China Watching

Within a behemoth like China, a myriad of cultures still struggle to survive the forging of a fascist culture as the last step in the successful rise of the Han of the last few thousand years.  The Han culture is far older, more varied and probably more tolerant than it’s latest embodiment in one of the few successful mutations of communism.

The sense of rightness and invincibility that so many feel in regard to China, flows inherently from any phenomena with huge scale and longevity. 
Scale: If it is that big, then it must be doing something right, and is too big to resist anyway.
Longevity: The Chinese government’s partial absorption of Confucius is part of a strategy to absorb power from seeming to be continuous with the immensely long timeline of Chinese history.

I consider China to be immensely dangerous because it is immense and dangerous.

It is a nation that is at the beginning of its imperial adventures (only having been partially thwarted in its previous attempts in south east by another imperial power that is highly likely to economically self destruct in the very near future).  The beginnings of this adventurism in Africa and to a lesser extent South America are being systematically ignored by most commentators as they recognise the dangers, both political and personal, that can flow from unwelcome facts about China.

When resource scarcities occur in the future, China will have the same justification for military action as all imperial states in the past – maintaining access to markets and commodities.

China will have a few other factors encouraging such options – an oversupply of males with little chance for mates in China, and lower economic prospects than the “rags to riches” success stories so prominent in the boom years.  What better direction to point these men in than the military?  What better reason for them to fight than to defend access to African oil fields of food sources?

None of the above detracts from my admiration for so many attributes of chinese culture:
They have family structures that are highly coherent and self supporting, and remain so when relocated within almost any other culture. Those who identify as Hindu and Muslim have similar family stability, but Muslims are far less likely to be economically successful.
Chinese succeed economically in areas of the world where other cultures fail (e.g. Chinese and Indians are vastly more successful that blacks in the same economic position within US urban environments).
Chinese academically outperform most other ethnic groups in most populations.
Chinese ethnic groups have higher reproductive rates than most western indigenous cultures (who hasn’t !!!).
To top it off, Chinese have a growing cultural self-confidence stemming not only from the mother country’s immense size and long history, but also from the scale and spread of the Chinese diaspora.
Objectively, the chinese deserve to inherit the earth.

I just doubt that the quaint belief in freedom, already being actively undermined in current democracies, is likely to have much of a future in such a world.