China Steps on the Gas

China represents the only society on this planet to weather the transition from pre-industrial to postmodern intact and gaining strength. The American Experiment is merely a chapter or two compared to the volumes of patient, pragmatic, skilled governing that has led one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse areas on the planet to remain intact as a single country. The USSR couldn't do it, Europe is only beginning to get serious about it, Africa is years away from pulling together, and even the USA is too young a nation to judge its success.

We in the West like to think of ourselves as more advanced because we've invented enviable and useful technology. But when we consider that America is still making up its mind how to deal with the fundamental questions that come with being a secularly governed, pluralistic, market-aware society, China has kept a tight reign and is marching at an alarming rate toward all the goals we imagine are our inheritance.

Twenty-five years from now, I predict that China will be the world's superpower and America will simply be another of its many customers. Fifty years from now, China will own most of the world -- not by political overthrow, but by economic influence and property ownership -- while America will have simply traded away through consumption away any influence it earned in its leaner years.

This emergence has been underway for a long time, but as Charles Krauthammer points out in his article China's Moment, I believe we have all just heard the sound of an immense engine revving up to change into a higher gear. As the author states, we are witnessing China's emergence from an economic and demographic dynamo to a major actor on the world stage, and serious rival to American dominance in the Pacific.

Can America still see far enough down the hyper-consumptive path on which it now sprints to slow down and possibly turn around? Not as long as we are self-congratulatory in our self-absorption and remain in denial of the unsustainability of our current course. America should prepare for a humbling stretch over the coming years -- either by voluntary humility or the more frightening kind that comes from external sources.