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BOOK
REVIEW
The mirror of Western
inadequacies
The Coming
China Wars by Peter
Navarro
Reviewed by Benjamin A Shobert
As Peter Navarro states in his new book
The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be
Fought, How They Can Be Won, exploring the
questions and ramifications of China's aggressive
geopolitical and economic development can be
nearly impossible to do with any degree of
meaningful nuance.
Navarro's stated
objective is to give voice to what he calls the
"silent majority" (p 211) of
Chinese scholars and policy followers who desire
to find middle ground between apoplectic horror at
the potential global destabilization of China's
ascendancy versus those who can only see the
country's upside potential waiting to be
discovered.
That Navarro writes of this
desire in the last chapter, only six pages before
the book ends, suggests the 
primary weakness in
his book: while we appreciate the "canary in the
mine" warning that his analysis rightfully
highlights, the book ends without a sense that
another model of economic and political
development has been proposed that would alleviate
these concerns.
The very title itself
suggests that someone must win, and someone must
lose, in what Navarro sees as a series of what
today are only skirmishes, but promise tomorrow to
be full-on wars. That this might be a false choice
indicative of deeper problems within US domestic
and foreign policy is only lightly touched on, and
then much too late for proper development.
Appropriately, Navarro comments that the
inability of those who see China's downside risk
to work alongside those who see only its upside
potential has resulted in "the abdication of any
policy analytic responsibility by the silent
majority ... generat[ing] far more heat than light
and far too little real policy movement" (p 211).
Having finished this book, many readers will see
in hauntingly clear terms the problems and only in
a much vaguer sense have an idea about how to
address solutions to Navarro's analysis.
Navarro's concerns fall along eight policy
areas he terms "China wars". Respectively, these
are piracy, drugs, pollution, oil, Chinese
imperialism, water supply, social unrest, and
demographics. On none of these would any
right-minded reviewer take Navarro to task
concerning his command of the facts, which is not
to say that at times the contextual presentation
of these facts could use some comparative
historical analysis. To the extent his writing is
alarmist, it is in many cases rightfully so. The
question of China's environmental problems is one
such example.
As Elizabeth Economy has
also written about in exquisite detail in her book
The River Runs Black: The Environmental
Challenge to China's Future, [1] the
combination of lax environmental laws, coupled
with fines that are insufficiently punitive, and
China's conscious choice to pursue economic
development regardless of environmental impact is
very poorly matched to the industrial age where
technology's precursors, enablers and derivatives
cumulatively impact the individual, the community
and our ecology in unprecedented ways. This is
Navarro at his best: elucidating data and
providing anecdotal insights into how China's
manufacturing infrastructure is operating in ways
that are impacting our shared futures.
For
those unacquainted with the various aspects of
China's current-day situation covered by Navarro,
these insights are startling. But the book is not
wholly satisfying in presenting solutions, and in
this the reader gets the sense that Navarro's work
touches on a body of work whose need is perhaps
more critical today than ever before; namely, if
we are to deny China its current development path,
what other one are we to propose?
And if
we could agree on such a path, how might we go
about bridging the gap between respecting a
nation's right to develop according to its own
needs and requiring (even enforcing) that, in
doing so, it not cross pre-ordained ecological,
economic, legal or political boundaries?
Navarro's analysis has a certain summation
character to it, yet the quality of his narration
at times begs an answer to the question: If so,
what now? The question of China's faltering
intellectual-property protection is an often-used
example of the country's development woes that
Navarro himself discusses at some length, and no
one should excuse, justify or overlook this
troubling aspect of China's economy.
But
it seems that if we are to understand why the
chasm between putting regulations in place and
enforcing such regulation remains so vast, we have
to go beyond yet another recitation of the problem
itself. Context, culture and history need to be
brought to bear to illuminate why it is that so
much energy has been poured into China's
intellectual-property dalliances, with such
inadequate results.
Totalitarian systems
do many things extremely well. Unfortunately,
where they perform best includes things such as
identifying dissenting voices, ostracizing them
and creating a culture where complicity with
falsification is encouraged to achieve a goal.
During the 1960s, the Western media's
receipt of pictures of wheat-filled Chinese
farmland and their correlative stories had no way
of knowing that the pictures were a sort of
Chinese equivalent to the Soviet Potemkin village,
or that millions of Chinese were starving while
the very pictures were taken. Other fields would
be ransacked to find plants that could be pulled
up and replanted in the field where the picture
would be taken.
The greater point is that
culturally, China has been used to cutting
corners, if only to have the outward vestiges of
success: what mattered were appearances, not
actuality. Small wonder now that so much
difficulty exists in getting the Chinese people to
adapt to ideas and expectations whose legitimacy
derives from a source that previously had been
immaterial.
It seems strangely inadequate,
on one hand, to praise China for its rejection of
totalitarianism and, at the same time, expect that
it will have a seamless transition into the form
of laws and regulations that have taken the West
hundreds of years to develop. Real insight would
accommodate these historical lessons, and would
allow us to do more than just observe problems;
such understanding would bridge the gap between
our needs and the reality of China's development.
While Navarro's analysis provides
frustratingly few tangible options for solving the
problems within China that he adequately
illuminates, more troubling is the approach he
takes while wrestling with China's efforts to
acquire natural resources. It should be said in
fairness to any respectable author looking to
address this question that doing so entails
jamming one's hand deeply into a hornets' nest of
problems that the US has its own mistakes to
apologize for; objectivity is fleeting for many
when comparing America's own energy policies with
those of other countries.
Among the more
troubling arguments Navarro makes is that an
inevitable pinch point is developing among the US,
Western Europe and China relative to energy
supplies. At worst, this seems to be unfairly
one-sided - that China's gain must be the United
States' loss and vice versa. Inadequately
developed in the analysis and narrative is any
idea that China and the US could work to find
cooperative rather than competitive solutions in
this area.
Strangely missing is the idea
that the market will allocate resources between
China and the US based on the market's own logic
and needs. Navarro's entire thesis seems to
revolve around the idea that the world's
chessboard will not support a draw between China
and the United States; if China develops its
political influence to levels of the US, this can
only mean conflict with the US.
His
chapter on oil specifically seems to argue for the
inevitability of global resource wars among the
previously mentioned actors. But in making his
case, do we not set the stage for precisely the
political-military calculus that evolved in
Germany in 1913-14 and Japan in 1941, when each
country's expansionist plans forced the false
choice between economic malaise and acquisition of
new resources through force?
This is a
difficult criticism to make, as Navarro's analysis
asks good and probative questions that need to be
asked regarding the matter of China's oil
pursuits. That they have been asked before
suggests that at this point in our discourse
regarding China, it would be to everyone's
advantage for the discussion to transfer toward
more pragmatic and cooperative planning rather
than recession to classic models of competitive
behavior.
On the question of oil, are we
presenting China with other options? If we wish to
encourage the Chinese not to cut deals with
African dictators for the sake of accessing oil,
might a moment of self-reflection as to our own
mixed motives and scurrilous political
relationships on the question of oil need to be
likewise evaluated and changed?
But even
such a question begs the more difficult, complex
and dangerous issue that should be wrestled with:
if the only successful model the world has for
advancing the cause of humanity is capitalism, its
emphasis on industrialization, and industry's
reliance on the almighty hydrocarbon, then should
we not be honest and state clearly that what we
really want from China is not prudence, but rather
contentment with where it is?
At times
Navarro's commentary seems to suggest that China
may not be wise to push its economy out of
subsistence agrarian farming into the industrial
world. Is this then the solution? History will not
look kindly at one country that asked of a
potential rival thriftiness, discipline and
sacrifice that it was unwilling to ask of its own
people.
All of these questions, coupled
with Navarro's analysis, raise another: What is
the trajectory of development we in the West will
"allow" China to have? May they make the same
mistakes we have? If they may not, what other
paths would we suggest they take? Too many "what
if" scenarios have flooded bookstores in recent
years, making broad arguments about how China is
going to challenge America's global hegemony, or
how China is to today's US economy what Japan was
in the 1980s.
Much, if not most, of what
Navarro has written about in this book is
factually correct and serves as an important
touchstone for any prudent discussion regarding
the implications to China's growth. For those
unfamiliar with China's ecological disaster,
natural-resource crisis or aging and soon to be
inverted demographics, his book is a very good
introduction.
But much of this information
has been known for some time and the questions
remain: How many American business people include
environmental requirements in their due diligence
when evaluating new vendors? Who really believes
that his or her own country should lead in
austerity measures to taper down consumption of
limited natural resources?
And most
important: If we are to cry "foul" at China's
current economic development strategy, what should
the Chinese do to bring more than a billion people
out of repression and barely subsistence farming
into the modern world?
One of Navarro's
most salient and piercing insights is toward the
end of his book when, wrestling with precisely the
question of what should be done differently, he
states, "From this discussion, it should be
equally obvious that the United States will never
be able to credibly and effectively challenge
China until it gets its own house in order" (p
206).
On this he is wholly correct. Too
much of Americans' fear concerning China is
ultimately a reflection of their own anxiety that
their prosperity model may not be adapting,
changing and growing as quickly as they will need
to deal with their own demographic, ecological and
industrial problems. It is this fear Americans see
reflected back on themselves, and because it is
easier to see China's problem than to recognize
and deal with one's own, China becomes the villain
of America's own inadequacies and proclivities.
This need not happen, but will happen
unless we can begin talking about solutions and
not only problems. Navarro's book sheds light on
many problems, but it would have been more
complete with an expanded emphasis on solutions to
the issues he introduces.
Note
1. Elizabeth
Economy's book is reviewed in China's waters of life are the
waters of death, Asia Times Online,
July 24, 2004.
The Coming China Wars:
Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won
by Peter Navarro. Financial Times Prentice Hall;
1st edition (October 19, 2006). ISBN: 0132281287.
Price US$24.99, 288 pages.
Benjamin
Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc
(www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated
to helping Asian businesses bring innovative
technologies into the North American market.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.) |
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