Views expressed in guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media.
Visit the complete Guest Column archives.
China: Challenging America and the World in the 21st Century
Guest Column | By Col. Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.) | August 10, 2008
Olympic medals reflect individual achievement but you can ignore the meaningless blather about which nation wins the final medal count. The greatest triumph over the next several weeks will not be individual but collective: the unmistakable benchmark signaling China’s ascent to great power status.
No matter how spectacular, athletic ceremonies have little to do with how great powers are made or broken. But watch the Beijing Olympics closely and you just might glimpse why the U.S. and China are two societies headed in opposite directions.
One obvious symbol is China’s conspicuous construction: the cranes, the high-rise office buildings, the shiny new infrastructure. The pace of development is nothing short of a sprint, its Olympian speed paused only long enough for the authorities to insure that the games might be reasonably smog-free.
What you won’t see on network TV coverage are the “sovereign wealth transfers” making all this development possible. Those transfers are the result of conscious decisions to out-source American manufacturing to China, something you can witness for yourself every day much closer to home. Either go down to the unemployment office or walk into Wal-Mart and ask for the “Made In USA” section.
Because economics is a two-way street, we import Chinese goods and export our debts, public and private. Long before the onset of the current banking crisis, we were warned that debtor nations lead cushy lives but run inevitable risks. Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson began 2008 by writing in the Financial Times about wealth being transferred from “the U.S. financial services industry into the hands of foreign governments. This is happening at a time when the gap between eastern and western incomes is narrowing at an unprecedented pace. In other words….the balance of power is shifting.”
That point partially seems to have gotten through, according to a survey released on Monday by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Americans get it. They fully grasp the reality of China’s rise…but they want to cooperate with, not contain, China” the council’s president said soothingly. But such comforting words reassure only if you have no real idea of the potential challenges that China poses, militarily and economically.
Want to know what we might be up against? I began paying closer attention to Chinese military developments ten years ago when my first book on American command and control was mysteriously translated into Chinese. The PRC’s interest in information war became undeniable after the publication of Unrestricted Warfare in 1999. Written with exquisite literary sophistication by two Chinese colonels, the treatise was a chilling argument for “using all means, including armed force…military or non-military, lethal or non-lethal, to compel the enemy to accept one’s intersts.” Specifically included: cyber attacks, infrastructure warfare, even deliberate environmental pollution.
Ever since, Chinese-sponsored hacking and cyber-espionage have become accepted hazards not only for the Pentagon but also for information-age businesses like banks (which are understandably reluctant to discuss the effectiveness of those penetrations).
If you think such excesses reflect only the momentary exuberance of a newly-arrived world power, then let me introduce you to Admiral Zheng He. Fifty years before Columbus, he commanded seven fleets that dwarfed the combined navies of the European powers. Its treasure ships, each with nine masts and carrying a thousand sailors, explored entire regions from China to Africa. But go back even farther and meet the 8,000 tomb warriors of the Xian Terracotta Army, carved from life and flawlessly depicting the well-organized military forces of the Qin Dynasty in 210 BC. Three hundred years before, SunTzu had already written The Art of War, the finest military classic in any language.
So how is that matchless heritage being applied today? The foundation of any civilization or any society is discipline, a quality seen every semester in my Chinese graduate students. While their American counterparts have learned to question every decision, to challenge every bastion of authority, Chinese culture appears to have imparted a more ancient wisdom with far-reaching implications: Discipline first, creativity later, victory and congratulations last of all.
And that’s the challenge we’re really up against.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Colonel (Ret.) Ken Allard is an executive-in-residence at UTSA and the author of “Warheads.” Email him at An earlier version of this column appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
2 Comments | Post a Comment
Yep, there was a time when America was the Worlds lender…. an now is the Worlds borrower/leach. Seems that China will become a lending Nation while America will be the Welfare receipiant.
Thanks ‘Democracy’/‘Corporate’ Advocates for turning America into a Third World.
August 11 at 9:38 am | #1 | Link
I think China has the guts to challenge great countries such as the United States because of their business potential and population as well. Beijing Olympics Update