1990-2004 : And then there were two
By the early 1990s, China as a whole is no longer in a phase of extensive development, but in one of intensive development : while the level of economic activity in the provinces of the hinterland (with the exception of Sichuan) remain comparatively lower than in the coastal provinces, the gap is narrowing, and the completion of most infrastructural projects causes a relative slowdown of the growth rate ; from then on, China is a First World economy in its own right. In 1992, the average per capita income in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Hebei and Shandong is equal to Germany’s, and slightly lower but catching up in Guangxi, Hubei, Sichuan and Liaoning ; in 2004, it is equal in the aforementioned provinces to California’s ; some 580 million Chinese are now economically of middle class level or above. GDP parity with the USA is reached in 2003, and after that date China is the n°1 world economic power.
The Chinese economy benefits to no small extent from the quantum leap in information technologies that takes place in the 1990s ; just as investments in more traditional sectors have reached saturation levels, hich-tech electronics and online services begin to pick up. In order to maximize the potential of those new activities, industrial parks devoted to hardware and software production are created in several locations, the largest of which is in the coastal city of Dalian. As India similarly develops in own electronic industry, businesses in both countries begin merging and concluding assorted deals with each other, leading to the development of what is now known as the Dalian-Bangalore Connexion. In 2004, China has the largest absolute number of PCs in the world, with the USA coming second and India third, which explains that 47% of all online communications are in Chinese. From the early 1990s onward, China also becomes a world pioneer in the development of fuel cells and alternative fuels, as the Chinese government seeks to reduce the country’s growing dependence on oil imports; from 1997, the first operational (and affordable) hybrid cars roll off the assembly lines, and by 2004 8% of Chinese vehicles are hybrids, including most public vehicles, and the proportion rises steadily.
Meanwhile, Chinese universities such as Beida and Fudan enroll a constantly rising number of foreign students not only from satellite countries and India but also, increasingly, the Western world, the Middle East and Africa, while enrollment figures in the overseas network of Chinese colleges rise at a similar pace.
The last few years of the 20th century further witness a shift in the flow of international investments : outward investment from China becomes almost as high as inward investment into the country, as Chinese businesses increasingly implant branches abroad or take over foreign firms. While economic links with satellite countries, the USA, Canada, Japan and Europe remain dynamic, China also becomes Australia and New Zealand’s first trading partner, and the second after the USA for Argentina, Chile, Brasil and Mexico. China thus expands its economic and cultural influence in the South Pacific, and makes promising inroads into Latin America.
In 2004, the total number of Chinese worldwide is 1,642 million, of which 79 million live outside of China. The breakdown is as follows :
ï® 29 million in vassal Asian countries, including 13 million in Malaysia (62% of the population), 5 million in Indonesia (2% of the population) and 4 million in Yakutia (35% of the population) ;
ï® 21 million in the USA (6% of the population) ;
ï® 15 million in the European Union (3% of the population) ;
ï® 6 million in Canada (17% of the population) ;
ï® 4 million in Australia (19% of the population) ;
ï® 2 million in Latin America, half of those in Brazil (0.8% of the population) ;
ï® 1 million in New Zealand (21% of the population) ;
ï® 1 million in South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Pacific and Africa.
This diaspora is both highly economically dynamic and upwardly mobile. Its hold on the economy of China’s satellite states, which in several cases dates back centuries, grows more solid by the year ; and thanks to low-profile, family-based business networks that extend into every overseas Chinese community, as well as the growing integration of Chinese immigrants in the economy of their host societies, this influence—distinct from but contributing to the more classic trading links with China—begins to expand in the rest of the world. But second- and third-generation children of the diaspora take every avenue of social promotion, from the entertainment industry to politics. One of them is the current governor of California, Sonia Cheng, who moved many with her speech at the inauguration of the largest Buddhist temple in the USA, built in 2002 in San Francisco, when she praised Buddhism as "a religion that embraces science where others shun it ; a religion that gives compassion where others demand obedience ; a religion in the name of which no crusade was ever launched, nor any jihad fought."
The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is followed within two years by the collapse of the USSR as a country ; and whereas the Soviet Union could at least project the appearance a superpower, post-Communist Russia is little more than a Third World state—and a rapidly depopulating one at that—leaving only the USA and China as global powers. The relationship between the two, while not altogether devoid of a strategic dimension, turns out to be primarily diplomatic, economic and cultural, as each deploys its "soft power" to increase its global influence. Each obviously retains a civilizational edge in its own sphere of influence, but, to an increasing extent, the two hegemonic cultures begin competing on each other’s turf. This Protean race is not the less intense for being mostly covert, and as pundits such as Joseph Nye and Benjamin Barber don’t fail to notice, it is the ultimate vindication of Sunzi’s theories over those of Clausewitz, for this "clash of civilizations" is a war without violence whose battlefields are the hearts and minds of people, and whose soldiers are universities, entertainment industries, religious organizations, websites and even restaurants. On one side are the Ivy League colleges, Hollywood, Christian missionary movements, Silicon Valley and McDonalds ; on the other, Beida/Fudan, the Shanghai and Hong Kong studio network, Buddhist NGOs, the Dalian-Bangalore Connexion and Chinese takeaways. It is, in a sense, the purest, most abstract form of warfare, between two different perceptions of history, humanity’s place in the world, and the nature of reality itself : a war between memes and possibly meta-memes. What people read, watch, hear, eat, wear and believe are so many vectors for the competition. However, as Korean scholar Park Sunghee writes, unlike conventional warfare, this conflict may ultimately turn out to be a positive-sum game, as it enriches the global cultural makeup ; in Taoist fashion, out of binary opposition a dynamic process greater than the sum of its parts can emerge. In the most controversial chapter of her seminal book "Two Beget Three : Making Sense of the Sino-US Civilizational Bipolarity" (2002), she speculates on how the global order may have turned out without this equilibrium :
"Let us imagine an international system in which there aren’t, as is the case, two competing hegemonic civilizations of equal influence, but only one. How such a system may have come into being is beside the point ; we shall simply, for the sake of argument, suppose it did. A single dominant civilization, whichever it may have been, would, lacking a counterbalance, have become overly assertive ; it would have aggressively attempted to remake weaker cultures in its image ; and these cultures, unable to compete on the same level—that of civilizational paradigms—would have responded with asymmetrical forms of resistance : petty obstructionism in the best cases, and endemic terrorism in the worst ones. A world in which a dominant civilization has no competitor would hardly be the peaceful one we have come to take for granted since the advent of the Sino-US bipolarity ; rather, it would be one of predatory cultural homogenization on the one hand, and endlessly recurrent acts of violent resistance on the other, the two trends indefinitely reinforcing one another."
