After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age by Starobin Paul

Author:Starobin, Paul [Starobin, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101056509
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-04-28T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Chinese Century

The leader of the pack is the alpha, supreme boss, Top Dog. He (or she) gets the best of everything—the best food, the best place to sleep, the best toy, etc.

Dog expert Vicki Rodenberg De Gruy

Does the world need a dominant power—a leader of the pack? The idea that the planet might benefit from an alpha dog sounds politically incorrect, but it has sometimes proved the case that socially flatter arrangements, in which there is no acknowledged leader, have produced squabbling and unhappiness and, worst of all, dangerous vacuums. The time between the first and second world wars of the twentieth century was that kind of a void—and it was not filled until America emerged from its willful isolation and asserted a consummate leadership role with its economic and military might. America, remember, did not have to elbow everyone out of the way in order to gain this station: If one path to global dominance is conquest, another is the voluntary subservience of lesser powers whose overriding interest is in safety and stability.

Americans are not easily impressed by what the rest of the world has to offer. Today’s Europe, in the minds of even sophisticated Americans, is typically viewed as a museum showcase for a once glorious past, not the face of tomorrow, not a serious threat to a more muscular and dynamic America. China feels different to Americans. First-time visitors to Shanghai—including seasoned world travelers, men and women in their fifties and sixties—are awed at the spectacle of what is so clearly a massive work in progress, changing almost by the hour. American businessmen who visit cities in remote provinces are dazzled by the quality of the modern infrastructure. Not everything is agreeable to their senses, but in their reports they sound like the foreigners who visited New York and Chicago in the late nineteenth century and were stunned (and assaulted) by the energy level on the streets. And after many years of patronizing praise for China’s ability to manufacture cheap knockoff goods, the outside world, in America and elsewhere, is captivated by “Art’s New Superpower,” as Vanity Fair called China in a spread on the riot of paintings, sculptures, and other works now being turned out in studios in places like Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

The path to a Chinese Century would in all likelihood look something like the path to the American one—a zigzag ascent driven by economic imperatives and assisted by the stumbles and miscalculations of others. The beginnings of this path can already be glimpsed. Just as the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries started to reorient itself toward America, without consciously knowing that America was destined to be the dominant power, the world of the early twenty-first century is already starting to make cultural, political, and economic adjustments to China’s rising star. And as the world reaches out to China, China reaches out to the world. This encounter is happening all over the globe, including in America’s own backyard, in South America, a region that America has dominated for centuries and tends to take for granted.

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