As the Olympics comes to a close–a true “coming out” event for China–I thought I’d share some information from Fareed Zakaria’s superb book The Post-American World, which I mentioned in an earlier post. He has lengthy chapters on China and India. Here are tidbits from the China chapter.

• Today, China exports more in a single day than it exported in all of 1978.
• Jeffrey Sachs: “China is the most successful development story in world history.”
• The average Chinese person’s income has increased nearly sevenfold.
• During the last 30 years, China has moved 40 million people out of poverty, “the largest reduction that has taken place anywhere, anytime.”
• The 20 fastest-growing cities in the world are all in China.
• China imports seven times more stuff from the United States than it did 15 years ago.
• “China will not replace the United States as the world’s superpower. It is unlikely to surpass it on any dimension–military, political or economic–for decades, let alone have dominance in all areas. But on issue after issue, it has become the second-most-important country in the world.”
• Though China is an authoritarian government, the central government doesn’t have nearly as much control over the rest of China as outsiders think.
• “Decentralized development is now the defining reality of economic and increasingly political life in China….This problem of spiraling decentralization will be China’s greatest challenge.”
• An authoritarian government can remain impervious to public opinion. One advantage is that the government can focus on the long-term, rather than the immediate cries of constituents. “While it doesn’t do everything right, it makes many decisions that are smart and far-sighted.”
• “State control is often at odds with openness, honesty, and efficiency.”
• “Every day, tens of thousands of people are moving from villages to cities, from farms to factories, from west to east, at a pace never before seen in history. They are not just moving geographically; they are leaving behind family, class, and history….The Chinese state is struggling to keep up with this social upheaval.”
• “The Communist Party of China–the party of workers and peasants–is actually one of the most elite organizations in the world. It is composed of 3 million largely urban educated men and women, a group that is thoroughly unrepresentative of the vast peasant society that it leads.”
• “The Communist Party spends an enormous amount of time and energy worrying about social stability and popular unrest.”
• “With the exception of anything related to Taiwan, Beijing tends to avoid picking a fight with other governments. The focus remains on growth.”
• In 2007, Chinese TV aired a 12-part series called “The Rise of the Great Nations.” Zakaria says it was thoughtful, intelligent, and “mostly accurate and balanced,” as it covered the rise of nine powers, including Portugal, Spain, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the US. “There are startling admissions, including considerable praise of the US and British systems of representative government for their ability to bring freedom, legitimacy, and political stability to their countries. The basic message of the series is that a nation’s path to greatness lies in its economic prowess, and that militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end….The path to power is through markets, not empires.”
• “When asked about issues like human rights, some younger Chinese officials will admit that…they see these as luxuries that they cannot afford.”
• East Asians do not believe that the world has a Creator who laid down a set of abstract moral laws that must be followed.”
• “Confucianism is simply not a religion. Confucius was a teacher, not a prophet or holy man in any sense. His writings…are strikingly nonreligious. He explicitly warns against thinking about the divine, instead setting out rules for acquiring knowledge, behaving ethically, maintaining social stability, and creating a well-ordered civilization. His work has more in common with the writings of Enlightenment philosophers than with religious tracts.”
• While Christian and Islamic countries want to spread their views and convert people to their faiths, China has no such ambitions. “Simply being China and becoming a world power in a sense fulfills its historical purpose. It doesn’t need to spread anything to anyone to vindicate itself.”
• China wants to rise peacefully, maintaining friendly relations with other countries and not interfering in other countries. But “The problem is size. China operates on so large a scale that it can’t help changing the nature of the game.”
• China buys 65% of Sudan’s oil exports.
• China has abandoned communism, and has replaced it with nationalism, which is now the glue keeping China together.
• “George W. Bush is probably the most ideologically hostile president ever to handle US-China relations….But despite all of this, Bush has repeatedly sided with Beijing over Taiwan and warned Taiwan not to attempt secession….On the issue is cares about,Bush has been its ally.”
• While China is expanding its military, it’s still far behind the US. We have 12 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. China is still working on its first. We have 9000 nuclear warheads and 5000 strategic warheads; China has 20 “small and cumbersome” nuclear missiles that could reach US shores.
• Writes China expert Joshua Ramo: “Rather than building US-style power, bristling with arms and intolerant of others’ world views, China’s emerging power is based on…the strength of their economic system and their rigid defense of …national sovereignty….The goal for China is not conflict, but the avoidance of conflict. True success in strategic issues involves manipulating a situation so effectively that the outcome is inevitably in favor of Chinese interests.”

A book I can’t recommend highly enough is Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World. I love big-picture books, ones which don’t focus just on what’s happening in the United States, but put the US in a global context.

With that title, your instinct as a nationalistic and maybe thin-skinned American is to think, “Oh, he’s knocking America, saying we’re a nation in decline.”

Zakaria, a Newsweek writer, answers that assumption in the first sentence: “This is a book not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

I hate to disappoint the doomsdayers who think the world’s going down the toilet, and that’s why the Second Coming will occur next Friday. But the reality is, the world is experiencing a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and of peace.

• We see the prosperity most noticeably in China and India, where hundreds of millions of people are rising out of poverty. But you also see “the rise of the rest” in Brazil and other parts of South America, in Russia, in some of the Eastern European countries, in the Muslim countries (which are beginning to invest in infrastructure for their countries, instead of just Swiss bank accounts for Muslim princeling playboys), and in various other countries here and there (like Vietnam).
• Wars, particularly wars among major countries, are becoming a thing of the past. The threat of terrorism remains on our minds, but in most of the world, peace reigns. Has the world ever been this peaceful?

Zakaria (an immigrant from India who is now a US citizen) says the United States will continue being the strongest economy and the only superpower for many years. But no longer will we call all the shots.

In the years ahead, global economics, not politics, will rule the day. Central planning, the centerpiece of communism, has been thoroughly discredited. Capitalism (with or without democracy) is now the way to organize a country’s economy.

It’s a wonderful, big-picture book. And he gives some great insights into why America has been so strong, and why it will remain so. I’ll be writing more about this book.