Will China become the world's biggest superpower? My friend Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, Rest in Peace, was the first person who made me become interested in this question. When he returned from a trip to China in the mid-nineties, where he saw the size of Shanghai and the extent of its development to become a global financial capital, he wrote in Al-Ahram that the future belongs to China. I went back to this topic a few weeks ago, after I read a summary of a report issued by the IMF, which said that the American era would end by 2016, and that China's economy will be the world's number one economy. China has overtaken Japan last year, becoming the world's second largest economy, after the United States. At the same time, I read a report prepared by specialized research centers, which said that China will manage overseas investments worth between one and two trillion dollars by 2020. This is while bearing in mind that so far, China's overseas investments remain somewhat limited, amounting to about 230 billion dollars, even though it is the largest foreign buyer of U.S. debt. With the beginning of this year, China controlled about 1.1 trillion dollar in U.S. debt. My experience in China and my information on the country, nay my interest in it, is limited. However, I know the United States very well, having lived there for several years. So I say that if China overtakes the United States as the world's strongest economic force, one of the reasons will be the skillfulness of the Chinese leadership and people. However, the primary reason in my opinion is the United States' self-defeat, which facilitates the job for those who want to catch up with it. The United States is a democratic country, and this is undisputable. However, the country is politically divided, and the division is sharp and deep, and extremely tense. The National Journal, a publication that studies voting trends in the Congress, recently said that its study of the voting process there has shown that for the first time since 1982, when monitoring first began, every Democratic Senator is more liberal than every Republican Senator, and that every Republican Senator is more conservative than every Democratic one. In the House of Representatives, and out of 435 seats, there aren't more than four or five Republicans who are more liberal than Conservative Democrats. The above means that Congress is divided between conservatives and liberals, or left and right, and that the disagreement is ideological in nature. One of the results is that public debt this month reached 14.274 trillion dollars, and is rapidly approaching its limit of 14.294 trillion dollars. And yet, there is no agreement, because American legislators cannot agree over anything. The House of Representatives where the Republicans became a majority following the midterm elections last year, is filibustering the administration's work as much as it can manage to do. The Republicans want to reduce the deficit and the debt, provided that this would not infringe on the allocations of the Department of Defense, and instead want cuts on healthcare and social services. This is happening as they, or the Bush administration in particular, are the ones responsible for the destruction of the U.S. economy in the pursuit of an American empire that rules the world. The result was that the U.S. spent 1.3 trillion dollars on the losing War on Terror since 2001, 800 billion dollars on the invasion of Iraq, and 400 billion dollars, so far, on the longest war in its history since the independence, i.e. the war in Afghanistan. Today, the U.S. defense budget has reached the record level of 700 billion dollars or so, and yet the Americans protest when China allocates 90 billion dollars for its annual defense budget. The Republicans are opposed to increasing taxes on the rich which were cut by George W. Bush, even when experience in the past decades proves the counter-productivity of this measure. When taxes were cut in the early eighties, the budget deficit rose from 26 to 40 percent by 1986, and when taxes were increased in 1993, the deficit fell from 49 to 33 percent from that year until 2001. Then George W. Bush came to the White House and destroyed the U.S. economy, until the whole world ended up being under the weight of the global financial crisis of 2008. Today, Obama wants to increase taxes on the rich, to raise around one trillion dollars for the treasury, and reduce the defense budget by 400 billion dollars over the next twelve years. However, the Republicans oppose this, and will do their best to thwart his attempts to repair what they have ruined. The ongoing political dispute in the U.S will thus facilitate China's task. Were it not for Bush's wars in the past decade, China would not have attained its present economic stature. And with the determination shown by the Republicans to walk the path of ruin, the chance of overtaking the U.S. in the next few years becomes bigger and easier. [email protected]
