Middle-Income Kingdom

Dan Blumenthal’s article (“Beijing’s Grand Strategy,” August 2) on China’s increasingly assertive grand strategy – like his book – usefully draws our attention to the challenge posed by today’s China but misses two important parts of the picture. The first is that the Chinese Academy of Sciences predicts that China’s population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2029, drop to 1.36 billion by 2050, shrink to as few as 1.17 billion people by 2065, and bottom out at about 50 percent of today’s number by the turn of the next century. The second is that China’s growth curve is flattening – and for reasons far deeper and more worrying (for Beijing) than the pandemic. Indeed, China now finds itself ensnared in a classic “middle-income trap” – a situation in which the rapid rise to middle-income status peters out long before achieving the status of a high-income country. China, in other words, is not fated to become the world’s economic middle kingdom, owning and controlling all under the heavens. Rather, it is far more likely to suffer the fate of countries, such as Brazil and South Africa, that have also fallen into this economic trap.

While Blumenthal mentions this in passing, it really requires more focused attention. Though China will continue to vie with the United States for leadership in the Western Pacific, and while it may well continue to seek to disrupt American leadership more broadly, there are ironclad material limits to what Beijing can achieve. China has already peaked and is destined to falter – and to do so long before displacing the U.S. as the world’s leading economic or military power. This being the case, the pressing strategic question today is not how to “thwart China’s bid to create a new world order.” Rather, it is how to deal with a China that has allowed itself to imagine that the prize of global primacy was within reach, only to come to the bracing realization that it is not. It is important to get this right. The historical cases of Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941 suggest that, when a dominant power mistakenly assumes it is confronting a rising power when in fact it is confronting a faltering contender, catastrophic war can ensue. Now as then, the key is first to diagnose the problem correctly.

Professor Andrew A. Latham Macalester College, St. Paul, Minn.

East Is East

On page 9 of your June 14 issue – in The Week – you run a short paragraph about the emergence of the Brood X cicadas arriving in 15 states and the District of Columbia. You state that “Brood X is the largest in a set of twelve 17-year cicada broods.” You further imply that 17-year cicadas are “unique to the East.” As a proud Chicagoan – home to Brood XIII – I would like to dispute both your statement and implication. While Brood X is indeed large, the University of Illinois states that Brood XIII “has a reputation for the largest emergence of cicadas known anywhere.” Furthermore, Brood XIII is centered in northern Illinois – which should not be geographically included in any reasonable definition of the “East.”

Chuck Doherty River Forest, Ill.

The Editors respond: Mr. Doherty’s request for clearer geographical distinctions is to be admired, but if we are being equally exact, it is a fact that Chicago is about 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean and about 1,000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, as well as being east of the Mississippi River. Alas for Chicago, this places it squarely in the eastern half of the U.S. (though not culturally or socially, of course). And per Scientific American: “Periodical cicadas that emerge en masse once every 17 or 13 years are unique to the eastern U.S. The 17-year cicadas live in the North, and the 13-year cicadas are found in the South and the Mississippi Valley.” As to which brood is bigger – between Brood X or Brood XIII – well, the University of Illinois will have to take that argument up with Scientific American. Though after suffering through the plague of Brood X, the editors hope, for the sake of Chicago’s sanity, that Brood XIII will not be as large as predicted.