Tag: China

Posted on

The coming Tripolar world order (not really)

I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this paper which sets out an analysis of what the geopolitics of the next few decades will likely be:

Three Worlds: the West, East and South and the competition to shape global order

Among the many impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the most consequential may be in pushing the world in the direction of Three Worlds—the global West, the global East and the global South. One is led by the United States and Europe, the second by China and Russia, and the third by an amorphous grouping of non-western developing nations. These Three Worlds are not blocs or coherent negotiating groups, but loose, constructed and evolving global factions. This article makes four arguments. First, the Three Worlds system has the makings of a fairly durable pattern of global order, shaping struggles over rules and institutions. Second, the Three Worlds system will encourage a ‘creative’ politics of global order-building. The global West and global East will have incentives to compete for the support and cooperation of the global South. Third, there are deep principles of world order that provide a foundation for the Three Worlds competition. Finally, if the global West is to remain at the center of world order in the decades ahead, it will need to accommodate both the global East and the global South, and adapt itself to a more pluralistic world. But in the competition with the global East for the support of the global South, it has the advantage. The global South’s critique of the global West is not that it offers the wrong pathway to modernity, but that it has not lived up to its principles or shared sufficiently the material fruits of liberal modernity.

I find this a fascinating idea because it’s basically the return of the Three Worlds from the Cold War, except this time the Third World has more hard power on its side. And yes, if you read the paper then you’ll know I was being a bit clickbait-y with the thread title since it argues that what the future will be is likely not to be enduring blocs like in the Cold War but much looser groupings with plenty of intermeshed connections and situational realignments between the different factions (i.e., a country may align with one faction for one issue but with another for a different one).

I like the paper’s comparison to the three estates of pre-Revolutionary France. While an individual aristocrat, for example, might disagree with what the rest of his peers are doing, you can still talk about the interests of the aristocracy as a whole and what they are likely to do in aggregate as a class.

I make four arguments about this Three Worlds system. First, it has the makings of a fairly durable form of global order. Going forward, world order may be defined by the struggle between these three groupings, but no one will ‘win’ this struggle. This is because each of these groupings carries with it deeply held political ideas and projects, rooted in its global position and developmental circumstances, that will not disappear any time soon. Each, in effect, has its own set of conceptions about how modernity will and should unfold.

So basically that’s just how things are likely going to be. Personally, barring something unforeseen, the biggest future shakeup of this system will probably be the rise of India. If India manages to do what China did then that’ll disrupt any status quo that emerges in the meantime. India will probably present itself as the champion of the global South just like China is now, but it’ll be its own thing distinct from the real South.

At least the paper has some optimism for the future. While wars will happen, norms will hopefully emerge that limit the potential for total destruction.

I don’t really agree with the paper’s assertion that the global West stands for democracy while the global East stands for illiberalism and autocracy. I mean, China works with democracies all the time while the US has supported some of the most savage autocrats of recent history. But it’s a neat story to explain the contest between West and East for the masses (see the democracy vs communism angle from the last great global rivalry).

The main axis of the struggle over world order runs between the global West and the global East. These two groupings each have a superpower and a coalition of great powers to drive their agendas. The global South is weaker. It is not led by an established great power. No state in the global South has a permanent seat or veto in the UN Security Council. It is an amorphous and diverse coalition of states with a wide range of ideologies and agendas . . .

Nonetheless, the global South is not without its capacities. After all, it is where most of humanity resides. Specifically, as a global grouping of states, the global South has at least two types of capacities to assert itself in world order struggles. One is simply its ability—in various regional and global configurations—to join larger coalitions linked to the global West or global East. It is a sort of ‘swing grouping’, available to join other states in ways that tilt world politics in one direction or the other. Both China and the global East and the US and the global West acknowledge and act upon this situation . . .

Second, and relatedly, states from the global South can also confer ‘legitimacy’ on moves by one or the other superpower bloc. This is not to say that the countries from the global South necessarily hold more enlightened views about the proper organization of world order. As one scholar has put it, ‘for both analytical and political purposes, it is important not to simplify or romanticize the idea of the global South’. But the global South can act as a sort of third party—a global audience—that can weigh in to help shape global narratives about what passes for proper and acceptable behaviour in world politics. As global powers, the United States and China both have an incentive to shape global public opinion. The Chinese have called this ‘narrative power’, a strategy to increase their standing on the world stage by promoting pro-Chinese narratives and critical opinion about their rivals.

It’s nice that the Third World won’t simply be the battleground for the superpowers this time around.

If this analysis is correct, both the global West and the global East will have incentives to widen their coalitions, reaching out to swing states in the global South. How might this competition evolve over time, and how might it have an impact on the evolution of global rules and institutions? We might expect at least three impacts.

First, China and the United States will increasingly look to build alliances with key states outside their orbit. As noted earlier, neither superpower has the ‘critical mass’ to shape and dominate the global system by relying only on states inside their orbit. The contrary is the case. Both the United States and China have reason to worry that the other side will build the bigger global coalition. Therefore, both states will increasingly seek to cultivate strategic partners in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East . . .

What is America’s nightmare coalition, and what is China’s? For the United States, it would be for the global East and global South to combine in a way that left the global West on the outside, weaker and smaller in its global position. For China, the nightmare coalition would be for the West and the global South to swing into alignment. For the reasons detailed in this article, neither scenario is likely to happen completely, or any time soon. The Three Worlds system of global politics is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. But this Three Worlds system will generate incentives and patterns of conflict and cooperation that could shape and reshape the rules and institutions of global order.

I hope medical technology improves greatly because I want to see how things shake out at the end of the century. Sometimes I like to watch Youtube videos that project GDP into like 2100 or read stuff like Goldman Sachs’ prediction of the biggest economies in the world by 2075.

They’re an amusing diversion but if some of the predictions come to pass then the geopolitics of the future will be quite different from now. Forget China and India being the top two and the US being # 3 in economic size, the Philippines is going to have a larger economy than France in 50 years? Mexico will have a bigger economy than Japan?

Wild stuff. I really want to see if this happens.

Posted on

Guardian of the Sacred Spirit

Discovering an exceptional but lesser-known work of fiction for oneself is one of life’s smaller pleasures, one made no less enjoyable for being such an ordinary experience. The story of Seirei no Moribito (Guardian of the Sacred Spirit) itself feels rather small and ordinary; instead of covering an epic struggle between good and evil, at its heart it’s about the depths of maternal love and how far a person can go to protect a loved one. The melancholy nature of the song in the video captures well the feeling of the show, much better than the opening song, in fact, which I found rather insipid in an inoffensive pop song way.

Seirei no Moribito is based on the first book of a Japanese fantasy series and it covers the story of Balsa, a female bodyguard, who is tasked with protecting a prince from his father’s own assassins. There are many things to like about the series, not least of which are the lush backgrounds as can be seen in the video. Generally speaking, it’s a lot more realistic than other anime that deals with swords and the supernatural. You won’t find arcs of blood stylishly spraying into the air or fighters shouting out the names of their attacks; rather, all of the fighting is firmly rooted in real-world martial arts.

Unusually for the genre, the anime does not deal with the samurai-and-ninjas feudal era which first springs to mind when one mentions “Japan” and “swords”. Instead, the series is set in a fantasy world based on Heian-era Japan, which is to say, Japan before the samurai. Japan was governed more like Imperial China, with the Japanese emperors wielding direct political power as the sons of Heaven. This is the opposite situation of the later feudal era, where the emperor was largely a figurehead.

It’s interesting to note that the hydraulic theory of state formation posits that states formed in early China because a centralized power was needed to organize the necessary resources that allowed complex irrigation systems to nourish rice paddies. Ancient Japan, of course, consciously modeled itself on China, and the fact that both countries relied on rice as the central staple food in their diets certainly helped keep their systems of government in sync for a while. Certainly a bunch of squabbling feudal lords couldn’t have organized things half so well.

Of course, one must then ask why feudalism arose in Japan if central organization was so necessary to keep a country of rice eaters alive. There are of course the political and historically-contingent reasons for why the strong Japanese state broke down (short story: a combination of screw-ups and bad luck for several Japanese emperors). Improvements in military technology and the resulting change in recruitment practices also gave greater power to regional leaders, and I suspect developments in agriculture also helped. A separate military class rose to challenge the power of the imperial government, a civil war happened, and slowly but surely the samurai were the new rulers of Japan.

Admittedly, all this is going rather far afield from the original topic of the anime series. What can I say, I have a certain fascination for states and state formation. Anyway, to return to Seirei no Moribito: I liked it. If you like serious anime, please try it out. Not that I hate the funny (Ranma 1/2 remains one of my favourite shows, period), but Moribito definitely deserves a larger audience, which I hope this blog post might in some small way help to provide.

Posted on

On The Righteous and Harmonious Fists

The Economist recently published a fairly decent overview of modern Chinese attitudes towards the Boxer Rebellion (judgement on the historical accuracy of the article supplied by Frog in a Well). Overall, there’s nothing surprising about how the Chinese nationalists have lionized the Boxers and how the underground Chinese Catholics have their own counter-narratives about the Rebellion. However, the comments to the article are full of Sinophile apologists making idiotic excuses for the actions of the Chinese, especially that of the Communist government. One commenter looks to be a genuine Chinese nationalist. Eh, whatever, a pox on all their houses.

Posted on

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

For history-minded people who are also China watchers, it’s fascinating to see how China’s current drive towards accelerated industrialization resembles the historical trajectory of European industrialization.  There is, of course, the massive pile of Chinese migrant labourer bodies stacking up from various coal mine accidents, sweatshop fires, and worker riots.  All of this recalls “Western” experiences, and if you squint at the headlines in the right way you can even imagine you’re reading a news article from the 19th century.  The wealthier Chinese are even aware of this:

But an odd change has come about in some [Chinese] shoppers’ minds. As members of China’s business and political elite, they have come to believe that the world is a huge jungle of Darwinian competition, where connections and smarts mean everything, and quaint notions of fairness count for little.

I noticed this attitude on my most recent trip to China from the United States, where I moved nine years ago. So I asked a relative who lives rather comfortably to explain. “Is it fair that the household maids make 65 cents an hour while the well-connected real estate developers become millionaires or billionaires in just a few years?” I asked. He was caught off guard. After a few seconds of silence, he settled on an answer he had read in a popular magazine.

“Look at England, look at America,” he said. “The Industrial Revolution was very cruel. When the English capitalists needed land, sheep ate people.” (Chinese history books use the phrase “sheep ate people” to describe what happened in the 19th century, when tenant farmers in Britain were thrown off their land to starve so that sheep could graze and produce wool for new mills.)

“Since England and America went through that pain, shouldn’t we try to avoid the same pain, now that we have history as our guide?” I asked.

“If we want to proceed to a full market economy, some people have to make sacrifices,” my relative said solemnly. “To get to where we want to get, we must go through the ‘sheep eating people’ stage too.”

In other words, while most Chinese have privately dumped the economic prescriptions of Marx, two pillars of the way he saw the world have remained. First is the inexorable procession of history to a goal. The goal used to be the Communist utopia; now the destination is a market economy of material abundance.

Second, just as before, the welfare of some people must be sacrificed so the community can march toward its destiny. Many well-to-do Chinese readily endorse those views, so long as neither they nor their relatives are placed on the altar of history. In the end, Marx is used to justify ignoring the pain of the poor.

Certainly it’s a mealy-mouthed excuse for an excuse: It’s okay for Chinese to exploit their fellow human beings because the British did the same 150 years ago.  The British also forced the Chinese to buy British opium at gunpoint and cede Hong Kong in the Opium Wars, so my inner cynic wonders if the Chinese are also planning on doing the same thing to other countries.  Then again, the march of progress means that often the new capitalists are welcomed with open arms.

Of course, this pattern of worker abuse is not just a simple reiteration of Western history being played out by people with darker skin.  For example, no witches were ever burned in England because manufacturing jobs were scarce.  The present isn’t the past and the (cough, ahem) Third World isn’t the farcical Napoleon III to the First World’s l’Empereur, Marx’s witticism notwithstanding.

For one thing, while it may be tempting to think of all of this “stuff” as happening in foreign countries or in the past, the resurgence of Taylorism and “scientific management” (a discredited management philosophy organized around getting the most productivity out of workers and damn their health and comfort), the introduction of flexible labour and contingent work (in rural as well as in urban areas), the migration of capital and jobs, and the shrinking of the working class labour market in the “West” means that things are getting crappier where white people live too.  Some economists are even admitting this, despite the fact that most of them seem to be propagandists of global capitalism.

In fact, the globalist project has been so dismal in its rewards that it’s been traded in for straight-up nationalism in some quarters (e.g., the US, Russia, Pakistan, Japan, and so many other countries).  “Here we go again,” say the historians, though in this sequel the Indians sometimes fight off the cowboys successfully — note, though, that it’s not the absolutely downtrodden countries that are resisting successfully, but the ones that already have some power.  Lest anyone forget, remember also that the elites of those countries are hard at work exploiting their paisanos, so what we’re seeing is more like one group of elites fighting off another group of elites than the underdogs beating the five-time league champion.

All of these thoughts were triggered in me when I read about the recent fashionability of skin tanning among wealthier Chinese (via Boas Blog’s shoutout to Racialicious).  Note that light skin was previously the in-thing to have to signify one’s wealth since it’s a sign that one isn’t a common labourer working outdoors, just like in Britain before the Industrial Revolution and just like it is today in many developing countries (and let’s not forget that skin whitening creams are used by many black people in the US, UK, and the Caribbean, though they’re used for slightly different reasons than mere signifiers of wealth).  With the expansion of the airline industry, the drop in ticket prices thanks to cut-throat competition, and the greater number of vacationing middle class people created by industrialization, tanned skin has become a sign that the possessor has been to an expensive holiday overseas — again, like the way tanned skin became fashionable in Britain as a sign that the person has been to the Mediterranean, most likely during their Grand Tour of Europe, such holidaying becoming only possible by the building of railways to criss-cross the continent.

So there you have it: The more things change, the more they stay the same (barring the odd witch-burning and war on Islam here and there).