BEIJING—The mocking tone of the editorial may have been unusual for a Chinese newspaper, but the sentiments were not: America, it scoffed, is a washed-up superpower.
“Too lazy to reform,” is how the nationalist-leaning Global Times framed the American dilemma just days ahead of a visit to Beijing by U.S. President Barack Obama this month, reflecting a widespread Chinese view about America’s decline. U.S. politics are a mess and social cohesion is fraying, the paper said. As for Mr. Obama, he’s “doing an insipid job.”
In international relations, perceptions matter greatly. They can even lead to military conflict.
Today, a growing risk to global stability is the way that mainstream views of America in China--and common views of China in America—are losing touch with reality.
China makes a habit of exaggerating America’s weaknesses and underrating its strengths. America has the opposite tendency, hyping China’s ascent and underestimating its vulnerabilities.
The effect is to exacerbate a dangerous rivalry in East Asia between the world’s two largest economies.
A newly emboldened China has abandoned years of careful diplomacy and is openly confronting America and its regional allies and friends, including Japan and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, stricken by concerns that China will one day rise to become a military peer in the Asia Pacific, America is “pivoting” its forces to the region.
Perceptions have warped not just among ordinary Chinese and Americans but among top officials and, in particular, military strategists with a vested interest in perpetuating myths and distortions of this kind.
The perception gap has been widening ever since 2008 when America’s economy plunged into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. This was a watershed moment for Chinese leaders since they understand very well that military power, over the long run, stems from economic prowess.
Determined not to disrupt its own growth pace, China sent its economy into expansionary overdrive, spurring a frenzy of construction to make up for lost exports.
To many in the upper echelons of the Communist Party, it seemed that the balance of power had shifted, that China’s time really had arrived and America’s days of global pre-eminence were numbered.
This sentiment appeared to trump more sober analysis. Writing in 2010, for instance, Zhang Bin, a scholar with the China Institute of International Studies, argued that “America’s status as the world’s only superpower has not changed fundamentally.”
Time has borne out that assessment. It turns out that much of China’s recent growth has been illusory, the result of reckless lending and wasteful INVESTMENT. Bridges to nowhere and empty “ghost cities” litter the Chinese landscape. Debt among state-owned enterprises is out of control; chronic overcapacity plagues the steel and shipbuilding industries, among others.
When the cost of the cleanup from all this polluting, and increasingly unproductive economic activity is stripped out, China’s seemingly miraculous growth looks even less impressive. Some 20% of all farmland is contaminated.
Furthermore, these immensely complex problems need fixing—along with a broken education system, hopelessly underfunded pension and welfare programs and inadequate health-care coverage—just as China’s demographic tailwinds turn into headwinds. China is aging and its workforce is about to shrink. Nothing can be done to reverse this in the foreseeable future.
Larry Summers is one American who isn’t buying into the story put out by the economists at Goldman Sachs and other INVESTMENT banks that China inevitably will soar past America in terms of overall economic output.
In a recent working paper co-written with fellow Harvard academic Lant Pritchett, the former U.S. Treasury secretary argues that after the greatest economic surge in history, China’s growth is likely to revert to the global average—more like 2% than this year’s anticipated 7.5% or so. In other words, China won’t overtake America soon and, in fact, may never catch up.
Meanwhile, America’s long-term economic prospects are brightening. Entrepreneurship and invention are alive and well: Silicon Valley is filled with Chinese engineers who find more reward there than at home. Thanks to the shale-gas revolution, even manufacturing is making a modest comeback. America may become energy self-sufficient in the next decade.
None of this is to say that China’s prospects are doomed. PresidentXi Jinping has made an impressive start to his program of sweeping economic reforms. And it’s often noted that few people have made MONEY betting against China in the past quarter century.
Still, the odds that China can keep growing in a linear fashion without serious mishap get worse by the day.
Nor is America’s success assured. The Global Times makes fair points about American frailties (Who can deny the baleful consequences of political gridlock in Washington?)
But perceptions have a way of confounding logic. For years, Americans labored under a false sense that the Soviet Union represented a mortal economic threat. And, improbable though it now seems, in the 1980s many thought their country would be eclipsed by Japan.
And perceptions shape history, too. The Greek philosopher Thucydides explained the causes of the fifth-century B.C. Peloponnesian War in these terms: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
There’s nothing preordained about either China’s rise, or America’s demise. The combustible mix of triumphalism and fear, though, are very real. That’s the true dilemma of contemporary East Asia. © Provided by ANDREW BROWNE I THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Write to Andrew Browne at andrew.browne@wsj.com
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