part here is the country’s place along the developmental scale. China’s rise is still—and for the foreseeable future—based overwhelmingly on extensive growth (trying to adequately employ/exploit that rural 700m, for example), but it desperately needs to trip over into unprecedented intensive growth to accommodate the society’s equally unprecedented demographic aging. In twenty years’ time, average workers will need to earn a lot more to be able to support those two parents and four grandparents—the so-called 4-2-1 problem. What we’ve seen in history is that the shift from authoritarianism to political pluralism comes as annual per capita income rises from about $5,000 to $10,000. China is just approaching the bottom of that range. Show me a China with $10,000 per capita annual income that’s still ruled by a single-party state and you’ll have a real argument. Until then, this is all a lot of premature handwringing on our part.

Now, you can come back at me with numbers on Singapore and a few Arab emirates and say that you can develop wealth in such societies and still rule them authoritarian-style, but then you’ve reversed your argument—in effect suggesting that such development without political evolution is possible only in tiny city-states.

The Chinese Communist Party’s biggest problem is all those overseas Chinese living in democracies and thriving. As mainland Chinese get more media connectivity with the outside world (a battle of sorts, admittedly), they naturally wonder why overseas Chinese can rule themselves in democracies while “rising” mainland Chinese are too incompetent to do so—Jackie Chan’s notorious hypothesis.

Again, the large history on this score is fairly clear: after the “revolution” that sends the country into a more open global stance, we often see a single party dominate for about 40-50 years. Happened here in the United States, also in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and we’re watching Malaysia get close to the tipping point. The tipping point is the build-up of a middle class that demands more of a say in how the system is run. China is only about 30 years old in Deng years, so again, check back with me in 20 years and I think we’ll be talking about a very different Chinese political system.

Many Chinese thinkers and policymakers of my age range (late 40s) know this change is coming. Their Sixth Generation of leaders takes over in 2022 and will rule through 2032. Most of them have a very hard time imagining getting the country, along with all that developmental change, to 2032 without a lot of political evolution toward pluralism. It will simply be too complex and tumultuous a journey for a bunch of guys sitting around a table in Beijing to figure out all on their own.

MZ: Can the United States remain a superpower while China raises the living standards of its people? Can this really be achieved peacefully, conflict-free?

Barnett: It’s been happening for 30 years, with the last two decades featuring America’s pronounced superpower domination. We can certainly argue about how well we’ve handled that situation since 9/11, a favorite subject of mine, but the existence of the dual dynamics is undeniable.

China’s rise, creating as it does all that cheap labor, does challenge our definition of being a middle-class-heavy political system, because it eats away at a lot of well-paying jobs. But our challenge there is not to protect aging industries, but to move on to the next technological/manufacturing challenges. IBM sells off its computer-manufacturing business to Lenovo (LVNGY.PK) because it doesn’t plan on being the world’s best PC manufacturer in the 21st century—smart move. Manufacturing continues to be about 25% of our GDP, just providing fewer and fewer jobs over time because we continue to ratchet up productivity. Fighting China’s need for jobs is a losing battle—a true fool’s errand. We need to retool our education system and simply aim higher on the production scale.

Or we can sit on past laurels and wonder where all the jobs are going and become protectionist in a lazy, knee-jerk reaction.

Speaking in more political-military terms, there is little chance of China truly challenging our military superpower status in my lifetime, despite all the Pentagon hyperbole. We like to dream that we’re totally bankrupt now and they’re totally flush, but their system hides a lot of its gigantic “debts,” like its demographic debt, its environmental debt, etc. China has a lot of bets to cover in the coming decades, aging as it will to a scary degree (simply put, “old” countries have no history of warring). America, in contrast, will remain unusually young for an advanced economy, thanks in large part to immigration and a relatively high birthrate.

But far more important is the fact that we are comfortable, as a political system and society, with overseas military interventions. We’ve got a huge experience base. China hasn’t fought a war in half a century. They have no history of going anywhere overseas and fighting anybody. A lot of thinkers on our side seem to think that China, with its brittle single-party state system, will effortlessly evolve in that direction, but guess what? A single-party state like China can’t wage war because it cannot afford to lose one—the risk is simply too great. With America, our secret is that our political system is more than flexible enough to survive a Vietnam or an Iraq insurgency. We simply throw the “bums” out and get new ones. China, as currently configured, can’t risk such a roll of the dice, and a politically evolved, rapidly-aging China simply won’t take them.

So, in the end, this “threat” is self-liquidating.

MZ: What’s the thinking in Chinese political-military circles about their military needs? Who do they fear?

Barnett: At the top, you’ve got admirals and generals who’ve grown up totally within the “get Taiwan” mindset, so they largely see a world in which the United States military threat is everything. They live for that scenario and prefer to buy for it, because since it’s hemorrhaging plausibility with Ma’s KMT administration in Taipei and its strategy of political outreach to the mainland, that mindset will naturally age out (much like the Cold War mindset took a while following the Berlin Wall’s fall to age out of the U.S. military). It was never a plausible scenario on either side (e.g., lengthy missile battles, large-scale naval fights, months of naval blockades, etc.), but it was one that navies (especially submarine communities) and air forces on both sides naturally glommed onto in the post-Cold War era, because the alternative (low-intensity wars in unstable developing countries of strategic interest) favored the ground forces.

Back to the PLA: move down a bit and you bump into smarter, more self-aware officers who recognize that China’s network and economic connectivity with the outside world is rapidly outpacing its political-military capacity to defend it—not unlike a Mahanian generation of strategists in the U.S. in the last quarter of the 19th century. They know that China’s military isn’t built for that reality and want to see it move in that direction. That’s bad news for their air force but not bad for their surface navy (the whole string-of-pearls naval bases being constructed between China and the Middle East’s energy) and certainly good news for the ground forces. But remember this: a military that adapts itself down that pathway won’t be one bristling with the high-tech weapons, but one that’s capable of doing counterinsurgency and peace-keeping and nation-building en masse. That force would actually meet China’s growing security exposure in the world.

Will China be smart enough to evolve down that path? There’s a certain security in building a big-war force for them because it’s one they are incredibly unlikely to actually use, plus the lack of the small-wars capability becomes their excuse for never getting involved. Then there’s the whole India-China rivalry, where strategists on both sides love to engage in those “this region ain’t big enough for the two of us” thinking. It’s sad and very 19th century, I know, but rising powers have to go through such adolescent fears.

But in the main, I don’t really care what China’s military thinkers are up to. They can fantasize all they want about Taiwan and make their forces irrelevant to the world China actually finds itself operating within. They can dream up all sorts of asymmetrical strategies of warring with America that would, if ever pursued, end up disintegrating their country in a frightening flash once their Pearl Harbor/lightning strike dreams failed to materialize. But in the end, it’s the equivalent of strategy masturbation—very pleasing to oneself and essentially harmless.

A China, however, that seriously moves in the direction of appropriate power projection capabilities, is of great strategic interest to me, because that’s an ally I can use instead of some immature, reckless rising power I simply need to manage to make sure it doesn’t hurt anybody—including itself. The next ten years are incredibly crucial in this regard. I find the writings of the senior Chinese military leadership to be wholly out of touch with emerging strategic realities, but when I sit down with military strategists of my age range in China, I come away deeply impressed and very hopeful about what China will be able to accomplish and contribute to global security in the years ahead.

Again, this is the same professional dynamic I had to suffer through here in the States after the Cold War: you simply have to wait out the aging dinosaurs incapable of noticing the giant meteor strike that just occurred.

MZ: You make the case for a strategic alliance between China and the United States (given some of the global challenges we face like climate change and nuclear proliferation) but why do many American policy makers vilify the Chinese government?

Barnett: There are huge institutional forces within our military-industrial complex that need China as a big-war scenario, otherwise, the head-long evolution toward a more balanced force (part big-war/Leviathan, part small-wars/“system administrator” in my vernacular), as forced by Iraq and Afghanistan, will continue apace. Simply put, we’re talking budget flows and jobs.

Then there’s the larger reality that China, as the number one rising economic pillar of globalization today, represents the convenient bogeyman for all American fears about the world right now. We prefer those fears to the painful adaptations we should otherwise make.

We also fear China because we fantasize that their government has proven the supremacy of state capitalism (see my previous answer on that), which, in developmental terms, is a deeply unproven notion.

We’re led right now by the Boomers, who got their images of China in the 1960s, when they came of age. Their China will always be “communist” China (again, a laugher considering their brutal form of capitalism right now). It will always be a China on the verge of coming apart (think early 60s famines, or late 60s Cultural Revolution) or one that is easily inflated into a fantastic threat (remember Mao bragging about how nuclear weapons were nothing big?). When the Boomers pass and we get more fully into the post-60s-coming-of-age-in-the-more-globalized-1970s types represented by Barack Obama, then we’ll have an easier time politically thinking about and dealing with China.

The same will be true on their side. China’s current leadership, the so-called Fourth Generation, were the ones who stayed home during the Cultural Revolution. The Fifth and Sixth Generations were later allowed to get their college degrees in the U.S. and Europe. The Fifths come online in 2012, so we’re not far from a serious change in leadership capabilities on their side. You put them together with the sort of strategic intelligence displayed by Obama and I believe we’re in a much safer zone.

If you want to think like a grand strategist, you need to have the ability to look beyond the current fears and name-calling and anticipate the generational changes in the works. Along those lines, I see a lot of reason to expect better Sino-American relations in coming years.

Comments

[Graham and ...:]

China is the greatest military threat to the United States. And they're not shy about using it. Barnett should know better.

Jul 28 06:24 PM