We Live in Interesting Times

Sorry, Paul Krugman. According to the World Bank’s report there is a global rising middle class:

…growth in developing countries will reach a near record 7 percent this year. In 2007 and 2008, growth will probably slow, but still likely exceed 6 percent, more than twice the rate in high-income countries, which is expected to be 2.6 percent.

On how globalization will shape the global economy over the next 25 years, the report’s ‘central scenario’ predicts that the global economy could expand from $35 trillion in 2005 to $72 trillion in 2030. “While this outcome represents only a slight acceleration of global growth compared to the past 25 years, it is driven more than ever before by strong performance in developing countries,” said Richard Newfarmer, the report’s lead author and Economic Advisor in the Trade Department. “And while exact numbers will undoubtedly turn out to be different, the underlying trends are relatively impervious to all but the most severe or disruptive shocks.”

Unfortunately, I can think of some doomsday scenarios that would provide those disruptive shocks: the unnatural disasters provided by the death-dealing Islamists come to mind. Were they ever to coordinate their murderous intentions, the reverberations could spread to include the world’s economy. However, it’s not likely they have the organizational structure in place — at the moment — to bring off a major catastrophe, at least major enough to have a deep effect on a global level.

Meanwhile, apocalyptic dreams of the Ummah coming to pass are much more 7th century airy-fairy bloody tales than are the plans the Chinese have for the rest of us. In a recent essay Rowan Callick suggests that we “excise” the Middle East and look at what China is doing:

This might seem a very odd exercise if you live in the USA or the Middle East. But for those of us in the rest of the world, it’s pretty natural. Simply excise the Middle East, and look at what’s happening in most other places. One word will do: China. That’s what’s happening.

While the USA is preoccupied with the Middle East, it is “losing” the rest of the world. The entire developing world, as well as the industrial powerhouses of East Asia, are already starting to view China as not a mere potential rival to the US but as a new super-power already.

The forced resignation of John Bolton as America’s United Nations ambassador reinforces the perception that Washington will be hors de combat for a couple of years, with a lame duck president competing for domestic influence with an isolationist Congress.

This is helping stimulate Beijing’s voracious engagement in trade deals of every kind. Its diplomacy is focused and relentless. And its “non conditional friendship” approach is loved by Third World leaders irritated by the attempts of Western countries, international agencies and non government organizations to bring them to account.

[…]

From a Washington perspective, this might appear darned unfair, as the US is almost alone leading the war on Islamist terror in the thankless heat of the day, on behalf of most of the rest of the world.

It is indeed unfair. But for many complex reasons, the crucial need for the war on terror is little understood elsewhere, and most European opinion leaders — including those from Britain — that remain influential internationally are exulting in the USA’s being humbled.

Meanwhile, most of the problems, the vanities, the cruelties of the rulers of China are conveniently sidelined as it is vaunted as not merely the Next Big Thing — a sort of globalization-meets-internet-age super new wave — but as the Now Big Thing. Call this ungrateful, naïve, greedy, unintelligent, amoral, short-sighted, disloyal, opportunistic — and you’d be right. But it’s next to impossible to turn it off.

China Central TV has just finished broadcasting a lavish 12 part historical series on “The Rise of the Great Nations.” The message is clear, in a country whose diplomatic catchphrase is its “peaceful rise” — we’re next.

The most interesting aspect of China’s inroads does not lie in its economic tsunami. Have you heard of the Confucius Institute? If not, you will soon. Forget the local mosque. The coming attraction is much older than anything extant in the West or Middle East:

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Confucius Institute is a non-profit public institute which aims at promoting Chinese language and culture and supporting local Chinese teaching internationally through affiliated Confucius Institutes. Its headquarters is in Beijing and is under the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. After establishing a pilot institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in June 2004, the first Confucius Institute opened on November 21, 2004 in Seoul, Korea and many more have been established in other countries, such as the U.S., Germany and Sweden, where Chinese enjoys an increasing popularity. The first Confucius Institute in South Eastern Europe was opened in August 2006 in Belgrade, Serbia. The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China estimates that, by the year 2010, there will be approximately 100 million people worldwide learning Chinese as a foreign language, and it plans to set up 100 Confucius Institutes worldwide.

In case there is one near you, here’s the U.S. list:

• Chicago Public Schools
  
• China Institute
  
• Michigan State University
  
• Palm Beach County School District, Boca Raton, Florida
  
• San Francisco State University
  
• University of Hawaii
  
• University of Iowa
  
• University of Kansas
  
• University of Maryland
  
• University of Massachusetts
  
• University of Oklahoma
  
• University of Texas

There are listings in the same Wikipedia link for Germany, Hungary, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Sweden, New Zealand, and the UK.

Mr. Callick references Daniel Bell, a Canadian philosopher teaching in China:

The earlier rise of authoritarian, Confucianesque “Asian values” promoted by south east Asian leaders bit the dust, rightly so, when the region’s economies hit the wall in 1997.

But the concept is now returning with a vengeance, far more powerfully fuelled this time — by the leaders of China who are investing millions of dollars in a global chain of Confucian Institutes.

The view that this is already China’s cultural, political and strategic hour as well as its economic hour, decades before many observers had expected, is being echoed in new books such as “Beyond Liberal Democracy,” by the young Canadian Philosophy Professor at Beijing’s elite Qinghua University, Daniel Bell.

He champions as an alternative to liberal democracy, re-emergent Confucianism, that he sees embodied in the new Chinese leadership of Asia, encapsulated in Hu Jintao’s relentless slogan about building a “harmonious socialist society.”

However, despite Professor Bell’s encomium, all is not well on the Eastern Front:

Willy Wo-lap Lam, a renowned China analyst, says the Chinese regime’s treatment of the defenders of marginalised people — like blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, his four year sentence for conspiring to disrupt traffic recently upheld — hardly promotes “community life.”

“Internationally, ‘harmony’ is supposed to mean the opposite of Bush-style unilateralism,” he says. “But it is just rhetoric. Beijing is aggressively trying to subjugate Burma, Laos and other client states, and its behaviour in Sudan is certainly not Confucianist, only creating ‘harmony’ for the murderous dictators there.”

Finally, just to make things interesting, Larry Kudlow has a link to a news article that says China is getting ready to attack North Korea. And it seems that China wants us to know about it, since the attack plan was leaked to those in a position to tattle to Western intelligence sources.

You’d think even the North Koreans were smart enough not to dis the Chinese. But, then again, maybe not.

We need to ask James Higham about this.