(1) Yes, the Newsweek piece on China was well done. Nobody knows which way
China will go, so a commentator’s opinions tend to reflect his own
temperament and recent experience. I myself would not have written quite so
breezily. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three
People’s Principles” — Sun’s statement of the three areas in which the
China of 1906 needed to concentrate her modernization efforts. In a
nutshell they were: economics, politics, and the national question. On
economics, I think China has done well — has probably reached a point where
economic stability can be taken for granted. There will be ups and downs,
of course, and probably booms and crashes, but they are on the right path.
Politics, however, remains “unresolved.” So, even more so — though it
doesn’t get so much coverage — does the national question. What **is**
China? The so-called People’s Republic is in many ways a very artificial
construct — essentially, the old Manchu empire reborn, held together by
force. It can’t be democratized in its present shape (the Tibetans, for
example, given a vote, would vote unanimously for independence). On the
other hand, a break-up would, given the intensity of modern Chinese
racial-national-imperial passions, be extremely ugly. So Newsweek left out
some stuff. If the PRC holds together though (which, in my opinion, it can
probably do, though only by remaining undemocratic), I think Newsweek’s
concluding paragraph is right: “A world war is highly unlikely… But there
is probably going to be a soft war, a quiet competition for power and
influence across the globe. America and China will be friends one day,
rivals another…”
(2) Several readers have asked me to comment on Mark Steyn’s piece about
China in Jewish World Review.
This looks like the piece he originally published in The Spectator last
month. Jonathan Mirsky, one of the greatest of all China correspondents,
had a letter in the following issue of the Speccie, pooh-poohing Mark’s
piece. Obviously I agree with Mark’s comment that “As a centralized
nation-state, [the People’s Republic] is as artificial an entity as the more
obviously appellatory crocks such as the ‘Soviet Union’ or ‘Yugoslavia.’”
Mark says that Russia, China, and the EU all have major structural defects,
but “if you were betting on only one happy ending, I’d take China.” I’m not
sure I would.