The Rise And Rise Of China

Mark Steyn's take on China. (Hat Tip to Instapundit.)

The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal on the
grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a
Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the
cockroach she is.

What we're seeing is a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that
is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid
hovel.

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong
Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world
gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your
house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a
regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was,
nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism:
lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private.

China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on
Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five
centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of
North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a
provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob
boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a
psychologically healthy state.

How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen
when they collide?

Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most
outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable
form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even
free-ish - society.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper
the present arrangements in Beijing.

Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will
bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about
a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a
second American century". But wishing won't make it so.

"One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or
four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America,
India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find
the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.