The rise of China as a player on the world stage has kept the West in great suspense. It is true that the Chinese have a great deal of manpower at their disposal which explains why such a massive amount of manufacturing has been exported there by multinational corporations that abide by the absolute bottom line. The cat is out of the bag in the sense that the world’s compulsive consumer products are produced in Chinese sweatshops for pennies on the dollar. In all reality there isn’t a nation in the world that can offer such a massive amount of labor at such low prices and that further explains how the Chinese have shattered the ideological roots of Maoism all within the PRC. There are absolutely no Westerners willing to work for less than a dollar an hour after signing a contractual agreement which keeps them within an assigned work environment for a designated period of time in campus like facilities.
Nevertheless, for Chinese standards the implementation of such a measure stands as an exponential improvement because living conditions in the countryside take an outside observer to a different timeframe entirely. Rural and impoverished Chinese farmers sleep on cement slaps with no furniture while making just a few hundred dollars annually. Overall, ideologists haven’t turned China into an international success story; rather opportunistic party bureaucrats have rescinded ideology for market capitalism that employ methods that control economic fiefdoms which are divided, conquered, and exchanged among the Chinese Communist Party’s internal autocracy. In a nutshell that explains the administrative mechanics of the so called Chinese super-state economy. Living standards are generally relative to the nation or locale of observance, but when there is such a sharp developmental divide within a nation’s infrastructure resources are disproportionally distributed across the expanding nation which hinders the arrival of super power status.
That is not to suggest that the proliferation of hegemony can’t reign over a region. There are plenty of quasi superpowers emerging all over the world that crave global hegemony; the rise of regional economics has afforded political leveraging power to nations that were once entirely dependent on a single Cold War superpower (Brazil stands as a pristine example). India is another emerging power that is virtually in the same boat because there are corners of its infrastructure that fall within the confines of the modern first world while much of the countryside is deprived of household flooring, running water, and electricity. Of course this is not to insist that the Chinese and Indians are on the same level; the former is much more economically pervasive and dynamic on an international scale when compared to the latter. A superpower isn’t made when sharp infrastructural discrepancies are at hand; even the Soviet Union had to push modernization into the deepest parts of the Siberian tundra which fully furnished a proficient nation that could live up to its super-power status.
Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union these feats of industrial progress were largely abandoned because policies of even economic equilateralism © does not sit very well with a nation that boasts and protects a national agenda that is overwhelmingly jingoistic. From a historical point of view empires aren’t made in a substantiated way when there are sharp infrastructural holes within its own mantra; that explains the ongoing issue with the Chinese of the twenty-first century. To that effect it must be realized that modern towers and cities are springing up in the Chinese mainland, but much of that depicts a hallow infrastructure that isn’t inhibited or operational for that matter. Chinese industry is notorious for copying patents and technologies from abroad without actually initiating their own implementations of industrial design; hence, the patents and blueprints for these consumer industrial technologies remain here in the United States (Silicon Valley is a pristine example) in addition to others found all over the Western mainstream.
There is an austere reason why Chinese spies have been trying to penetrate the halls of these multinational corporations as if they were top secret military bases; on some counts that is exactly what they are. Financial lending and borrowing is how empires expand and the origin of those finances don’t always originate from the expanding empire in question; that is why the business of war and empire are essentially one and the same because there are foreign investors putting up massive amounts of finances in hopes of profiting from hegemonic leaps into what is essentially the situational abyss when observing any political, economic, or military issue worldwide. Nonetheless, will the Chinese emerge as the next socio-economic and military superpower in the Far East? That tide has already turned in the sense that Beijing has successfully asserted itself as a regional power, but the Chinese are realizing that it has an important role to play as a mediator between East and West.
That is done by cooperatively coercing regional powers in addition to international counterparts in hopes of retaining the position of superpower because they don’t have the ability to transform into the historical likes of an Imperial Japan which would spell out economic suicide for the Chinese. Restoring the glory of imperial empires that have historically defined the essence of the twentieth century is a far cry from reality no matter which jingoistic element mounts such a vision before the rest of the world. Ideologists are largely romanticists in the sense that they are out of touch with any major real world picture of reality because all they have is a preordained blueprint which in their view is too big to fail. There have been far too many paradigm shifts to revert back to the way things once were one hundred years ago as simple as the world scenario was then when compared to the world of today. The population of the world continues to increase at exponential levels and the developing world requisitions itself with the developed through interlocking economic pacts that are virtually airtight and unbreakable.
It is much more practical to monopolize the socio-economic development of a developing nation when they are courted, exchanged, and sold off as expendable commodities as opposed to maintaining a physical presence in the same nation because the latter requires an obvious infrastructural commitment that is anything but inexpensive. That describes the new imperialism of the twenty-first century and the rendering of its force is faceless because its pursuit is all about the maximization of power and control; both are ceded to the highest economic bidder that can mass produce and inflate the world economically at the cheapest fiscal cost possible. That explains one of the main reasons why humankind is facing the most dangerous timeframe in which the species has ever known.
-Image is Courtesy of Carlesmithart.com-