Tempering China's chauvinism
THOMAS BARNETT
ARTICLE: China Changes Course, Advocating Tempered Response to Its Critics, By Jill Drew, Washington Post, April 23, 2008; Page A14
Good example of the limits of nationalism for the Chinese Communist Party: a bit is okay, but too much and pretty soon you're threatening the economic connectivity that justifies their rule.
The Olympics were going to be a major readjustment of their nationalism one way or the other. I see it working out quite nicely, as in, the Chinese grow up a lot in this process and the immature chauvinism gets tempered with something more weighty.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 6, 2008 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Remember the bit in Esquire about "if your grad degree involved a lot of memorization"?
GLOBAL BUSINESS: "Call My Lawyer … in India: Call-center jobs were first; now U.S. companies are looking to offshore for their legal work too," by Suzanne Barlyn, Time, 14 April 2008. p. G1.
We're looking at 29k legal jobs shipped abroad by the end of 2008 and maybe 80k by 2015. India is simply moving up the service ladder, just like China does on the manufacturing ladder. You go from call centers (lower-value business process outsourcing) to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). Engineering and medicine comes under assault too, as these KPOs act more and more like "branch offices of U.S. companies."
India's advantages are clear: English speakers and a common law background.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 6, 2008 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Speaking of growing food dependency …
WORLD NEWS: "Japan's Changing Tastes Lead to Import Dependence," by Hiroko Tabuchi, Wall Street Journal, 9 April 2008, p. A10.
A generation ago breakfast in Japan is rice, fish and home-grown veggies. Now it's toast from imported wheat, ham from pigs that eat imported grain and ditto for the eggs.
Japan now grows only 39% of its food needs, down from 70% in the 1960s. Body fat rises and heart disease is now the number one killer.
Yes, yes, they're so different and will never change.
The food interdependency that we're just now seeing will only grow with ag production shifting due to global warming. In a quarter century's time, we'll view global food nets as far more economically important, strategically vulnerable, and politically sensitive than energy nets are today.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 6, 2008 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Urbanization will trigger rural land sale rights in China
ARTICLE: "On the Move: Chinese officials want more farmers to migrate to the city. But they are also aware that migration brings problems," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 12-13 April 2008, p. R5.
The biggest peacetime migration in human history, inside one country.
Forty-four % of Chinese live in cities now. When Deng kicked this whole thing off in 1980, 80 percent lived on the farm. By 2050, China's looking at 1B in cities and only 400m on the farm, or about half of the rural population it had in 2080.
All of this in response to the opportunities afforded by connectivity to the global economy.
After so many years of trying to keep farmers down on the farm, now China encourages the migration, because it needs the supply of cheap labor to continue for as long as possible while shifting more and more of the population to higher-paying jobs as the demographics tilt dramatically older.
So the old household-registration system, called hukou, is being dramatically relaxed, meaning people are more able to choose where they want to live. As it is, more than 100m Chinese simply "float" right now, living in urban areas while retaining—officially—farms back in the village.
Here's where it links then:
Indeed, the most pressing issue raised by China's urban transformation may not be migrants' entrance into cities but their exit from the farm. Those who migrate permanently to cities and obtain urban hukou have to give up their rights to farmland. Not everyone is willing to take that chance, since farming is something to fall back on if the job doesn't work out.
But here's the additional dynamic: China needs to mechanize its ag production a lot more, meaning fewer bigger farms, otherwise the population's growing demand for more and better food will trigger even more dependency on foreign sources (which is inevitable, but why not meet as much of that demand as possible at home?).
My point? Once you open up to globalization, the secondary and tertiary effects never end. You simply have to feed the beast.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 6, 2008 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Our leadership is needed now more than ever
ARTICLE: 'The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest', By Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008
A good exegesis on why the new "declinists" are hyping our "fall" quite a bit, but still, at the end, this summary of Zakaria's book suggests he pushes for internal improvements and active integration of rising powers. I will wait to read book to see what else he says, but the gist here seems to be: balance is coming, but slower than you think: we can self-improve to deal with this loss of power but the loss is inevitable.
Compare this to Khanna (balance is already here and there is nothing America can do to stop it) and Kagan (renewed bipolar Cold War of democracies vs authoritarian states) and it's clearly more sanguine.
My book aims to surpass this baseline diagnostic approach to argue for a grand strategy rethink and redesign for the next iteration. Yes, China's model says this is how nations catch-up economically, and the EU replicates our "states uniting" model of developed countries' integration, but neither constitutes a grand strategic vision for future global order. As today's rising great powers within our liberal int'l trade order signal the unprecedented global success of our American System-cum-globalization, we need to step up to the next grand strategic iteration and define the global integration to come. My book, Great Powers fills in that blank, not just stopping at the diagnosis and saying either accept it (Khanna, Zakaria) or fight it (Kagan), but argues that America needs to keep leading and keep shaping and defining what must come next. The current interdependency of globalization is rapidly being superseded by a new hyper- connectivity, -transparency, and -interdependency (we just begin to see this on food). Since we're the furthest along in this multinationalism experiment, our leadership is needed now more than ever.
(Thanks: William R. Cumming)
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 6, 2008 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Have to consider this one of the last "dominos" to fall
ARTICLE: Nepal Maoists to embrace capitalism, Times of India, 24 Apr 2008
Kind of funny, because the Asian Maoists have been the most recalcitrant ideology to move out of the past.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
