I once had a problem with the headlights of my car, a problem which illuminated the truth that the ‘smarter’ our technologies get, the more things can go wrong. The car’s headlights are adjustable, allowing their beam to be cast closer or further away. Because of a bump in the road they became stuck in the most downward position, so that night I could only see a short way ahead.
This is an allegory of thinking in the EU and the US about the world’s future. Out there in the dark beyond our habitual short-termist vision we can see a couple of large shapes, in the form of China’s fast-approaching economic dominance and superpower status, and the shift from West to East of the global centre of gravity. Today the EU produces nearly 25 per cent of world GDP, so does the US, and until recently the West altogether accounted for over 60 per cent of world GDP. But in a decade it will be less than 50 per cent, and the downward trend will accelerate. Economic power means influence; it is a simple fact of life that the values, practices and assumptions of the rich carry more weight than those of the poor.
At the time of writing, in the middle of the twenty-first century’s second decade, China had already overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest economy in dollar terms, and was continuing to move fast towards eventual pre-eminence. Has anyone looked closely at the values, practices and assumptions of a country with one of the world’s worst human rights records, which is extremely irredentist and imperialistic, which devotes massive resources to military build-up, which backs every dictatorship and delinquent regime in the world that has natural resources and/or geographically strategic usefulness to China’s interests? Has anyone noticed that the successor to the colonial powers in Africa is China’s Exim Bank, bankrolling the dictatorships there for such delicacies as oil, copper, bauxite and other minerals?
Those dipped headlights certainly do not shine on Arunachal Pradesh, where a microcosm of the future is being played out between China and another of the future’s big powers, India. Arunachal Pradesh is India’s far north-eastern state, remotely and tenuously attached to the rest of the country, squeezed between Nepal and Bangladesh. Its border town of Tawang is just 400 miles south of Lhasa in Tibet. A large slice of the north of the state is claimed by China on the grounds that it used to belong to Tibet.
The suspect credentials of this claim are immediately obvious: Tibet only belongs to China at present because of a violent military occupation and forced immigration of Han Chinese to swamp the local population by numbers. The problem is that Tibet and Britain agreed the Tibet–Arunachal Pradesh border (the McMahon Line, fixed by the Simla Convention of 1914) before the First World War, so that if China recognised the terms of that treaty it would ipso facto recognise Tibet’s right to have entered into it, which ipso facto again would amount to recognition of Tibet’s status as a sovereign state prior to China’s invasion of it in 1950. But China refuses to recognise the Simla Convention of 1914, as a function of its aggressive irredentism: because China had invaded and conquered Tibet for a while in the remote past, it now claims it as an inalienable part of itself. (A treaty of 821 ending two centuries of war between Tibet and China registered the mutual acceptance of the sovereignty of each; the stone pillars on which the treaty is engraved still stand in Lhasa and on the Sino-Tibetan border. This, of course, China ignores.) And if a single inch of territory was ever thought to have belonged to any territory to which China now or once had a claim, it claims it too.
The result? A chilly stand-off between heavy Indian and Chinese military forces along the disputed Tibet–Arunachal Pradesh border. The Chinese constantly mount aggressive ‘patrols’ into Indian territory every year (over 2,000 instances in 2008 alone), directed from its regional HQ in Bumla, and in recent years the Indian army has moved extra forces into the area, heightening tensions.
The stand-off does not only take place along the physical border. In 2013 China tried to block a $3 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, part of which was earmarked for flood control measures in Arunachal Pradesh. This was simply and solely an attempted spoiler by China to inconvenience India as part of the border cat-and-mouse game. For India the issue is as serious as its tensions with Pakistan, and the fact that it has dangerous borders to both west and north-east is a consideration not lost on China, which is only waiting its time – it has great patience, and thinks in the long term, unlike the West with its electoral-cycle mentality – to help itself to bits of India just as it will help itself to Taiwan, the Spratly Islands, and anything else it can find even the most spurious historical reason to claim as its own, by military force if necessary.
Prediction might be a mug’s game, but if any one prediction is sure, China will one day assert its regional claims militarily if it has not yet got them by the current means of manipulation, bribery, economic muscle and sheer diplomatic attrition. The US has been doing the same thing ever since it has had the capability, and the UK did it when it had the capability (and still pretends to it now), but China’s current political arrangement exhibits even fewer scruples, and experiences far less constraint from internal dissent and criticism, than is the case in the contemporary US and UK.
Draw some contrasts: the UK does not lay claim to Eire and France, backed by military ‘patrols’ into their territory several times a day, and interference with their economic affairs. If it behaved as China is now doing, it would be doing exactly that, because it once possessed Eire and large parts of western France, which to the Chinese way of thinking would count as a clear ground of current ownership. And if England were growing rapidly in economic and military power, the likelihood that it would use both to get its way would keep pace. How do we know? Because in the past it actually did it, overpowering Wales and Scotland and Ireland and claiming a big chunk of France and, in due time, even bigger chunks of the rest of the world.
If our headlights remain dipped, we had better fasten our seatbelts more tightly. We can judge people by the company they keep, and so with states: think of China’s friends – the likes of Burma and Sudan – and imagine what they would be like if they had China’s money and guns. Would they be restrained, responsible, good neighbours? Raising the headlights shows that what the world needs is a different kind of politics in China, making it more responsible, more responsive, more benign: a state that is a better world citizen, and certainly a better neighbour in its region. The great hope, accordingly, is China’s indigenous democracy and human rights movement, which merits every ounce of applause and support it can get from the rest of the world.