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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22693)	3/19/2005 6:23:01 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 81023

Mar 19, 2005 The real 'China threat' By Chalmers Johnson I recall 40 years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O Reischauer once commented, "The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer served as US ambassador to Tokyo in the administrations of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W Bush, the United States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even accelerate Japanese rearmament. Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future Sino-American conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand what they are unleashing - a possible confrontation between the world's fastest-growing industrial economy, China, and the world's second-most-productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation that the United States would have caused and in which it might well be consumed. Let me make clear that in East Asia we are not talking about a little regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney advocate. After all, the most salient characteristic of international relations during the last century was the inability of the rich, established powers - Great Britain and the United States - to adjust peacefully to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan and Russia. The result was two exceedingly bloody World Wars, a 45-year-long Cold War between Russia and the "West", and innumerable wars of national liberation (such as the quarter-century-long one in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of European, US and Japanese imperialism and colonialism. The major question for the 21st century is whether this fateful inability to adjust to changes in the global power structure can be overcome. Thus far the signs are negative. Can the United States and Japan, today's versions of rich, established powers, adjust to the re-emergence of China - the world's oldest continuously extant civilization - this time as a modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war, when the pretensions of European civilization in its US and Japanese projections are finally put to rest? That is what is at stake. Alice in Wonderland policies China, Japan and the United States are the three most productive economies on Earth, but China is the fastest-growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum for more than two decades), whereas both the US and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is today the world's sixth-largest economy (the US and Japan being first and second) and America's third-largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico. According to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) statisticians in their Factbook 2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a purchasing-power-parity basis - that is, in terms of what China actually produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United States' gross domestic product (GDP) - the total value of all goods and services produced within a country - for 2003 as US$10.4 trillion and China's as $5.7 trillion. This gives China's 1.3 billion people a per capita GDP of $4,385. [...] atimes.com