Domestic Affairs

China can hardly rule the world

By Liu Liping (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-03-31 13:37

In fact, the absolute value of a country's military budget would be a better criterion than GDP for measuring national strength. Here, China pales into insignificance beside the United States. In an interview last March, Major General Luo Yuan from the Academy of Military Science pointed out that "America has all along been accusing China of excessive rapid increase of military spending, but its own military budget for the 2012 fiscal year hits $708 billion, ten times China's figure, which stands at $70 billion." China can only be considered a comparatively backward country in terms of per capita GDP, not a great power or even a medium developed nation, and certainly nowhere near a superpower.

What's more, China's rapid development over the past three decades has come largely at the expense of natural resources, a course which is simply unsustainable.

Chinese officials have admitted that alarming destruction of the eco-system caused the severe mud slide in Zhouqu county, in Northwest China's Qinghai province in August, 2009. From 1952 to 1990, the county lost 100 thousand square meters of forest annually through deforestation. Indeed, Zhouqu epitomizes the whole country with its overgrazing and excessive mining. Moreover, China has derived international competitiveness from cheap labor of rural migrants, another unsustainable situation.

Finally, apart from evaluating hard indicators like GDP to qualify as a rising power, we need to look at soft indicators, as well. 

While living standards have risen remarkably since the reform in 1978, parallel enhancement of values and social morals has stalled. If anything, there is degeneration. Money worship prevails, fuelled by insufficient education. Nepotism is rampant, with a weak legal consciousness among the public. Social security is weakening and integrity is severely in short supply. Can a country with an impressive GDP that is devoid of soft power be called a superpower?

As a Chinese citizen, I naturally feels proud of China's remarkable achievements and the sharp rise in comprehensive national strength and living standards over the past three decades. But we should not be carried away by self-complacency and view things with the distorted mindset of an upstart. Keeping a low profile - the guiding sprit put forward by Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China's reform and opening-up policy - should be our guiding principle now and for many decades to come.

This is an abridged version of the original article, which was first published in the academic journal Contemporary International Relations (Volume 21 Number 1 Jan./Feb. 2011). The author is an editor of the journal.