George Friedman on a China under stress

Two days ago we shared George Friedman’s unsentimental views of the Middle East. In the March 21 issue of WORLD Magazine the founder and head of the Stratfor international intelligence organization offered his surprising forecast for stormy weather in Europe. Here’s what he said about China during an interview conducted before students at Patrick Henry College.

Is China moving toward military aggression? China is surrounded by jungles, the Himalayas, and Siberia. The People’s Liberation Army is primarily the internal security force. The navy they are building is in no way even close to a match to the United States. The real issue is internal. Over a billion Chinese have a standard of living below that of Bolivia. Some 300 or 400 million would be considered the Chinese miracle, and of those maybe 100 million live the kind of life we would think of as middle class. There is a huge contradiction in China that the Chinese government is trying to solve by imposing a dictatorship. We are seeing it moved back to a Maoist model with the Communist Party as the dictator, primarily because the party is afraid the country will rip itself apart through these social contradictions.

Isn’t Communism discredited? The Communist Party may have lost a lot of its ideological fervor, but as an institution it is still very strong. Right now it is imposing a very vigorous dictatorship on the country, re-centralizing many of the economic processes and purging political opponents with a corruption campaign. The former head of the security forces, for example, was discovered to be corrupt—it would be amazing if he hadn’t been. So we’re seeing an internal power struggle that the party is putting down ruthlessly.

What are some of the major social contradictions? Rapid growth has ended. It’s going to be below 7 percent and I doubt it’s really 3 percent—they’re making up numbers. As they re-centralize, China will get more and more inefficient. China has had its Japan moment, as when Japan was going to take over the world and we were all going to be speaking Japanese. And then Japan reached a limit. Japan didn’t have a billion utterly impoverished people. China does. Japan could land in a socially coherent place, but China can’t do that unless it has a very powerful state, and the real question is: Can that state manage this, or will it break apart in civil war as it did prior to World War II? Right now the odds appear to be that it goes back into a dictatorship. But will the coastal region that has prospered so much—and depends more on Walmart than Beijing for its future—at some point resist because the leaders are transferring the money away from the coastal region to placate the interior. Will Beijing be able to contain the Shanghai Party Committee?

Who controls the army? Party committees may or may not have control over regional armed forces. Who in the end is the military loyal to? You have to remember that many in the military enriched themselves and many are afraid that the party will start to dominate the military and purge them. The chances are the army has multiple loyalties to different people. You get into trouble when the army splits.

What about the Chinese navy? It’s very difficult for the Chinese navy to operate because the South China Sea is enclosed and the East China Sea is similarly enclosed by a string of islands from Japan down to Taiwan. Behind those islands the United States can keep one of its carrier battle groups, any one of which can annihilate the Chinese navy. That is what the Chinese are afraid of, so they build missiles to keep the Americans at a distance. The United States can’t invade China. The Chinese can’t break into the Pacific against American power. It really is a standoff. This is not a war that can happen. To land enough military is difficult for the Chinese. To keep them supplied is even harder, and to make sure that the amphibious force that’s moving back and forth is not going under attack by the very substantial Taiwanese air force, or even worse by the United States. And then what does China do in Taiwan? When you play this out, they have nothing to gain by war. It exposes them. In the 1970s there was a war between China and Vietnam, and Vietnam won. The Chinese military has not fought a serious war since Korea, where it was also fought to a standstill. It is not an experienced military force. It’s an experienced security force.

What’s the role of Christianity in all this? The Chinese government doesn’t want any organization to resist. The government doesn’t mind individual Christians, but they are terrified of the church because a church could become a counter-revolutionary force. If the party decides that the Christians in their study groups are actually engaging in political organization it could become very severe for them. If the government sees an essentially fragmented individualist movement it certainly does not want to alienate the United States and other countries by purging Christians. If the movement gains a kind of self-confidence and sees itself as a self-conscious community, that’s crossing a line, and I don’t think that the party will tolerate it.