Rather a lot of megaphone diplomacy followed the recent UN vote on Syria. Confusion and anger flowed from British and western media. So why did Russia and China veto the UN security council draft resolution on Syria? As Chinese ambassador in the UK, I feel it is timely to give a more measured explanation of why China voted no. Also, I want to explain how together we can, must and should give peace a chance in Syria.

Since day one of this crisis, China has been watching the situation very closely. We have consistently urged all sides to stop violence, avoid civilian casualties and restore order in the country. Central to any lasting solution must be a clear principle: the Syrian people’s call for change should be heard, and their interests need to be protected. This is the best possible result for the Syrian people.

For this to happen, China has backed the Arab League’s efforts to find a political solution and maintain stability in the region. In addition, we encouraged all sides in Syria to respond positively to these efforts to mediate. The goal must be an immediate end to all violence; once that is achieved, we must encourage an inclusive political process led by the Syrian people. Peaceful dialogue is the best way to tackle differences and grievances and restore stability to Syria.

The international community should act in a way that constructively helps this goal, not the opposite. It is fundamental that Syria’s sovereignty, independence and territory must be respected. The security council should adopt a calm and measured response to the crisis; above all it must stand by the purposes and principles of the UN charter.

Any decision the council makes must reduce rather than inflame tension, encourage reconciliation and contribute to regional peace and stability in the Middle East. Entrusted with a responsibility for world peace and security, the last thing the UN should do is to further complicate the crisis. What we need from the UN security council is a sustainable solution, not a rash decision. It was following the above principles that led China to vote no.

China has been an active negotiator at the security council to try to produce a draft resolution on Syria. We continue to work hard to win a consensus. But imposing hasty deadlines on these debates will most likely lead to failure; this was particularly so at a time of sharp divide on the text and some members’ insistence on further consultations. Furthermore, the Russian foreign minister had announced a visit to Damascus to begin a new round of mediation. This means it was, and is, not a good time for forcing a vote on Syria. The end result was anticipated by those members who pressed for the vote; the solidarity and authority of the security council is undermined as a result, and we are further away from a sustainable and lasting solution.

Chinese people abhor the violence and bloodshed in Syria as much as those in Britain and other countries. China voted against the resolution for a simple reason: the resolution as drafted will not help cool down the situation. It does not facilitate political dialogue. It does not address distrust, or bring peace and stability to the region. Quite the contrary, China believes that forcing the vote only aggravates these tension and makes the situation more unmanageable.

So what about the track record of no votes in the UN security council? In the 41 years since the People’s Republic’s return to the council, China has only cast a no vote eight times. This is a frequency far lower than any of the other four permanent members. China always strives for consensus and harmony; this attitude is embedded in our culture. So the low pattern of no votes by China shows my government thinks very hard before voting. It means that China’s veto on Syria this time around was a very tough decision.

China in this process has shown a consistent and clear commitment to work with the international community to seek a responsible and lasting solution to the Syrian issue. But the vote itself is a powerful reminder of the international responsibility to choose a constructive path forward.

La celebración del XVIII congreso del Partido Comunista de China (PCCH), previsto para octubre, será el gran acontecimiento político en el gigante asiático este año 2012. La elección de una nueva cúpula dirigente, con Xi Jinping y Li Keqiang a la cabeza, abrirá paso a una nueva generación de líderes que deberá afrontar los grandes desafíos de la presente década, entre ellos la probable culminación general del proceso de modernización iniciado a marchas forzadas en 1978. La plasmación del nuevo modelo de desarrollo y la definición de las bases de una estabilidad sociopolítica renovada serán sus mayores retos en el ámbito interno. Los equilibrios que pueda reflejar la composición del próximo Comité Permanente del Buró Político ofrecerán señales del rumbo chino en los años venideros.

En el orden económico, todos los esfuerzos deberán centrarse en contrarrestar el impacto de la crisis económica global y de deuda europea y en mantener la estabilidad financiera doméstica. El crecimiento podría sustituir a la inflación como el asunto prioritario de la agenda económica. La inflación, relativamente controlada en el 2011 (5,5%, superior al 4 fijado por el Gobierno), podría rondar el 3,5% en el 2012. Tras la cifra de crecimiento del 2011, ligeramente por encima del 9%, los expertos vaticinan que podría rondar el 8,5% en el 2012 (en el 2010 fue del 10,4). Se anuncia una política monetaria prudente y una política fiscal proactiva. La rebaja en el coeficiente de reservas bancarias por primera vez en tres años anuncia un probable fin del relativo endurecimiento del acceso al crédito. El sector inmobiliario proseguirá su regulación y ajuste con un fuerte impulso a la construcción de viviendas sociales.

La disminución de las exportaciones a los mercados occidentales ha comenzado a repercutir en algunas de las empresas del sur de China, especialmente en Guangdong (responsable de la cuarta parte de las exportaciones del país), originando cierres, huelgas y movilizaciones sociales que se han extendido hasta Shanghai. El primer semestre del 2012 promete ser difícil y lo será también para Huang Huahua, el gobernador provincial y una de las probables figuras clave del nuevo estrellato chino.

El cambio de estrategia en marcha pasa por prestar más atención a los mercados emergentes, en especial de América Latina, y el fomento del consumo interno, que se apuntan como orientaciones correctoras para evitar una ralentización pronunciada del crecimiento con el consiguiente agravamiento de las tensiones sociales. El aumento de los costos laborales, la apreciación del yuan y la desaceleración de las exportaciones auguran tiempos difíciles en el sur del país, uno de los principales motores de su transformación.

Taiwán, la provincia rebelde, celebró unas elecciones decisivas el 14 de enero y ha puesto a prueba la estrategia de apaciguamiento impulsada por Hu Jintao, a diferencia de su antecesor, Jiang Zemin, más influido por el lobby castrense. La incontestable victoria del Kuomintang sirve para avistar un horizonte de entendimiento y activación de la aproximación bilateral, que ha experimentado cambios históricos entre el 2008 y el 2010. De haber triunfado los soberanistas del Partido Democrático Progresista, las aguas podrían haber bajado revueltas en el estrecho de Taiwán.

En política exterior, desactivar las tensiones con EE.UU. será la principal preocupación de China. El proteccionismo comercial, las políticas monetarias, Tíbet o Taiwán seguirán enturbiando las relaciones bilaterales. La estrategia Pivot to Asia, reiterada y enriquecida por la Administración Obama en la cumbre de APEC celebrada en Hawái en noviembre último, es leída en Pekín en clave de contención, tanto económica como militar. El aumento de las tensiones en el mar de China meridional con el apostamiento de infantes de marina norteamericanos en Australia presagia dificultades añadidas. La campaña para las elecciones presidenciales de noviembre hará lo propio, convirtiendo a China en la gran culpable de todos los males de EE.UU., lo que dispensará más baches que alegrías, con un claro predominio de la exacerbación de los diferendos sobre las expectativas de cooperación.

La imagen de China apenas ha mejorado en Occidente. El congreso del PCCH puede avivar las tensiones en Tíbet o Xinjiang, donde ya se vienen reforzando las medidas de seguridad desde hace meses, recordando a los países desarrollados los graves déficits democráticos que alberga la que pronto podría convertirse en la primera potencia económica del planeta. Los esfuerzos del Gobierno chino por edulcorar las sombras del régimen, promoviendo su imaginario cultural a gran escala en todo el mundo sabrán a poco en tanto no de señales de una sincera voluntad de democratización de sus estructuras, alentando nuevos códigos de valores que trasciendan esa ausencia de humanidad que parece haber cuajado en buena parte de la sociedad china. No todo puede arreglarse con dinero. Por fortuna, habría que concluir.

China’s behavior during the recent presidential election in Taiwan demonstrates that its leaders have learned some lessons, if only the hard way. They have learned that China can have a greater impact on Taiwanese voters through trade and making people feel richer than by threats – even threats to fire missiles – which had been China’s electoral tactics in previous Taiwanese elections, particularly when a pro-independence candidate looked popular enough to win.

Indeed, fearing the popularity of Lee Teng-hui, who ran in the 1996 presidential election on a pro-independence platform, China’s People’s Liberation Army actually fired missiles close to the nearby coast of Keelung. But this saber rattling backfired. Lee won.

The presidential election on January 14 was the first of the transfers of power in China and Taiwan that will take place this year. Later this year, China’s President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will be succeeded by men chosen by the Communist Party long ago. Avoiding new tension with Taiwan appears to have been a calculated decision by China’s leaders as they begin their own – perhaps not yet fully settled – changing of the guard.

For almost two decades, Taiwan’s presidential elections have attracted global attention not only for the robustness of Taiwan’s democratic culture, but also for the perennial question of whether the winner would seek formal independence for Taiwan. This time, Tsai Ing-wen, the woman nominated by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), mounted a late charge on the Kuomintang incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou. But China did not bluster as Tsai surged in the polls.

Instead, China did all that it could do boost Ma, who has presided over a massive increase in economic ties with the mainland. For example, China provided cheap airplane tickets to roughly 400,000 of the one million Taiwanese living on the mainland to enable them to return home to vote. Given that Ma won by 800,000 votes, this tactic may not have been decisive, but it most likely played a considerable part in determining the outcome.

Paradoxically, the strong performance of James Soong Chu-yu of the People First Party, which split from the Kuomintang, helped Ma by giving voters a second alternative to him. And America’s quiet instructions to all candidates to avoid nationalist provocation undoubtedly also played a role in dampening tension with China – another factor that probably benefited Ma.

As part of China’s new “soft” approach to Taiwan, Wen emphasizes “conceding interests” to Taiwan. In Taiwan’s south, long a DPP stronghold, that approach appears to have paid off. The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) between China and Taiwan has enabled farmers and fishermen in southern Taiwan to prosper by selling agricultural and fisheries products to the enormous Chinese market, and the Kuomintang received higher support in the region than in past elections.

Of course, promoting economic interaction with Taiwan is not China’s ultimate goal; unification is. China’s government appears to believe that Ma’s victory is a step in this direction.

But economic integration is one thing, and political integration quite another. After experiencing the benefits of democracy and freedom of expression, Taiwanese are unlikely to want to settle for anything less than the open society that they have today. Indeed, with increased contact between Taiwan and the mainland, ordinary Chinese could begin to envy the modern democracy that the Taiwanese people have built – and spread the idea of an open society to the Chinese mainland. Ma’s role in his second term should be to serve as just such an evangelist for democracy in China.

Well aware of this “danger,” China is implementing five policies. The first is to expand the ECFA, so that more Taiwanese companies feel its benefits. Second, and similarly, China will try to shake up the DPP’s base by further targeting the commercial interests of Taiwanese farmers and fishermen in the south. Third, China will emphasize common Chinese culture in order to reduce Taiwanese fear of unification. A fourth goal is to win over young legislators elected during this presidential election. Finally, China will seek to prevent the use of the name Taiwan and force the international use of the awkward name “Chinese Taipei.”

But the greatest issue affecting cross-strait relations is the Chinese economy itself. Signs of decline in China’s economy, which has racked up double-digit growth for decades, would affect all of its Taiwan policies. When Shanghai stocks fell by about 20% last year, Taiwanese stocks fell by a similar amount almost simultaneously – proof of how synchronized the Chinese and Taiwanese economies have become. China will not be able to get its way if the profitability of this synchronization breaks down.

So, will Taiwan become more like the mainland, or vice versa? To ask that question is to reprise a debate that was heard when Hong Kong and Macau reverted to China, but that is seldom encountered nowadays. Whether serious moves toward unification change that fact will depend on the effectiveness of China’s soft-power approach, which cannot be limited only to the attractiveness of its economy if it is actually to succeed.

From July 2005 until this past December, China’s renminbi (RMB) appreciated steadily. But then the RMB fell unexpectedly, hitting the bottom of the daily trading band set by the Peoples’ Bank of China (PBoC) for 11 sessions in a row. Though the RMB has since returned to its previous trajectory of slow appreciation, the episode may have signaled a permanent change in the pattern of the exchange rate’s movement.

As long as China was running a trade surplus and receiving net inflows of foreign direct investment, the RMB remained under upward pressure. Short-term capital flows had little impact on the direction of the RMB’s exchange rate.

There were two reasons for this. First, thanks to an effective – albeit porous – capital-control regime in China, short-term “hot money” (capital coming into China aimed at arbitrage, rent-seeking, and speculation) could not enter (and then leave) freely and swiftly. Second, short-term capital flows usually would strengthen rather than weaken upward pressure on the RMB’s exchange rate, because speculators, persuaded by China’s gradual approach to revaluation, bet on appreciation.

So why, if China was still running a decent current-account surplus and a long-term capital surplus, did the RMB suddenly depreciate, forcing the PBoC to intervene (though not very vigorously) to prevent it from falling further?

Many economists outside of China have argued that the December depreciation resulted from betting by investors that Chinese policymakers, facing the prospect of a hard landing for the economy, would slow or halt currency appreciation. But if that were true, we would now be seeing significant long-term capital outflows and heavy selling of RMB for dollars in China’s foreign-exchange market.

We see neither reaction. More importantly, the RMB’s slow appreciation resumed fairly promptly after December’s dip, while investors’ bearish sentiments about China’s economy remain consistent.

In fact, the RMB’s sudden fall in December reflects China’s liberalization of cross-border capital flows. That process began in April 2009, when China launched the pilot RMB Trade Settlement Scheme (RTSS), which enables enterprises, especially larger ones, to channel their funds between Mainland China and Hong Kong. As a result, an offshore RMB market, known as the CNH market, was created in Hong Kong alongside the onshore market, now dubbed the CNY market.

But, in contrast to the CNY, the CNH is a free market. Given expectations of RMB appreciation and a positive interest-rate spread between Mainland China and Hong Kong, the RMB had a higher value in dollar terms on the CNH than on the CNY market. That difference led to active exchange-rate arbitrage by mainland importers and multinational firms – one form of capital inflows from Hong Kong to the mainland. Correspondingly, RMB liabilities owed by mainland Chinese and multinationals increased, as did RMB assets held by Hong Kong residents.

Exchange-rate arbitrage by mainland importers and multinationals creates upward pressure on the CNY and downward pressure on the CNH. In an economy with flexible interest and exchange rates, arbitrage eliminates the exchange-rate spread quickly. But, because China’s exchange rate and interest rates are inflexible, the CNH-CNY spread persists, and arbitragers are able to reap fat profits at the economy’s expense.

Last September, however, financial conditions changed suddenly in Hong Kong. The liquidity shortage caused by the European sovereign debt-crisis led developed countries’ banks – especially European banks with exposure in Hong Kong – to withdraw their funds, taking dollars with them. As a result, the CNH fell against the dollar. At the same time, the shortage of dollars had not yet affected the CNY, which remained relatively stable.

The CNH therefore became cheaper than the CNY. Consequently, mainland importers and multinationals stopped buying dollars from the CNH market and returned to the CNY market. At the same time, mainland exporters stopped selling dollars in the CNY market and turned to the CNH market.

The dollar shortage created depreciation pressures on the CNY, which the PBoC declined to offset. The CNY was thus bound to fall, which it did last September.

Reverse arbitrage meant capital outflows from the Chinese mainland. Correspondingly, RMB liabilities owed by mainlanders and multinationals decreased, as did RMB assets held in Hong Kong. In fact, increases in financing costs and uncertainty about RMB appreciation prompted a partial sell-off of RMB assets by Hong Kong residents.

In short, because the RTSS made cross-border capital movements much easier, short-term flows have become a major factor in determining the RMB’s exchange rate. External shocks affect the offshore exchange rate first, and then feed through to the onshore exchange rate.

The RMB will continue to appreciate in the near future, owing to strong economic fundamentals, but the inherent instability of short-term capital flows will make its exchange rate more volatile. This change is bound to pose new challenges for decision makers in the United States and China, particularly as they engage in a fresh round of debate about China’s exchange-rate policy.

Long the most fragmented nation on earth, China is being brought together like never before by a new connectivity. Its Internet community is expanding at hyper speed, with profound implications for the Chinese economy, to say nothing of the country’s social norms and political system. This genie cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. Once connected, there is no turning back.

The pace of transformation is breathtaking. According to Internet World Stats, the number of Internet users in China has more than tripled since 2006, soaring to 485 million in mid-2011 – more than three times that in 2006. Moreover, China’s rush to connectivity is far from over. As of mid-2011, only 36% of its 1.3 billion people were connected – far short of the nearly 80% penetration rates seen in South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Indeed, with the cost of connectivity falling sharply – China’s mobile users are expected to surpass PC users by 2013 – and, with urbanization and per capita incomes also rising sharply, it is not unreasonable to expect China’s Internet penetration rate to cross the 50% threshold by 2015. That would be the functional equivalent of adding about three-fourths of all existing Internet users in the US.

Nor are the Chinese casual and infrequent Internet users. Consistent with what the social-network theorist Clay Shirky has dubbed a society’s penchant for unlocking the “cognitive surplus” embedded in net-based activities, survey data from the China Internet Network Information Center suggest that Chinese netizens log an average of 2.6 hours per day online – a full hour longer than the average 15-49-year-old Chinese citizen spends watching television.

China’s microblogs, or social networks, where usage tends be most intense, were estimated to have approximately 270 million users as of late 2011. And there is plenty of upside. Worldwide, about 70% of all Internet users currently engage in some form of microblogging, which is the fastest-growing segment of the Internet. In China, this share is just 55%.

When it comes to analyzing China, it is always easy to get carried away with numbers – especially those driven by the country’s sheer size. But the real message here concerns the implications of connectivity, not just its scale.

A key implication is the Internet’s potential to play a significant role in the emergence of China’s consumer society – a critical structural imperative for a long-unbalanced Chinese economy. With connectivity comes a national awareness of spending habits, tastes, and brands – essential characteristics of any consumer culture.

The consumption share of China’s economy, at less than 35% of GDP, is the lowest of any major country. Surging Chinese Internet usage could well facilitate the pro-consumption initiatives of the recently enacted 12th Five-Year Plan.

The Internet could also enable freer and more open communications, upward mobility, transparent and rapid dissemination of information, and, yes, individuality. China’s leadership has been increasingly vocal in raising concerns about growing inequalities that might otherwise hinder the development of what they call a more “harmonious society.” Online connectivity could be a powerful means to help China come together and achieve this goal.

Finally, there is the Internet’s potential as an instrument of political change. That is hardly an inconsequential consideration for any country in the aftermath of last year’s Arab Spring, which was facilitated in many countries (especially Tunisia and Egypt) by network-enabled mobilization.

While reform of China’s single-party state has always been viewed as an important objective in modern China – from the so-called Fifth Modernization of Wei Jinsheng in the late 1970’s to recent speeches by Premier Wen Jiabao – meaningful progress has been limited. Is this likely to change as China embraces the Internet?

China is no exception in requiring leadership, accountability, and responsiveness as conditions of political stability. Its rapidly expanding Internet community has repeatedly raised national awareness of tough local issues. This was especially evident in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, ethnic violence in Xinjiang in 2009, and the high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou in 2011.

As the Arab Spring demonstrated, the Internet can quickly transform local incidents into national flashpoints – turning the new connectivity into a potential source of political instability and turmoil. But that has been the case only in countries ruled by highly unpopular autocratic regimes.

By contrast, China’s leadership is viewed with a much greater degree of public sympathy. Their quick and direct response to the recent incidents in Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Wenzhou are important cases in point. Senior Party leaders – especially Premier Wen – were quick to lead an empathetic national response that was largely effective in countering the outpouring of concern expressed on the Internet.

None of this is to deny the dark side of the Chinese Internet explosion – namely, widespread censorship and constraints on individual freedom of expression. China’s “SkyNet” team (rumored to be greater than 30,000) is the largest cyber police force in the world.

Moreover, while China is not alone in censoring the Internet, self-policing by many of the nation’s largest portals amplifies official oversight and surveillance. Recent restrictions on microbloggers – especially denial of access to those who use untraceable aliases – have heightened concerns over Chinese Internet freedom. Such restrictions, of course, cut both ways – potentially limiting personal expression, but also constraining disguised and reckless vigilante attacks.

Filtered or not, a long-fragmented China now has a viable and rapidly expanding network. The power of that network – especially insofar as economic, social, and political change is concerned – is hard to predict. But connectivity adds a new dimension of cohesion to modern China. That can only accelerate the speed of its extraordinary development journey.

China celebró el pasado octubre el primer centenario de la revolución de Xinhai. Fue en 1911 cuando tardíamente puso fin a siglos de feudalismo, abriendo camino a un nuevo republicanismo que aportaría la modernización pendiente. El gigante oriental giró 180 grados con el objetivo de “aprender de Occidente para salvar a China”, aspiración que venía movilizando las mayores y mejores energías del país desde finales del siglo XIX.

Sin renegar al completo de ella, para la China continental de hoy, la revolución de 1911 se asoció a su rival Kuomintang (KMT), la fuerza nacionalista que vertebró dicho movimiento bajo el liderazgo de Sun Yat-sen. Se comprende así que las celebraciones dispuestas por Pekín hayan tenido un perfil notoriamente bajo. Naturalmente, en Taiwán, con un Gobierno continuador y depositario de la República de China fundada entonces, las celebraciones revistieron la dimensión de una gran efeméride. A pesar de tan diferentes intensidades conmemorativas, la revolución de 1911 y, sobre todo, la propia figura de Sun Yat-sen ofrecen un valioso nexo de unión entre Pekín y Taipei con capacidad para fundamentar claves que afiancen la aproximación en curso desde 2005 entre ambos viejos enemigos y, quizá, para abrir paso a la anhelada -y también controvertida- unificación.

Con independencia de las inevitables lecturas partidarias e ideológicas de este convulso pasado reciente, lo cierto es que el movimiento que se inicia en 1911 es parte de un mismo y dilatado transcurso histórico que tiene una segunda estación en 1949, año del triunfo de Mao sobre el KMT, y otra tercera en 1978, referencia del harakiri del maoísmo a instancias del propio PCCh. Ese extenso y conflictivo proceso revolucionario presenta como denominador común el ansia de la recuperación nacional de China, el fin de las humillaciones extranjeras y el logro de mayores cotas de bienestar.

Hoy, tan larga transformación está a punto de culminarse. En lo económico, convertida en la segunda potencia, China coquetea con la plena recuperación de la grandeza que exhibió hasta mediados del siglo XIX, cuando llegó a su fin el dominio del comercio mundial que había ejercido durante varios milenios. En lo político, las cosas son más complejas. A la dificultad de encuentro de las dos interpretaciones oficiales del reciente proceso histórico, vigentes a uno y otro lado del estrecho de Taiwán, se unen otros factores, internos y externos, de notable peso que pueden alargar, quizás medio siglo más, una hipotética convergencia. En cualquier caso, conviene advertir que, al menos para el continente, dicha aspiración es un objetivo irrenunciable. Probablemente, incluso para una China democratizada.

Pero lo más paradójico de lo acontecido en el siglo transcurrido es que la culminación de la hipotética modernización china discurre en paralelo al fomento del descrédito interno de Occidente. A las resistencias conocidas respecto a la idoneidad del modelo socio-político se ha unido ahora, en virtud de las incoherencias afloradas por la crisis global, la desautorización de un sistema económico reconocido como paradigma del desarrollo. Dicha circunstancia opera en un contexto que anima la recuperación de sus claves culturales más profundas, obviando aquella equiparación inicial entre decadencia y confucianismo y promoviendo la fórmula de progreso con identidad como clave superadora de las autoflagelaciones y los contenciosos ideológicos del pasado. El alcance de la modernización pone fin a la fe ciega de otrora en la occidenta-lización.

Por el contrario, sí ha echado raíces profundas una ideología nacionalista desconocida en la China imperial y ajena a una tradición cultural basada en el esplendor indiscutible del Imperio. El nacionalismo se ha ido fortaleciendo en este siglo como resultado inevitable de un doble proceso. En primer lugar, la conflictiva relación con Occidente a raíz de sus intentos de limitar la soberanía china o de condicionar su reemergencia. En segundo lugar, ante la necesidad de construir un discurso aglutinador de un universo chino fragmentado, superador de los vacíos ideológicos del presente pero igualmente capaz de justificar duros sacrificios en aras de culminar el horizonte estratégico de la modernización.

Esta última clave explica movimientos telúricos de enorme alcance e inimaginables hace solo pocas décadas. El fomento activo del confucianismo por parte del Partido Comunista en el continente o la también reciente -y un tanto trasnochada- legalización de la propaganda comunista en Taiwán, por ejemplo, no solo ilustra el acercamiento que se ha venido operando desde 2005, sino que alargan las bases para definir una nueva identidad compartida. ¿Alcanzará también dicho proceso a la aceptación común de la democracia reivindicada por Sun Yat-sen como uno de los tres principios del pueblo?

A partir de 1949, el mundo chino deambuló por dos caminos diferentes compartiendo el mismo objetivo de modernización y desarrollo. Pudiera decirse que con todas sus contradicciones y desmanes, los dos han conducido a la meta, algo realmente inédito. La yuxtaposición de las respectivas experiencias y la actualización del acervo histórico-cultural constituyen las nuevas señas de identidad de una China que ansía recuperar la autoestima desaprendiendo de Occidente.

China’s president, Hu Jintao, greeted 2012 with an important essay warning that China was being battered by Western culture: “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” he wrote, adding that “the international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.”

Essentially, Hu was saying that China was under assault by Western soft power — the ability to produce outcomes through persuasion and attraction rather than coercion or payment — and needed to fight back.

Over the past decade, China’s economic and military might has grown impressively, and this has frightened its neighbors into looking for allies to balance rising Chinese hard power. But if a country can also increase its soft power, its neighbors feel less need to seek balancing alliances. For example, Canada and Mexico do not seek alliances with China to balance American power the way Asian countries seek an American presence to balance China.

Already in 2007, Hu told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to invest more in its soft power resources. Accordingly, China is spending billions of dollars on a charm offensive.

The Chinese style emphasizes high-profile gestures, such as rebuilding the Cambodian Parliament or Mozambique’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. The elaborately staged 2008 Beijing Olympics enhanced China’s reputation, and the 2010 Shanghai Expo attracted more than 70 million visitors. The Boao Forum for Asia on Hainan Island attracts nearly 2,000 Asian politicians and business leaders to what is billed as an “Asian Davos.” And Chinese aid programs to Africa and Latin America are not limited by the institutional or human rights concerns that constrain Western aid.

China has always had an attractive traditional culture, and now it has created several hundred Confucius Institutes around the world to teach its language and culture. The enrollment of foreign students in China has increased from 36,000 a decade ago to at least 240,000 in 2010, and while the Voice of America was cutting its Chinese broadcasts, China Radio International was increasing its broadcasts in English to 24 hours a day.

In 2009, Beijing announced plans to spend billions of dollars to develop global media giants to compete with Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom. China invested $8.9 billion in external publicity work, including a 24-hour Xinhua cable news channel designed to imitate Al Jazeera.

Beijing has also raised defenses. It limits foreign films to only 20 per year, subsidizes Chinese companies creating cultural products, and has restricted Chinese television shows that are imitations of Western entertainment programs.

But for all its efforts, China has had a limited return on its investment. A recent BBC poll shows that opinions of China’s influence are positive in much of Africa and Latin America, but predominantly negative in the United States and Europe, as well as in India, Japan and South Korea. A poll taken in Asia after the Beijing Olympics found that China’s charm offensive had been ineffective.

What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture and narrative to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.

The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China’s domestic crackdown in Tibet and Xianjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was followed by the jailing of the Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and the artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Television into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda.

Now, in the aftermath of the Middle East revolutions, China is clamping down on the Internet and jailing human rights lawyers, once again torpedoing its soft power campaign.

As Han Han, a novelist and popular blogger, argued in December, “the restriction on cultural activities makes it impossible for China to influence literature and cinema on a global basis or for us culturati to raise our heads up proud.”

The development of soft power need not be a zero sum game. All countries can gain from finding attraction in one anothers’ cultures. But for China to succeed, it will need to unleash the talents of its civil society. Unfortunately, that does not seem about to happen soon.

Ma Ying-jeou, the incumbent president of Taiwan, has now won his hard-fought battle for reelection. What does it mean for the United States?

To state it plainly, Ma’s victory means one less headache for any U.S. administration, Democratic or Republican. China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. The U.S. ended its formal treaty commitment to protect Taiwan from a Chinese attack in 1979, but it continues to be committed to the island’s security through legislation. Ma is seen as the candidate least likely to provoke China or otherwise put the U.S. in an uncomfortable position. But the final vote tally indicates it may not be all smooth sailing for Ma or cross-strait relations.

Ma garnered only 51.6% of the vote this time; his chief rival, Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, got 45.6%. In 2008, the charismatic Ma helped the Kuomintang, or KMT, return to power in a landslide election by promising to reduce tensions with China after the pro-independence DPP had held the presidency for eight years. The drop in popular support this time around could be attributed to a third-party challenger, a sluggish economy or some lingering apprehensions about closer ties to Beijing.

The U.S. had pushed Taiwan hard to democratize in the 1980s. But with democratization came complications, the DPP stand on China being one of them. The DPP supports Taiwan’s de jure independence from the mainland — a move that would be guaranteed to trigger a Chinese military attack. Despite promises to behave prudently after gaining power in 2000, the DPP orchestrated a series of “surprises” that included changing the name of Taiwan’s state corporations (from “China” to “Taiwan,” for example), shelving documents outlining a road map to reunification with China, holding a series of controversial referendums and making repeated calls for a new Taiwanese Constitution. Perhaps most provocative, however, was a noisy and quixotic campaign to join the United Nations as a new country, Taiwan, rather than “return” as the Republic of China, as it has previously tried to do. These moves led to an escalation in tensions with Beijing and increased prospects that the U.S. might become embroiled in a conflict with China.

Following Ma’s election in 2008, relations between Taipei and Beijing warmed. The two sides signed a free-trade pact, opened direct flights between major cities, signed an agreement enabling swarms of mainland Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan and agreed informally to a “diplomatic truce” whereby each would stop trying to bribe the other’s diplomatic allies into aligning with their respective sides. More than 1 million Taiwanese now live on the mainland. There is talk of a formal peace agreement to end the civil war. In short, relations between Taipei and Beijing are at their best since 1949.

To be sure, Tsai went to great lengths to appear moderate. She even pledged to expand linkages with Beijing. But Tsai refused to publicly renounce independence as an option for Taiwan. She also opposed the “1992 consensus,” an understanding whereby Taipei and Beijing agreed that there is “one China” but with each interpreting what that means. (The arrangement enables them to talk to each other.)

Tsai’s position prompted one unnamed U.S. official to tell the Financial Times that Washington had “distinct doubts” about Tsai’s ability to maintain stable relations with Beijing. The comment sparked outrage among DPP supporters, who complained that the U.S. was interfering in Taiwan’s domestic politics.

The U.S. stance, however, should not have taken any informed observer by surprise. After all, the 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy proclaims that “we will continue to encourage continued reduction in tensions between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.” And this is why Washington welcomes Ma’s reelection. The chances that Ma will continue to reduce tensions with Beijing are considered greater than Tsai’s prospects to achieve that goal.

It is likely that relations between Taipei and Beijing will continue to improve during Ma’s second term. But one should not jump to the hasty conclusion that Taiwan no longer needs U.S. support. Rather, the Obama administration should comply fully with the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act — the 1979 law that guides America’s unofficial relations with Taiwan. Continued U.S. military and political support will help Taipei negotiate with Beijing from a position of strength. Taiwan is the first multiparty democracy in more than 5,000 years of Chinese history; supporting it is well worth the effort.

Tema: En el último año ha resurgido la cuestión de si el posicionamiento de Pekín ante Occidente obedece a una singularidad estratégica de China.

Resumen: Este análisis, en primer lugar, perfila el reciente posicionamiento chino en relación con el mundo occidental. En segundo lugar, presenta un panorama general de los distintos foros y diálogos internacionales en que participa China como parte de ese impulso.En tercer lugar, reflexiona sobre una probable singularidad estratégica en el ascenso chino.

Análisis: En diciembre Pekín anunció la creación de dos históricos fondos de inversiones para la UE y EEUU, respectivamente, y Pekín y Tokio anunciaron que usarán sus respectivas monedas en sus intercambios comerciales bilaterales. Ambas son decisiones estratégicas que se suman a la solicitud de la UE a China en noviembre para que aporte alFondo Europeo de Estabilidad Financiera (FEEF), lo que subraya el creciente protagonismo chino.

Pese a las propias debilidades materiales tercermundistas del gigante asiático, sigue sorprendiendo su posibilidad de apuntalar y estimular a las economías estadounidense y europea a la vez, particularmente si se considera que la economía del primer socio de la UE –EEUU– se apoya desde hace años en la compra de buena parte de sus bonos del Tesoro por Pekín. Paralelamente, para Latinoamérica (entendida ciertamente como parte del mundo occidental), China ha acrecentado su condición de socio comercial principal e interlocutor de creciente importancia, particularmente en un 2011 en el que Pekín ha participado más activamente en diálogos y foros internacionales acordes con su grado de actor central en los asuntos mundiales.

Esa tendencia tan clara del posicionamiento de Pekín, con gran énfasis en el último lustro, ha llevado a distintos analistas a discutir una vez más el carácter sui generis del ascenso chino, que tanto sigue distinguiéndose del ascenso de otras potencias de la época contemporánea, y en qué medida se explica a partir de singularidades de la cultura tradicional china.

Recientes posicionamientos estratégicos chinos

Los extraordinarios datos de crecimiento material de China pesan tanto como la capacidad de Pekín de planificar y reaccionar con medidas económicas. Tal dualidad se demostró una vez más el 26 de diciembre al anunciar Pekín y Tokio el uso de sus respectivas monedas en sus intercambios comerciales bilaterales y cuando dos semanas antes Pekín anunció el lanzamiento de dos fondos por valor de 225.000 millones de euros para inversiones en EEUU y la UE, respectivamente. Igualmente, fueron evidentes las expectativas que suscita Pekín cuando en octubre recibió la solicitud de ayuda de la UE para que contribuyera al FEEF.

Ciertamente, si bien la más reciente colaboración chino-japonesa no pone en duda la supremacía del dólar, marca un hito más para el yuan en su creciente avance internacional porque Pekín, durante los últimos años, ha ido estableciendo acuerdos similares con otros países. De tal manera, que a comienzos de 2012 se ha relativizado aún más la importancia de las proyecciones más famosas del Fondo Monetario Internacional que sitúan al PIB chino en paridad de poder adquisitivo en un primer lugar mundial en 2016, o la proyección de la consultora Goldman Sachs que estima que China lo logrará, en dólares corrientes, en 2027.

No es sólo el poder de influencia que se desprende de las reservas en divisas de 3,2 billones de dólares lo que hace a China situarse a la par con EEUU (exceptuando los asuntos bélicos) antes de lograr los indicadores para alcanzarle en el primer baremo de poder, que es el tamaño de la economía.

Los ya citados fondos chinos de inversión para la UE y EEUU por 225.000 millones de euros,respectivamente, se anunciaron con gran sentido de la oportunidad un día después de la más reciente decisión de la UE de profundizar en su integración. Y es ciertamente más practicable que ésta, porque la decisión de la UE lograda in extremis se traduce en un mapa de ruta en cuyo centro sigue un euro a merced de una impredecible valoración de los mercados y con la autoexclusión del Reino Unido. Lo cual a su vez lleva a una UE teóricamente más expuesta a ceder a eventuales demandas chinas.

Es cierto que Pekín no parece presionar (ni siquiera al parecer en privado) por lograr ventajas por vía excepcional, según afirman en sendos artículos publicados en diciembre el embajador de China ante la UE, Song Zhe, y el subdirector para Europa de la Academia China de Ciencias Sociales, Jiang Shixue. Sin embargo, es inevitable que en algún momento se fortalezcan estas demandas porque hay terreno abonado para Pekín. En éste se cuenta negociar el alcance de la última directriz de la UE del 23 de diciembre referida al medio ambiente y que afecta a la aviación comercial china,pasando por la solicitud de que se rebaje la presión por la revalorización del yuan o que se termine o soslaye el embargo de armas, o la consideración de China como economía de mercado, o que se aumente la cuota de poder de Pekín en el FMI. O que se suspendan las críticas por los derechos humanos en China.

El fondo de inversiones anunciado por Pekín en Occidente potenciará la tendencia reciente de adquisiciones, inversiones, arriendos y compras por el Estado chino y por compañías alentadas por él. En el caso europeo, entre varias operaciones, destaca la cesión en arriendo por 35 años del puerto griego de El Pireo a la compañía COSCO, destinada a ampliar significativamente las capacidades portuarias de distribución de mercancías chinas en el Mediterráneo.

A medio camino entre EEUU y Europa destaca el proceso de rescate de las prestigiosas marcas Volvo y Saab por la corporación china Zhejiang Geely ante la declinante gestión por Ford Motors. También destaca la compra de territorio en Islandia por un millonario chino (tipo de compra con precedente en distintos continentes). En el caso estadounidense el intento de compra de Yahoo por la china Alibaba, la mayor empresa de comercio electrónico china, o el ya citado anuncio del Banco Central de China, agudizan la preocupación tardía de Washington por incapacidades propias para competir en dinamismo comercial con el gigante asiático. Y se agregan al crónico desacuerdo por el valor del yuan respecto del dólar, que entre otros factores ha llevado a la reciente quiebra histórica del consenso dentro del partido republicano respecto de cuál es la política más adecuada hacia China en esta década.

La creciente intensidad de los contactos entre China y Occidente

Las decisiones de expansión estratégica de China al mundo se relacionan con la interacción y acceso a más información que se viene experimentando desde hace una década tanto en EEUU como en Bruselas y en cada capital europea. Por ejemplo, en diciembre se celebró en Washington, Texas y Misuri el cuarto encuentro de antiguos representantes demócratas y republicanos con sus homólogos del Partido Comunista chino, destinado a incrementar los niveles de confianza mutua. Es un tipo de reunión integrada en los más de 60 foros sectoriales bilaterales entre EE UU y China.

Un conocimiento en tiempo real igualmente refinado de la UE ha alcanzado Pekín. Por ejemplo, Pekín ya estaba bien informado desde sus 27 embajadas (y a través de los distintos idiomas de los países miembros de la UE) de los entresijos que llevaron a Bruselas a posponer la cumbre UE-China del pasado 25 de octubre y también de los detalles técnicos de la misión de Klaus Regling, director del FEEF, despachada un par de días después a Pekín a solicitar ayuda para apuntalar al euro. China también está informada por las numerosas delegaciones de académicos chinos que visitan nuestro continente con la misión específica de conocer mejor las perspectivas de solución de la coyuntura de crisis.

Por otro lado, y pese a la suspensión de la Cumbre China-Europa prevista para el pasado octubre y pospuesta sine die, se siguen incrementando los foros que China mantiene con la UE a distintos niveles. Por ejemplo, Pekín toma el pulso transversal del poder de EEUU tanto a través de sus numerosos centros y think tanks dedicados al estudio de EEUU, como a interactuar en una serie de diálogos directos con EEUU, tanto a nivel Track I como Track II. En los últimos años se han realizado los encuentros transversales denominados triálogos que comprenden relaciones bilaterales y trilaterales entre China, EEUU y la UE. Destacan el Trialogue21 impulsado por el East-West Institute y el China Institute of International Studies, así como el más reciente Trialogue organizado en Venecia en octubre pasado por el Aspen Institute y la Escuela Central del Partido Comunista de China.

Paralelamente, Pekín está adquiriendo una privilegiada relación con la otra parte de Occidente que es América Latina, tradicionalmente tan relacionada a Europa y a EEUU. Ciertamente, en relación con los polos de poder mundial importa recalcar el diálogo entre Pekín y Madrid sobre América Latina, así como el que se da entre Washington y Pekín sobre el subcontinente. Pero más aún importa recalcar la tendencia con la que ha concluido 2011, que es la clara acentuación de la relación del vínculo transpacífico de América Latina con China como centro. La baja asistencia de mandatarios a la última Cumbre Iberoamericana celebrada en Paraguay la explicaron algunos observadores españoles como clara muestra de una sobrecarga de la agenda y de una reorientación de la región hacia Asia Pacífico.

Pekín ha actuado con celeridad. En diciembre China fue la única potencia extrarregional que saludó la constitución de la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (CELAC), que incluye a 33 países del continente reunidos por primera vez sin potencias extrarregionales. Pekín, además, ofreció su disposición a reforzar el intercambio y la colaboración con el organismo que en enero ya está celebrando sesiones para fundar las bases de su esquema organizativo. Más promisoria aún por su relación con Asia Pacífico, y con China en particular, aparece la Alianza del Pacífico, constituida en abril en Lima y que igualmente en diciembre celebró su segunda reunión. Agrupa a los países de habla española más relacionados con China a nivel político o comercial, como son Chile, México, Colombia, Perú y Panamá. La Quinta Cumbre Empresarial China-América Latina, celebrada en noviembre en Lima, no es sino una muestra más del grado de acercamiento Asia Pacífico con el gigante asiático.

O sea, que están dadas las condiciones para que China celebre cumbres al máximo nivel con América Latina, de la misma manera como Pekín ya hace con EEUU, Europa, África, los países de la ASEAN y la ex URSS.

¿Hay una singularidad estratégica china?

Ante la coyuntura internacional descrita y considerando los últimos 33 años de ascenso chino, surge una valoración estratégica nuevamente en boga aunque discutible. Ésta es: quizá los tres importantes polos de poder mundial (EEUU, la UE y China) podrían ser homologables en su dinámica de posicionamiento a los reinos combatientes previos a la primera unificación china hace más de 2.200 años.

Pero, a diferencia de ese posicionamiento estratégico tanto como táctico, ha de recordarse que si bien China ha acumulado el poder que tiene como resultado posterior del acercamiento de Washington a Pekín, en 1972, esa dinámica de ascenso no proviene tanto de utilizar las sinergias del nuevo socio, siguiendo la dinámica del pensamiento estratégico tradicional chino por el cual uno se puede valer de la energía del contrario (no pocas veces para beneficio común). Al fin y al cabo, recuérdese que China no tomó la decisión de ascender ni en 1972 ni en 1978, sino de avanzar. Recuérdese que varias de las medidas chinas se han ido adoptando sobre la marcha y con cautela y no han roto la paz en ninguno de los escenarios internacionales.

La más reciente pregunta sobre el excepcionalismo chino proviene de la argumentación de Henry Kissinger en su libro On China (con sus inevitables lagunas sobre la China profunda), el libro más influyente a nivel mundial sobre política internacional china publicado en 2011. Si nos aproximamos a China en clave kissingeriana significa que aceptamos la diferencia china en procesos clave tales como la percepción del tiempo y el espacio y, por tanto, que entendemos que los chinos planifican y negocian de manera distinta.

De hecho, por oposición a Occidente es cierto que se ha constatado que distintos funcionarios chinos tratan algunos asuntos críticos de manera holística tanto a nivel espacial como temporal, no pocas veces aceptando la continuación de una no solución. Y su actitud ante la aún fresca sucesión de Kim Jung-un en Corea del Norte, o las dilatadas negociaciones de Pekín con la UE sobre asuntos comerciales, lo vuelven a demostrar.

Por otro lado, Kissinger y otros observadores tanto de la dimensión política así como de la cultural indican que los chinos subrayan la importancia del juego del weiqi que, a diferencia del ajedrez, no posee una acción frontal orientada hacia el jaque-mate al rey, sino que está encaminada a rodear al adversario hasta incapacitar su movimiento y en buenas cuentas ganar evitando la batalla frontal.

Sin embargo, a la luz de la coyuntura se constata que las medidas chinas de apoyo económico y de estímulo inversor son globales. Se dan hacia las principales economías del mundo, pero también hacia el Asia Central ex soviética, hacia el Sudeste asiático, hacia América Latina, el mundo musulmán, Oceanía, Asia meridional y a África. La inevitable salida al exterior de una economía que necesita sacarle partido a sus 3,2 billones de dólares de reservas en divisas en momentos que coinciden con un bajón en el mundo desarrollado es pura lógica económica.

Por otra parte, si suponemos exageradamente que el juego de estrategia fundamental de los chinos es el weiqi y el de los occidentales el ajedrez, se puede desmontar simplemente pensando que tanto en el juego del weiqi como en el del ajedrez juegan dos actores, no una multiplicidad de ellos, como ocurre en la realidad en los procesos deliberativos de las democracias actuales y por supuesto que también en la instancia deliberativa máxima que es el Comité Permanente del Buró Político del Comité Central del Partido Comunista. También hay situaciones del ajedrez que se parecen al weiqi porque aquél puede igualmente ser opaco y flexible. Por ejemplo, los movimientos de EEUU de acercamiento al régimen de Myanmar y de apostamiento de tropas en la Oceanía norte se podrían entender como movimientos tácticos dentro de una noción influida por el weiqi.

Así, el concepto clave no es el weiqi o el ajedrez, que como bien han notado distintos glosadores del libro de Kissinger, también lo juegan los chinos, sino que principios filosóficos más generales, como las fuerzas del ying y el yang, del tao (dao), que por ejemplo conducen a desdecirse o rectificar con cierta facilidad, facilitando una gran flexibilidad y profundidad estratégica mayor.

Igualmente, Pekín no dispone de un tiempo ilimitado como se podría entender a priori por la obvia diferencia entre regímenes de dictadura popular como en el caso chino, a diferencia de los democráticos occidentales que se enfrentan a la prensa y a los partidos de oposición. Uno de los argumentos que se esgrimen en China para no atolondrarse ayudando a las economías occidentales es precisamente la preocupación de una reacción adversa de la población china. En verdad, la creciente magnitud de una opinión pública (no de una sociedad civil) es un factor muy importante cuando se avalúa el poder chino, no un mero ardid cínico de Pekín a la hora de sondear a Occidente. Al fin y al cabo, como les ocurre a muchos países en esta coyuntura, tiene un margen de maniobra limitado.

Conclusiones: Si se analiza detenidamente el año recién concluido se constata nuevamente que China sigue posicionándose en el tablero central de poder mundial sin seguir los trayectos de ascenso de las potencias precedentes. Por ello, deberíamos desprendernos de la idea de que China encarna un nuevo poder hegemónico. No sólo en esta década sería impracticable, puesto que sus indicadores básicos tercermundistas (puesto 101 de acuerdo al más reciente índice de desarrollo humano de Naciones Unidas) más el grado de incertidumbre de gestión interna que le plantea el puesto 75 en el índice internacional de transparencia internacional van en contra de su propio poder.

Por otra parte, la notable expansión material china, con iniciativas estatales y privadas de empresarios relacionados con el gobierno chino que siguen el hilo expansivo natural de la economía para asegurar el aprovisionamiento de materias primas y el aumento del know how tecnológico, fortalece la salida del subdesarrollo sacando el mayor provecho en las negociaciones, regateando o no según la ocasión.

Por lo tanto, así como se ha hablado de la “potencia indispensable” al referirnos a EEUU, se podría hablar de la “potencia astuta” al referirnos a China. Aunque sea por una astucia del sentido común de operar con recursos limitados. Al fin y al cabo, los 3,2 billones de euros de reservas en divisas le pertenecen a un país que engloba a casi un cuarto de la humanidad, con una población aún en el subdesarrollo y en proceso de envejecimiento antes de alcanzar el desarrollo.

He aquí la paradoja. China se ha convertido en una baza de reserva para la eventual estabilidad financiera mundial e incluso de la gobernanza global. Pero si bien China parece muy grande para el resto del mundo, éste es aún demasiado grande para China.

Lo que debiera llamar la atención es por qué Pekín se ha empeñado tanto en repetir los errores de las demás potencias en un sistema de economía global para el que no aparece aún la alternativa de la sostenibilidad.

Por último, EEUU y los países europeos más relacionados con China tienen una estrategia para China, aunque no hay una estrategia europea para China. En tanto, entre los países del conjunto de Iberoamérica, sólo Brasil tiene una incipiente estrategia para China. Y ciertamente Pekín dispone de estrategias para cada continente. De manera que el desafío habla por sí solo.

Durante un almuerzo reciente con el embajador de Nueva Zelanda en Estados Unidos, Mike Moore, China se convirtió en el centro de la discusión. El embajador, que tuvo ocasión de supervisar la entrada de dicho país en la Organización Mundial de Comercio cuando era su director general, afirmó que el experimento había sido un éxito. La incorporación de China había ayudado a sacar a 500 millones de personas (muchas de ellas chinas) de la pobreza, aseguró.

Esta es una opinión que, hasta cierto punto, comparto; sacar a tantas personas de la pobreza no es ningún triunfo insignificante. Tampoco me gustaría unirme a las filas de quienes critican todo el tiempo a China. No creo que la economía china vaya a derrumbarse de repente a corto plazo, ni tengo la secreta esperanza de que así sea. Dado lo mucho que depende la recuperación de la economía mundial de que China continúe creciendo, y dada la fragilidad actual de la eurozona, ese es un dato muy positivo.

Sin embargo, sí tengo dos objeciones que hacer al argumento del embajador:

En primer lugar, el objetivo fundamental de la OMC es hacer respetar las normas del comercio internacional, y, por muchos éxitos que haya deparado China con su incorporación, todavía no ha asumido el espíritu de lo que significa pertenecer a la organización.

Segundo, tanto en sentido literal como metafórico, China no vota.

El giro político hacia unas normas nacionales e internacionales de tipo liberal en el que muchos confiaban durante los años noventa está aún por llegar. Los empresarios y la nueva élite económica no se han levantado contra el Partido Comunista ni han exigido reformas democráticas. Muy al contrario, colaboran de manera eficiente con el partido-Estado, del mismo modo que tantos empresarios colaboraron con los regímenes fascistas en Europa durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Las economías políticas planificadas y controladas, por repugnantes que puedan parecer a algunos, suelen ser motores eficaces del desarrollo económico. Las democracias, como demuestran los recientes problemas habidos en India a propósito de la reforma de los comercios, pueden ser caóticas y problemáticas.

Además, gracias al aumento de su poder económico, China puede permitirse no tener en cuenta las normas del internacionalismo liberal. El Gobierno sigue dedicando todos sus esfuerzos a perseguir unos objetivos económicos neomercantilistas, llevando a cabo una manipulación sistemática de su divisa -que contribuye al desarrollo de inmensos superávits comerciales-, dificultando las inversiones extranjeras y el acceso al mercado interior de otros países y comprando activos estratégicos que van desde recursos naturales hasta deuda pública de los países industrializados.

Hoy, la capacidad del mundo industrializado de asegurar su futuro económico está en tela de juicio. Los progresistas, tanto en Estados Unidos como en Europa, llevan mucho tiempo afirmando que la inversión en ciencia, tecnología y conocimiento nos permitirá desarrollar los productos y servicios del futuro y, por consiguiente, ayudará a garantizar la prosperidad económica. Ahora bien, si se chantajea a nuestras grandes empresas y se les obliga a ceder capital intelectual a cambio del acceso al floreciente mercado chino, o si el Gobierno chino sigue negándose a hacer respetar las leyes de propiedad intelectual sobre los sistemas y programas que utilizan en China, ¿qué eficacia puede tener esta estrategia de renovación económica a medio plazo?

Los ciudadanos de las dos orillas del Atlántico se dan cuenta de todo esto, y cada vez son más numerosos los que están dejando de creer en un futuro mejor para sí mismos y para sus hijos. Lo irónico es que tener una relación más estrecha con los socios internacionales se ha vuelto más necesario precisamente en el momento en que la gente está dando la espalda a la globalización. El presidente Obama dijo hace poco que Estados Unidos es hoy una potencia pacífica, una afirmación que no gustó nada a los líderes europeos. Pero lo que de verdad se necesita es una estrategia transatlántica de crecimiento económico, que incluya un plan de acción constructivo y común con respecto a China, concebido para garantizar la igualdad de oportunidades en las relaciones comerciales, el acceso al mercado y las inversiones.

Este es un proyecto que debe reunir a su alrededor una alianza transatlántica progresista: una sucesora de la tercera vía más globalizada, más intervencionista y menos ingenua. Si somos capaces de hacerlo, reanimaremos nuestro movimiento, reforzaremos nuestra posición en las negociaciones comerciales internacionales y, sobre todo, ofreceremos una base sólida y sostenible sobre la que reconstruir nuestras respectivas economías.

El tiempo lo dirá, pero, para los progresistas, quizá sí vote China.

Hu Jintao se juega en las elecciones taiwanesas de mañana (presidenciales y legislativas) buena parte del crédito de su política hacia la isla. Es verdad que al poco de iniciar su mandato al frente del Partido Comunista de China (PCCh) en el 2002, confirmó la aprobación de la ley antisecesión (2005), que viene a proclamar la disposición de China a recurrir a la fuerza para impedir la independencia de Taiwán. Pero justamente a partir de ese año y con la puesta en marcha del diálogo directo entre el PCCh y el Kuomintang (KMT) sobre la base de la aceptación del principio de «una sola China», la política continental hacia Taiwán dio un giro de 180 grados, reduciendo paulatinamente el lenguaje belicoso de su antecesor, Jiang Zemin, quien lidió a la brava con la compleja presidencia taiwanesa de Chen Shui-bian, líder del soberanista PDP (Partido Democrático Progresista), hoy en la cárcel condenado por corrupción.

Tras la victoria de Ma Ying-jeou (KMT) en las elecciones del 2008, respaldado por una abrumadora mayoría, se concretaron importantes acuerdos, poniendo fin a décadas de tensión. Las comunicaciones directas (antes eran vía Hong Kong) fueron restablecidas a una velocidad de vértigo; la promoción del turismo acercó a ambas sociedades; el intercambio comercial se afianzó… El Acuerdo Marco de Cooperación Económica, firmado en junio del 2010, culminó esa primera etapa de acercamiento, aun pendiente de desarrollo en los aspectos más controvertidos.

El mayor handicap de este nuevo tiempo en las relaciones bilaterales es la falta de consenso en Taiwán a propósito del tipo de relaciones a mantener con China continental. La oposición, liderada por el PDP de Tsai Ing-wen, acusa al KMT de sentar las bases de la destrucción política de la existencia de Taiwán como sujeto soberano de facto. La sociedad taiwanesa está dividida en dos bloques (azules y verdes, unos a favor y otros en contra de la unificación); norte y sur (unionista y secesionista, respectivamente); poder económico y sociedad civil (el primero, cegado ante los beneficios derivados del entendimiento, y la segunda, temerosa de verse sacrificada en el altar de los intereses de los poderosos).

El KMT tiene posibilidades de ganar las legislativas, pero de poco le serviría si pierde la elección presidencial. En los comicios celebrados desde el 2008, el PDP ha dado muestras de una vitalidad sorprendente. Tsai Ing-wen atrae por su carisma, pero también por su cercanía a la sociedad o la claridad de su mensaje no solo en materia de política continental, sino en otros ámbitos como en su apoyo al parón nuclear. El voto femenino, antes proclive a Ma, está más dividido en esta ocasión. Y para muchos, una mujer presidenta sería un símbolo de la definitiva irrupción de la modernidad. A mayores, la división unionista en dos candidaturas puede restarle a Ma unos miles de sufragios decisivos.

Un fracaso de Ma y el KMT en estas elecciones supondría el parón y revisión de todo este proceso. El PDP rechaza el principio de «una sola China», básico para Pekín. De ganar Tsai, las relaciones empeorarían, a pesar de que esta ha manifestado cierto pragmatismo para atraerse al electorado centrista.

En China, el recurso al poder duro podría sumar apoyos. No olvidemos que, en paralelo al acercamiento, China no ha cejado en su preparación ante posibles contingencias. En el plano político, está en condiciones de aislar más a Taiwán. En el ámbito de la defensa, la mejora de capacidades tanto de la Armada como en guerra electrónica tienen a Taiwán en el punto de mira.

La apuesta de Hu Jintao en relación a Taiwán ha marcado un punto de inflexión. El fomento de los contactos a todos los niveles tiene el propósito final de configurar una masa crítica en la isla que apoye la unificación. Pero hoy ni siquiera buena parte del KMT se inclina a favor de esta posibilidad. La defensa del statu quo es mayoritaria, optando por arbitrar fórmulas de convivencia amistosas en un proceso de aprendizaje y tolerancia mutua que puede durar bastantes años. La firma del acuerdo de paz, ya propuesto por Hu Jintao en el 2008 y retomado por Ma en el 2011, se enmarca en esa línea. Un armisticio no es equivalente a la unificación, pero podría incluir previsiones decisivas para avanzar por dicho camino.

Para culminarlo, Hu Jintao, quien vive sus últimos meses al frente del PCCh y probablemente no verá satisfecho su deseo de encontrarse con Ma Ying-jeou, debe confirmar su política con los resultados de estas elecciones, acallando a aquellos sectores internos, especialmente en medios castrenses, que abogan por prepararse para una guerra que consideran inevitable ante la ambigüedad calculada del KMT, la oposición abierta del PDP y la hipocresía de Washington, que dice aplaudir el acercamiento mientras vende armas a Taiwán. La opción de una guerra, no obstante, tanto si es breve y limitada como si no, pulverizaría cualquier mínima fe en el «desarrollo pacífico» de China, que perdería toda credibilidad ante el mundo.

In 1978, the Chinese government made a decision to change direction. Rather than continue the stagnating communist policies that mired the country in Third World poverty, it started to liberalize its economy. The gamble paid off, and today, China has the world’s second-largest economy, with a large trade surplus and near-double-digit annual growth rates.

The Chinese government just made another move that also should improve the nation’s economy – this time to streamline its higher-education system. China’s state-run universities have been churning out graduates so quickly that many can’t find good jobs, even in a booming economy.

In response, China will “soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting degree programs in which the employment rate for graduates falls below 60 percent for two consecutive years,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Perhaps America’s public universitiesshould follow China’s lead and focus on such net results as employment rates. After all, the United States also has too many college graduates who are having difficulty finding college-level jobs.

Roughly one-third of all U.S. college graduates work in fields for which no degree is required. As of May 2011, just 55.6 percent of graduates of the college class of 2009 held positions requiring college degrees, while the rest were almost equally divided between the unemployed and those working in jobs that don’t require degrees, according to a Northeastern University study.

There are two main reasons for this. One is that many students graduate without measurably improving their academic or vocational skills. The second is because there is a significant mismatch between students’ choices of majors – or even their decisions to pursue four-year academic degrees in the first place – and the needs of the U.S. workplace.

Of course, it’s a much simpler matter for China to take action because the Chinese government still pretty much calls all of the shots, without having to deal with any of the messy political and moral concerns of free nations.

Yet, while China remains a totalitarian state with little concern for individual rights – certainly not a system the United States should emulate – it frequently makes wise decisions on a purely utilitarian level. As a result, the standard of living has risen dramatically in just a few years: In 1991, its per capita annual income was $356, 6 percent of the average U.S. income. Today, per capita income in China is more than 10 times higher than it was – rising to 27 percent of average U.S. income.

The United States, on the other hand, is in the fourth year of a severe downturn, and our academic decision-making does not bode well for the future economy.

Large reductions in state appropriations have forced America’s public universities to make significant program cuts, but administrators generally make those cuts based on inputs, such as how many students are enrolled in a course – a measure of a course’s popularity with students – rather than utility.

Basing cuts on popularity rather than on how well a program prepares students for life after college hardly improves America’s economic competitiveness. The United States does not need more baristas with sociology or psychology degrees (two popular majors with comparatively little professional employment potential).

Of course, the value of the Chinese policy hinges on what Chinese officials mean by “evaluating college majors by their employment rates.” Job prospects should be only one of many factors administrators consider when they decide what goes, what stays, what gets cut, what gets expanded. A proper education encourages creativity, cultural knowledge and intellectual rigor. In fact, the Chinese have been trying to introduce American-style elements of creativity and innovation into their schools. So program cutting requires a scalpel rather than a chain saw.

But using data on the employment of graduates is still a valuable evaluation tool, and it serves as a useful guide for reforming higher education.

The Chinese exhibit hard-nosed common sense by looking at the actual results of their higher-education system; forward-looking U.S. public universities should do the same.If they won’t end their excesses voluntarily, perhaps it’s time for state legislatures to consider Chinese-style standards.

Results matter; it’s time to judge universities on how well graduates perform once they’ve left the security of the ivory tower.

From the outside, China often appears to be a highly centralized monolith. Unlike Europe’s cities, which have been able to preserve a certain identity and cultural distinctiveness despite the homogenizing forces of globalization, most Chinese cities suffer from a drab uniformity.

But China is more like Europe than it seems. Indeed, when it comes to economics, China is more a thin political union composed of semiautonomous cities — some with as many inhabitants as a European country — than an all-powerful centralized government that uniformly imposes its will on the whole country.

And competition among these huge cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism. The similar look of China’s megacities masks a rivalry as fierce as that among European countries.

China’s urban economic boom began in the late 1970s as an experiment with market reforms in China’s coastal cities. Shenzhen, the first “special economic zone,” has grown from a small fishing village in 1979 into a booming metropolis of 10 million today. Many other cities, from Guangzhou to Tianjin, soon followed the path of market reforms.

Today, cities vie ruthlessly for competitive advantage using tax breaks and other incentives that draw foreign and domestic investors. Smaller cities specialize in particular products, while larger ones flaunt their educational capacity and cultural appeal. It has led to the most rapid urban “economic miracle” in history.

But the “miracle” has had an undesirable side effect: It led to a huge gap between rich and poor, primarily between urban and rural areas. The vast rural population — 54 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people — is equivalent to the whole population of Europe. And most are stuck in destitute conditions. The main reason is the hukou (household registration) system that limits migration into cities, as well as other policies that have long favored urban over rural development.

More competition among cities is essential to eliminate the income gap. Over the past decade the central government has given leeway to different cities to experiment with alternative methods of addressing the urban-rural wealth gap.

The most widely discussed experiment is the “Chongqing model,” headed by Bo Xilai, a party secretary and rising political star. Chongqing, an enormous municipality with a population of 33 million and a land area the size of Austria, is often called China’s biggest city. But in fact 23 million of its inhabitants are registered as farmers. More than 8 million farmers have already migrated to the municipality’s more urban areas to work, with a million per year expected to migrate there over the next decade. Chongqing has responded by embarking on a huge subsidized housing project, designed to eventually house 30 to 40 percent of the city’s population.

Chongqing has also improved the lot of farmers by loosening the hukou system. Today, farmers can choose to register as “urban” and receive equal rights to education, health care and pensions after three years, on the condition that they give up the rural registration and the right to use a small plot of land.

While Chongqing’s model is the most influential, there is an alternative. Chengdu, Sichuan’s largest municipality, with a population of 14 million — half of them rural residents — is less heavy-handed. It is the only city in China to enjoy high economic growth while also reducing the income gap between urban and rural residents over the past decade.

Chengdu has focused on improving the surrounding countryside, rather than encouraging large-scale migration to the city. The government has shifted 30 percent of its resources to its rural areas and encouraged development zones that allow rural residents to earn higher salaries and to reap the educational, cultural and medical benefits of urban life.

I recently visited a development zone composed of small firms that export fiery Sichuan chili sauces. Most farmers rented their land and worked in the development zone, but those who wanted to stay on their plots were allowed to. So far, one-third of the area’s farmland has been converted into larger-scale agricultural operations that have increased efficiency.

More than 90 percent of the municipality’s rural residents are now covered by a medical plan, and the government has introduced a more comprehensive pension scheme. Rural schools have been upgraded to the point that their facilities now surpass those in some of Chengdu’s urban schools, and teachers from rural areas are sent to the city for training.

Empowering rural residents by providing more job opportunities and better welfare raises their purchasing power, helping China boost domestic consumption. And in 2012, Chengdu is likely to become the first big Chinese municipality to wipe out the legal distinction between its urban and rural residents, allowing rural people to move to the city if they choose.

Chengdu’s success has been driven by a comprehensive, long-term effort involving consultation and participation from the bottom up, as well as a clear property rights scheme. By contrast, Chongqing has relied on state power and the dislocation of millions to achieve similar results. If Chengdu’s “gentle” model proves to be more effective at reducing the income gap, it can set a model for the rest of the country, just as Shenzhen set a model for market reforms.

There are fundamental differences, of course: Chengdu’s land is more fertile and its weather more temperate, compared to Chongqing’s harsh terrain and sweltering summers. Life is slower in Chengdu; even the chili is milder. What succeeds in one place may fail elsewhere.

Ultimately, the central government will decide what works and what doesn’t. And that’s not a bad thing; it encourages local variation and internal competition.

European leaders ought to take note. Central authorities should have the power not just to punish “losers” as Europe has done in the case of Greece, but to reward “winners” that set a good example for the rest of the union.

China está más cerca de Francia que de Chile. Después de largos años, recuerdo diferentes experiencias francesas relacionadas con China. Me tocó presenciar, en décadas pasadas, un periodo de descubrimientos, de búsqueda, de contrastes. Hace poco, en el Museo del Louvre, visité una extraordinaria exposición de la Ciudad Prohibida de Pekín. Es una muestra de encuentros entre Occidente y el misterioso y remoto Imperio del Centro. El centro del mundo conocido del siglo XVI, del siglo XVIII: China. Desde el punto de vista de los chinos, se entiende. Hasta allí llegaban los viajeros europeos: religiosos, exploradores, diplomáticos. Jesuitas franceses y alemanes dibujaban caballos en paisajes de bambúes, de canales y fuentes, de cielos desleídos. En la sala del trono vemos un sistema de campanas, de instrumentos musicales desconocidos: hay materiales pulidos, diferentes especies de piedras, que producen sonidos rituales, ceremoniales, al ser rozados por mallas metálicas. Las bases del trono, de los campanarios, son animales mitológicos. Y la mitología se reproduce en los impresionantes trajes imperiales, en los cascos negros y dorados, fabricados con cueros finos recubiertos de pintura lacada.

Recuerdo ahora el primer viaje, exploratorio, cultural, diplomático, de André Malraux a China. La llegada de los primeros embajadores chinos a Francia. Las relaciones entre China y Chile, por ejemplo, se conversaron y convinieron en París, en la Embajada chilena, durante la presidencia de Eduardo Frei Montalva. China se encontraba entonces en periodos de terror revolucionario: la política de las Cien Flores, el Gran Salto Adelante, la Revolución Cultural. Nombres que más bien servían para esconder que para definir. Pero manejaban la diplomacia como una política de Estado, como reflejo de los intereses permanentes de la nación, no como la acción de Gobiernos pasajeros o de ideologías no menos pasajeras. De ahí que las relaciones, una vez establecidas, no fueron rotas, ni siquiera suspendidas, a través de las crisis del Chile moderno.

Me tocó asistir a un almuerzo copioso, exótico, sorprendente, en el que un viejo embajador chino, compañero del presidente Mao, del Gran Timonel, invitaba a un grupo chileno a celebrar el gran evento: el intercambio de misiones diplomáticas entre Pekín y Santiago. La cortesía de nuestros anfitriones era tan extraordinaria como su gastronomía. Comenté después el asunto en una reunión privada, en mi casa de esos años, y una mujer joven, de cultura, que formaba parte del universo editorial de la época, perteneciente a una familia de antigua aristocracia germánica, me dijo la siguiente frase literal: “Soy una mao” (Je suis une mao). “¿Y sabes lo que te pasaría si estuvieras ahora en Pekín?”. Ella contestó que sabía perfectamente, e hizo un gesto de cortarse el pescuezo. Pero lo aceptaba con gusto, como expiación de sus pecados de mujer privilegiada.

Eran las manifestaciones de la Revolución Cultural en Francia. Me acuerdo de jóvenes maoístas que mostraban el Libro Rojo de Mao en los pasillos del aeropuerto de Orly. Lo hacían con movimientos sincopados, de gimnastas o acróbatas, y el movimiento conjunto adquiría un viso de irrealidad, algo cercano a un delirio. Desde luego, las políticas delirantes son altamente peligrosas. Algunos ya lo sospechábamos, pero más tarde se supo de forma irrefutable.

Me atrevo a pensar que China tocó fondo en materia de ensayos sociales revolucionarios. El gran cambio moderno, producto de la dura experiencia anterior, comenzó hacia 1978 con el Gobierno de Deng Xiaoping. Me acordé en estos días del almuerzo de hace 34 años; ocurrió en una cena frente a una mesa giratoria llena de fuentes de todos los colores y las formas imaginables. Era una alta autoridad china que quería escuchar opiniones de un grupo de embajadores acerca de la crisis europea. Al final me dijo en inglés, en voz baja: no me extraña que exista crisis cuando se trabajan siete horas diarias durante cinco días a la semana.

Era como decir: se acabaron las teorías, entramos en el terreno de las duras realidades. La crisis del euro y del dólar inquieta, sin la menor duda, a los dirigentes de la China moderna. Es una crisis de sus principales clientes, de los compradores de sus productos. Y podría ocurrir que China, con sus enormes reservas, que corresponden a gran parte de la liquidez monetaria occidental, ayude a Europa y a Estados Unidos a salir de la coyuntura actual. Sería algo nunca visto en la historia moderna, quizá comparable a un Plan Marshall chino.

Por mi parte, pienso que habría que analizar con cuidado el comentario de mi anfitrión, pronunciado mientras se levantaba de la mesa bien servida para tomar un avión a Pekín. Europa trata de mantener en forma simultánea su desarrollo económico y su sistema avanzado de protección social. Nosotros admiramos este modelo de sociedad y nos gustaría mucho poder imitarlo. Pero el modelo entró en su etapa más peligrosa y nadie sabe si podrá sobrevivir. Nosotros esperamos que sobreviva y que podamos aplicarlo en la América hispana. Al fin y al cabo, allá somos expertos en crisis: hemos pasado por todas y estamos, quizá, mejor que nunca en nuestra historia, pero no sabemos por cuánto tiempo. Si nos salvamos contra toda teoría, con la ayuda de grandes potencias emergentes, tampoco nos opondremos en nombre de especulaciones ideológicas. Podríamos recordar, a este respecto, a uno de los grandes maestros del corazón central de Europa: gris es la teoría, pero verde es la rama del árbol eterno de la vida.

A peculiar feature of Chinese society is that a complaint process runs parallel to, but outside, the legal system.

Victims of corruption and injustice have no faith in the law, and yet they dream that an upright official will emerge to right their wrongs. Although a complaint mechanism is in place at all levels of Chinese government, petitioners seem to believe that the central authorities are less susceptible to corruption, and so make Beijing their destination. By some estimates, more than 10 million complaints are filed around the country each year, far more than are heard by the regular courts.

Law in China, at least on paper, is more firmly established than it once was, and some legal experts propose doing away with the grievance system. But the government has retained it — perhaps it, too, lacks confidence in China’s laws. Also — and crucially — it wants to leave the petitioners some slender hope, a fantasy that one day injustice will find redress. If all hope is lost, petitioners may take more extreme action.

Often, the State Bureau for Letters and Visits simply goes through the motions of registering the complaints, then asks the petitioners’ local governments to look into them. But years of failure have sharpened the petitioners’ wits. They know that the only way they can put pressure on their local governments is by persistent, repeated visits to Beijing, and they realize that collective visits are even more effective. The government rigidly controls demonstrations, but the collective submission of a complaint remains a means for ordinary people to exert pressure.

At the same time, some petitioners have come to focus more on the process of lodging a complaint than on the outcome. Seeing the judiciary as biased and the grievance process as a sham, they treat petitioning as a means of extortion.

Here’s an example. In the fall of 2007, during the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th Congress, a man from Shandong Province phoned his village chief and told him he was in Tianjin and about to board a train for Beijing to appeal a miscarriage of justice. The village chief was shocked: if the petitioner were to appear in Tiananmen Square at such a prominent moment, not only would the chief lose his job, but his immediate superiors — the township and county chiefs — would be disgraced as well. He begged the villager not to go to Beijing. All right, the man said, but there was a price for his acquiescence: 20,000 yuan, about $2,600 at the time. The village chief put down the phone, withdrew this sum from public funds, and personally delivered it that very day, to the man’s wife.

The pay-off should not surprise us. Alarmed by worsening social unrest, government officials have adopted “stability maintenance” as a mantra — and a pretext to stifle protest. While the grievance process coexists politely with the regular legal system, the insistence on maintaining stability is, all too often, utterly at odds with it.

The priority now given to keeping order has enabled local officials to regain the initiative when there are complaints or protests. In the name of maintaining stability, the interception and detention of petitioners seems perfectly reasonable, and higher-ups look the other way.

After the collision of two high-speed trains near the southeastern city of Wenzhou last July, relatives of those killed and injured rushed to the scene. Three days later, law offices in Wenzhou received an urgent notice from the local judicial bureau and lawyers’ association: “The train collision is a major, sensitive incident that bears on social stability.” The notice directed lawyers to “immediately report” all requests for legal assistance to the judicial bureau and the lawyers’ association and not to “respond to such requests without authorization.”

When the contents of this circular were revealed by the news media, an uproar ensued. The lawyers’ association took responsibility and issued an apology, saying it had issued the notice without judicial permission.

But the lawyers’ association takes orders from the judiciary, so this apology was greeted on the Internet with derision. It reminded me of the old adage, “A soldier fears his superior more than he fears the foe.”

The recent episode in Wukan, a village in southern China where residents staged an uprising that received international attention, reflected the uneven balance among the grievance process, the legal system and the insistence on stability. Local officials ignored complaints about corruption involving the sale of farmland and then cracked down on the subsequent protests. The uproar was eventually resolved through political arrangements, not judicial action.

In China, an extramarital love interest who comes between a happy couple is known pejoratively as “Little Three.” The expression appears in a joke about three kindergartners who want to play house.

“I’ll be the daddy,” the boy says.

“I’ll be the mommy,” one girl says.

Another girl frowns: “I guess I’ll have to be Little Three.”

If the law, the grievance process and stability maintenance were ever to play house, I think we’d see the following exchange:

“I’m the daddy,” Stability Maintenance says.

“I’m the mommy,” Grievance Process says.

The Law pouts. “Well, I’m Little Three.”

With China stumping assertively on the world stage, one might think Beijing would be open, even gracious, about the country’s past. To the contrary, history remains an exceedingly sensitive subject here, drawing relentless attention from authorities anxious to keep all skeletons safely in closets.

As a university professor in China, I face the consequences of this official apprehension every day. My young, bright students know little about their country’s recent past. What they do know tends to agree with government-sponsored discourse on the pride and glory of China’s rise after a century of humiliation by Western powers. Library and bookstore shelves tell, with enviable conviction, this same story of national grandeur. And it is hard to get around that government-approved tale. Some of us at the University of Nottingham at Ningbo recently attempted to order a standard Western work on China’s history, Jonathan Spence’s “The Search for Modern China.” Our efforts ran aground when customs officials refused to allow the book shipment into the country. The agent courteously proposed to manually cut out the censored sections — including photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre and Spence’s account of the Cultural Revolution — to get the customs clearance. These are things the Chinese people are not supposed to know.

Historians of China face secrecy and restrictions everywhere as the key archives remain largely inaccessible, even though the Chinese archives law provides for the opening of official documents to the public after 30 years. Some progress has been made with declassification, notably at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to appease international scholars. Academics can now read, though not print, digitized memos and telegrams from 1949 through 1965. Still, even these documents have been pre-selected to avoid potential embarrassment for the government. The party archives, which host the records of the Communist Party’s holy of holies — the Politburo — are closed. Anyone in China interested in studying the origins of the Korean War, which took place more than 60 years ago, will not get very far. The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? Same story. Uncomfortable episodes of China’s recent history have become a subject of official amnesia and a victim of the government’s monopoly on truth.

Consider the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Chinese Civil War, and later Mao Zedong’s comrade in arms during the Cultural Revolution, who died in 1971. Lin, who is well remembered for his appearances atop Tiananmen Square, the Little Red Book in his hand, supposedly conspired to kill the Chinese leader, even though he was Mao’s anointed successor. When the plot was discovered, he fled to the Soviet Union, then China’s archenemy, but he never made it: His plane crashed in Mongolia after allegedly running out of fuel.

This is the official story; this is as much as the Chinese government is willing to say 40 years on. We do not know whether Lin Biao really planned to kill Mao. Their fallout could have been a personal feud or, as the chairman later claimed, a policy disagreement (Lin Biao is said to have opposed the Sino-American opening).

In 2003, the crash report, including grisly photos of burned victims, was leaked from Mongolian intelligence archives. Contrary to the official Chinese explanation, the report (which was made available to me) showed that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed. No attempt had been made to land the plane, and weather conditions were fine. Mongolian investigators concluded that the pilot made an error. But they had no access to the plane’s black box; the Soviet military took it, along with one of the plane engines. The Soviets later came back and took the heads of the two victims with golden teeth, which, it turned out, belonged to Lin Biao and his wife.

These heads are said to remain at the archives of Russia’s Federal Security Service. Moscow has not released its findings about the crash, and China has remained silent. Although we know precious little about Lin Biao’s death, we know enough to conclude that at least part of Beijing’s explanation is a fabrication. In the absence of archival openness and amid repression of free historical inquiry, these kinds of myths and fabrications underpin the official discourse on history in China — hence, the need to repulse the infiltration of foreign books. Despite the best efforts of committed Chinese historians who defy government restrictions (and risk jail terms) to learn more, the government still has an iron grip on the past.

The time has come for strong and proud China to cast aside this fear of the past, which is utterly incompatible with Beijing’s search for international prestige and acclaim. True, China’s history is full of blood and tragedy, often directly caused by leaders’ misrule. It is also full of remarkable feats and formidable breakthroughs on the path toward modernity. Both facets of its history, like the proverbial halves of yin and yang, make China what it is today. World events suggest that government efforts to control how history is read and taught are doomed to failure. The question is when today’s China will realize it should not resort to methods of information control handed down from a tyranny.

Two weeks ago peasants in Wukan, a fishing village in the prosperous southern Chinese province of Guangdong, took over their village, throwing out local leaders. Because of long unanswered grievances, they risked their lives, barricading roads into the village and facing down the police. Their central concern was the sale of collectively owned village land to property developers, which has impoverished most residents while enriching their leaders.

As the Wukan protests evolved into an international media event, a provincial party official, under pressure from Beijing, stepped in and swiftly negotiated a truce acceptable to the villagers. This week Prime Minister Wen Jiabao asserted that “China can no longer sacrifice farmers’ land rights for the sake of reducing the cost of urbanization and industrialization.”

Once again China’s leadership has succeeded in the complex task of managing social unrest. The eye of the world is now shifting away.

This is a serious mistake. Like China’s leadership, the world should continue to play close attention to Wukan and to the tens of thousands of incidents of rural unrest that occur each year in China, the vast majority resulting from land grabs. Why? Because what happens to China’s peasants is crucial to our collective future.

China’s rural population is at the bottom of the global commodity chains of both Chinese and transnational corporations. Unhindered by regulations, these companies utilize China’s land and rural labor for the environmentally and socially unsustainable production of goods consumed the world over. While consumers everywhere benefit from inexpensive products and corporate profits, the real costs are borne by China’s most vulnerable.

The Wukan incident reveals the shaky foundation of China’s rise to economic super power: it is built upon an unresolved land struggle with hundreds of millions of lives in the balance. Anything that negatively alters the quality of life of China’s rural majority has the potential to impact the already fragile global economy, sending ripples across the world.

As I have seen first-hand during nearly 30 years of research in rural China, land grabs have been central to China’s economic “miracle.” Local governments take over land for real estate development, industrial expansion, roads, dams and power plants.

Having government and party connections to get a hold of prime real estate in urban cores and suburban fringes has enabled massive fortunes in property development. Eight out of China’s top 10 billionaires made their fortunes through land grabs.

Similar land grabs have occurred in China’s rural hinterlands where there is little oversight by the central government. Of the 1.1 million hectares taken away in 2011, according to China’s State Council, 700,000 were transferred illegally. The result is the complete loss of land for approximately 75 million peasants, who join the over 200 million rural residents migrating around China daily in search of work.

Land loss leaves many rural families — still the majority of China’s population — without access to enough land to produce their food. Wukan’s villagers not only saw 400 hectares of shared land sold to a property developer, but their common fishing grounds were sold off as well to a large seafood company. This severely reduced many villagers’ basic subsistence. Their rising anger and desperation is seen in other rural areas nationwide.

Land grabs are part and parcel of growing social inequality in China. Despite increasingly strong populist rhetoric from the government, along with significant rural investment to counter rising discontent, China today rivals the most unequal countries in the world. The 400 million Chinese at the bottom face continual threats to their livelihoods through land loss.

Beijing’s success in quelling daily unrest around the country, mainly through the use of local officials as scapegoats, fails to address the fundamental problem: a development path built on an eroding foundation of unjust land grabs, environmental destruction, social polarization and the resulting vulnerability of the country’s poorest and most marginal people. Until these structural issues are addressed, the Wukan incident will only be a harbinger of things to come.

For a European these days, thinking about the future is disturbing. America is militarily overstretched, politically polarized, and financially indebted. The European Union seems on the brink of collapse, and many non-Europeans view the old continent as a retired power that can still impress the world with its good manners, but not with nerve or ambition.

Global opinion surveys over the last three years consistently indicate that many are turning their backs on the West and – with hope, fear, or both – see China as moving to center stage. As the old joke goes, optimists are learning to speak Chinese; pessimists are learning to use a Kalashnikov.

While a small army of experts argues that China’s rise to power should not be assumed, and that its economic, political, and demographic foundations are fragile, the conventional wisdom is that China’s power is growing. Many wonder what a global Pax Sinica might look like: How would China’s global influence manifest itself? How would Chinese hegemony differ from the American variety?

Generally, questions of ideology, economics, history, and military power dominate today’s China debate. But, when comparing today’s American world with a possible Chinese world of tomorrow, the most striking contrast consists in how Americans and Chinese experience the world beyond their borders.

America is a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of people who never emigrate.

Notably, Americans living outside the United States are not called emigrants, but “expats.” America gave the world the notion of the melting pot – an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America’s collective imagination.

Since the first Europeans settled there in the seventeenth century, people from around the world have been drawn to the American dream of a better future; America’s allure is partly its ability to transform others into Americans. As one Russian, now an Oxford University don, put it, “You can become an American, but you can never become an Englishman.” It is, therefore, not surprising that America’s global agenda is transformative; it is a rule-maker.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have not tried to change the world, but rather to adjust to it. China’s relationships with other countries are channeled through its diaspora, and the Chinese perceive the world via their experience as immigrants.

Today, more Chinese live outside China than French people live in France, and these overseas Chinese account for the largest number of investors in China. In fact, only 20 years ago, Chinese living abroad produced approximately as much wealth as China’s entire internal population. First the Chinese diaspora succeeded, then China itself.

Chinatowns – often insular communities located in large cities around the world – are the Chinese diaspora’s core. As the political scientist Lucien Pye once observed, “the Chinese see such an absolute difference between themselves and others that they unconsciously find it natural to refer to those in whose homeland they are living as “foreigners.”

While the American melting pot transforms others, Chinatowns teach their inhabitants to adjust – to profit from their hosts’ rules and business while remaining separate. While Americans carry their flag high, Chinese work hard to be invisible. Chinese communities worldwide have managed to become influential in their new homelands without being threatening; to be closed and non-transparent without provoking anger; to be a bridge to China without appearing to be a fifth column.

As China is about adaptation, not transformation, it is unlikely to change the world dramatically should it ever assume the global driver’s seat. But this does not mean that China won’t exploit that world for its own purposes.

America, at least in theory, prefers that other countries share its values and act like Americans. China can only fear a world where everybody acts like the Chinese. So, in a future dominated by China, the Chinese will not set the rules; rather, they will seek to extract the greatest possible benefit from the rules that already exist.

Today, fears are growing that China and India are about to be the next victims of the ongoing global economic carnage. This would have enormous consequences. Asia’s developing and newly industrialized economies grew at an 8.5% average annual rate over 2010-11 – nearly triple the 3% growth elsewhere in the world. If China and India are next to fall, Asia would be at risk, and it would be hard to avoid a global recession.

In one important sense, these concerns are understandable: both economies depend heavily on the broader global climate. China is sensitive to downside risks to external demand – more relevant than ever since crisis-torn Europe and the United States collectively accounted for 38% of total exports in 2010. But India, with its large current-account deficit and external funding needs, is more exposed to tough conditions in global financial markets.

Yet fears of hard landings for both economies are overblown, especially regarding China. Yes, China is paying a price for aggressive economic stimulus undertaken in the depths of the subprime crisis. The banking system funded the bulk of the additional spending, and thus is exposed to any deterioration in credit quality that may have arisen from such efforts. There are also concerns about frothy property markets and mounting inflation.

While none of these problems should be minimized, they are unlikely to trigger a hard landing. Long fixated on stability, Chinese policymakers have been quick to take preemptive action.

That is particularly evident in Chinese officials’ successful campaign against inflation. Administrative measures in the agricultural sector, aimed at alleviating supply bottlenecks for pork, cooking oil, fresh vegetables, and fertilizer, have pushed food-price inflation lower. This is the main reason why the headline consumer inflation rate receded from 6.5% in July 2011 to 4.2% in November.

Meanwhile, the People’s Bank of China, which hiked benchmark one-year lending rates five times in the 12 months ending this October, to 6.5%, now has plenty of scope for monetary easing should economic conditions deteriorate. The same is true with mandatory reserves in the banking sector, where the government has already pruned 50 basis points off the record 21.5% required-reserve ratio. Relatively small fiscal deficits – only around 2% of GDP in 2010 – leave China with an added dimension of policy flexibility should circumstances dictate.

Nor has China been passive with respect to mounting speculative excesses in residential property. In April 2010, it implemented tough new regulations, raising down-payments from 20% to 30% for a first home, to 50% for a second residence, and to 100% for purchases of three or more units. This strategy appears to be working. In November, house prices declined in 49 of the 70 cities that China monitors monthly.

Moreover, it is a serious exaggeration to claim, as many do today, that the Chinese economy is one massive real-estate bubble. Yes, total fixed investment is approaching an unprecedented 50% of GDP, but residential and nonresidential real estate, combined, accounts for only 15-20% of that – no more than 10% of the overall economy. In terms of floor space, residential construction accounts for half of China’s real-estate investment. Identifying the share of residential real estate that goes to private developers in the dozen or so first-tier cities (which account for most of the Chinese property market’s fizz) suggests that less than 1% of GDP would be at risk in the event of a housing-market collapse – not exactly a recipe for a hard landing.

As for Chinese banks, the main problem appears to be exposure to ballooning local-government debt, which, according to the government, totaled $1.7 trillion (roughly 30% of GDP) at the end of 2010. Approximately half of this debt was on their books prior to the crisis.

Some of the new debt that resulted from the stimulus could well end up being impaired, but ongoing urbanization – around 15-20 million people per year move to cities – provides enormous support on the demand side for investment in infrastructure development and residential and commercial construction. That tempers the risks to credit quality and, along with relatively low loan-to-deposit ratios of around 65%, should cushion the Chinese banking system.

India is more problematic. As the only economy in Asia with a current-account deficit, its external funding problems can hardly be taken lightly. Like China, India’s economic-growth momentum is ebbing. But unlike China, the downshift is more pronounced – GDP growth fell through the 7% threshold in the third calendar-year quarter of 2011, and annual industrial output actually fell by 5.1% in October.

But the real problem is that, in contrast to China, Indian authorities have far less policy leeway. For starters, the rupee is in near free-fall. That means that the Reserve Bank of India – which has hiked its benchmark policy rate 13 times since the start of 2010 to deal with a still-serious inflation problem – can ill afford to ease monetary policy. Moreover, an outsize consolidated government budget deficit of around 9% of GDP limits India’s fiscal-policy discretion.

While China is in better shape than India, neither economy is likely to implode on its own. It would take another shock to trigger a hard landing in Asia.

One obvious possibility today would be a disruptive breakup of the European Monetary Union. In that case, both China and India, like most of the world’s economies, could find themselves in serious difficulty – with an outright contraction of Chinese exports, as in late 2008 and early 2009, and heightened external funding pressures for India.

While I remain a euro-skeptic, I believe that the political will to advance European integration will prevail. Consequently, I attach a low probability to the currency union’s disintegration. Barring such a worst-case outcome for Europe, the odds of a hard landing in either India or China should remain low.

Seduced by the political economy of false prosperity, the West has squandered its might. Driven by strategy and stability, Asia has built on its newfound strength. But now it must reinvent itself. Japanese-like stagnation in the developed world is challenging externally dependent Asia to shift its focus to internal demand. Downside pressures currently squeezing China and India underscore that challenge. Asia’s defining moment could be hand.

China tuvo una civilización avanzada y próspera durante milenios hasta el siglo XVIII, pero luego se degeneró y pasó a ser un país muy pobre durante 150 años. Ahora ha resurgido para convertirse en la economía más dinámica del mundo desde el lanzamiento de su transición a una economía de mercado en 1979. ¿Qué motivó estos cambios fatídicos?

En mi libro reciente Demystifying the Chinese Economy (Desmitificando la economía china), sostengo que, para cualquier país en cualquier momento, el cimiento para un crecimiento sostenido es la innovación tecnológica. Antes de la Revolución Industrial, los artesanos y agricultores eran la principal fuente de innovación. Al contar con la población más grande del mundo, China fue un líder en innovación tecnológica y desarrollo económico a lo largo de gran parte de su historia porque tenía una gran masa de artesanos y agricultores.

La Revolución Industrial aceleró el ritmo del progreso occidental al reemplazar la innovación tecnológica basada en la experiencia por experimentos controlados realizados por científicos e ingenieros en laboratorios. Este cambio de paradigma marcó el advenimiento del crecimiento económico moderno, y contribuyó a la “Gran Divergencia” de la economía global.

China no logró experimentar un cambio similar debido, principalmente, a su sistema de revisión de la administración pública, que enfatizó la memorización de clásicos de Confucio y ofreció poco incentivo para que las elites aprendieran matemáticas y ciencia.
La Gran Divergencia tenía un aspecto positivo: los países en desarrollo podían utilizar transferencias de tecnología de los países avanzados para lograr un ritmo más rápido de crecimiento económico que los países que estaban en la vanguardia industrial. Pero China no supo explotar ese beneficio del retraso hasta que la transición de una economía dirigida comenzó en serio.

Luego de la toma del poder por parte de los comunistas en 1949, Mao Zetung y otros líderes políticos anhelaban revertir rápidamente el retraso de China y adoptaron un gran impulso para construir industrias avanzadas que requerían grandes inversiones en bienes de capital. Esta estrategia le permitió a China hacer ensayos con bombas nucleares en los años 1960 y lanzar satélites en los años 1970.

Pero China seguía siendo una economía pobre y agraria; no tenía ninguna ventaja comparativa en las industrias que requerían grandes inversiones en bienes de capital. Las compañías en esas industrias no eran viables en un mercado abierto y competitivo. Su supervivencia requería protección gubernamental, subsidios y directrices administrativas. Estas medidas ayudaron a China a establecer industrias modernas y avanzadas, pero los recursos estaban mal asignados y los incentivos eran distorsionados. El desempeño económico era deficiente. La prisa fue enemiga de la perfección.

Cuando comenzó la transición de mercado de China en 1979, Deng Xiaoping adoptó una estrategia pragmática y de doble tracción, en lugar de la fórmula del “Consenso de Washington” de privatización rápida y liberalización comercial. Por un lado, el gobierno siguió ofreciendo protección transitoria a las empresas en los sectores prioritarios; por otro lado, liberalizó la entrada de empresas privadas e inversión extranjera directa en sectores que empleaban mucha mano de obra y que eran consistentes con la ventaja comparativa de China pero que habían estado reprimidos en el pasado.

Esta estrategia le permitió a China lograr simultáneamente estabilidad y crecimiento dinámico. De hecho, los beneficios del retraso han sido impresionantes: 9,9% de crecimiento anual promedio del PBI y 16,3% de crecimiento comercial anual en los últimos 32 años -un logro estelar que conlleva lecciones valiosas para otros países en desarrollo-. Ahora China es el mayor exportador del mundo y su segunda economía más importante, y más de 600 millones de personas salieron de la pobreza.

Sin embargo, el éxito de China tuvo sus costos. Las disparidades de ingresos aumentaron, en parte debido a que se perpetuaron las políticas distorsivas en varios sectores, entre ellas el predomino de los cuatro grandes bancos estatales de China, las regalías prácticamente inexistentes en el sector de la minería y los monopolios en las principales industrias, como las telecomunicaciones, la energía y los servicios financieros. Como estas distorsiones (un legado de la transición de doble tracción) resultan en disparidades de ingresos, terminan reprimiendo el consumo interno y contribuyen al desequilibrio comercial de China. Estos desequilibrios permanecerán hasta que China termine su transición de mercado.

Confío en que, a pesar de los vientos de frente que soplan desde la crisis de la eurozona y el derrumbe de la demanda a nivel mundial, China pueda continuar su crecimiento dinámico. En 2008, el ingreso per capita de China estaba en el 21% del nivel de Estados Unidos (medido en paridad de poder adquisitivo), y era similar al ingreso per capita de Japón en 1951, al de Corea del Sur en 1977 y al de Taiwán en 1975. El crecimiento anual del PBI promedió el 9,2% en Japón entre 1951 y 1971, el 7,6% en Corea del Sur entre 1977 y 1997, y el 8,3% en Taiwán entre 1975 y 1995. Dadas las similitudes entre la experiencia de estas economías y la estrategia de desarrollo china posterior a 1979, es probable que China pueda mantener un crecimiento del 8% en las próximas dos décadas.

Algunos piensan que el desempeño de un país tan único como China, con más de 1.300 millones de habitantes, no se puede replicar. Estoy en desacuerdo. Todos los países en desarrollo pueden tener oportunidades similares para sostener el crecimiento rápido durante varias décadas y reducir la pobreza drásticamente si saben explotar los beneficios del retraso, si importan tecnología de los países avanzados y si modernizan sus industrias. En una palabra, no hay nada que reemplace el hecho de entender la ventaja comparativa.

North Korea as we know it is over. Whether it comes apart in the next few weeks or over several months, the regime will not be able to hold together after the untimely death of its leader, Kim Jong-il. How America responds — and, perhaps even more important, how America responds to how China responds — will determine whether the region moves toward greater stability or falls into conflict.

Mr. Kim’s death could not have come at a worse time for North Korea. Economically broken, starving and politically isolated, this dark kingdom was in the midst of preparations to hand power over to his not-yet-30-year-old son, the untested Kim Jong-un. The “great successor,” as he has been dubbed by the state media, is surrounded by elders who are no less sick than his father and a military that chafed at his promotion to four-star general last year without having served a day in the army. Such a system simply cannot hold.

The transition comes at a time when the United States has been trying to get nuclear negotiations back on track. Those efforts have now been replaced by a scramble for plans to control loose nuclear weapons, should the regime collapse.

And yet Washington remains powerless. Any outreach to the young Mr. Kim or to other possible competitors could create more problems during the transition, and would certainly be viewed as threatening by China. Since Kim Jong-il’s stroke in 2008, the United States and South Korea have been working on contingency plans to deal with just such a situation, but they all thought they would have years, if not a decade.

The allies’ best move, then, is to wait and see what China does. Among China’s core foreign-policy principles is the maintenance of a divided Korean Peninsula, and so Beijing’s statements about preserving continuity of North Korea’s leadership should come as no surprise. Since 2008 it has drawn closer to the regime, publicly defending its leaders and investing heavily in the mineral mines on the Chinese-North Korean border.

But even as Beijing sticks close to its little Communist brother, there are intense debates within its leadership about whether the North is a strategic liability. It was one thing to back a hermetic but stable regime under Kim Jong-il; it will be harder to underwrite an untested leadership. For Xi Jinping, expected to become China’s president over the next year, the first major foreign policy decision will be whether to shed North Korea or effectively adopt it as a province.

All indications are that Beijing will pursue the latter course, in no small part because of a bias among its leadership to support the status quo, rather than to confront dramatic change. And yet “adopting” North Korea could be dramatic in itself. China may go all in, doling out early invitations and new assistance packages to the young Mr. Kim, conditioning them on promises of economic reform.

While some observers hope that Kim Jong-il’s death will unleash democratic regime change, China will work strongly against that possibility, especially if such efforts receive support from South Korea or the United States. Given that Beijing has the only eyes inside the North, Washington and Seoul could do little in response.

Yet even China’s best-laid plans may come apart. The assistance may be too little, too late, especially given the problems the new leadership will face. A clear channel of dialogue involving the United States, China and South Korea is needed now more than ever.

And yet such a dialogue is completely absent since Kim Jong-il’s stroke. Beijing has deflected every official and unofficial overture from Washington to have quiet discussions on potential North Korean instability. Before, China let its fears of Western interests get the better of it; wiser Chinese judgment should lead authorities to open such a channel now. The three sides should open with a conversation on all our fears about what could happen in a collapsing North — loose nukes, refugee flows, artillery attacks — and how each would respond.

With so little known about the inner workings of this dark kingdom, miscalculation by any side in response to developments inside the North is a very real possibility given the hair-trigger alerts of the militaries on the peninsula.

None of this will be easy. For China, the uncertainty surrounding North Korea comes against the backdrop of Mr. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia and assertion that the region is America’s new strategic priority. This has already created insecurities in Beijing that will make genuine dialogue with the United States even more challenging — and thus all the more necessary.

EL 23 de julio de 2011, el tren de alta velocidad de Pekín descarrilaba en la estación de Wenzhou, matando a cuarenta pasajeros. El Gobierno trató de ocultar los hechos. Censura inútil: al cabo de una hora, toda China sabía lo que había ocurrido gracias a Weibo. Los Weibo son microblogs en los teléfonos móviles, que comunican entre ellos a cerca de 300 millones de chinos. El Gobierno no dispone de ningún medio para controlar esta comunicación instantánea de textos y fotos.

El Partido, comenta Michael Anti, un famoso microbloguero, ha perdido el control de la información y de las mentes: para el 80 por ciento de los chinos de menos de 40 años, Weibo es su única fuente de información.

Michael Anti, cuyo microbloga trae cada día a millones de lectores, pertenece a la nueva generación con estudios que encarna la nueva China. Su formación y sus relaciones familiares le habrían permitido incorporarse a la clase dirigente para hacer carrera y fortuna en ella. Pero el Partido está perdiendo esa clase media, que era la base de su legitimidad. Pocos se incorporan ya a él porque sus mentiras son insoportables y su rigidez le impide gobernar de otra manera. La sociedad cambia, dice Anti, los chinos están informados y la economía se debilita, pero el Partido perdura con sus rituales, incapaz de respetar a las minorías y de adaptarse a un mundo económico cambiante. Esta esclerosis es parte de su naturaleza: qué la sustituirá, nadie lo sabe.

Nuestra «revolución de las peonías», señala el filósofo liberal Liu Junnin, se parece a las del mundo árabe: sabemos lo que ya no queremos, pero estamos mal preparados para tomar el relevo porque el Partido ha destruido los cuerpos intermedios y ha reducido al silencio a los líderes demócratas. Lo que también es característico de esta revolución Weibo es que no tiene ni jefe ni organización. Ha nacido una nueva generación, me dice Cui Weiping, un profesor de arte allegado del premio Nobel de la Paz, Liu Xiaobo: una generación que se ha educado a sí misma por internet y Weibo. Esta nueva generación evita el enfrentamiento que solo lleva al fracaso, porque el Partido y el Ejército chino disponen de fuerzas superiores. La generación Weibo inventa un mundo sin jerarquía y cuyas consignas varían en función de las circunstancias. Más allá de esta jerarquía deliberada, aparecen algunos principios comunes, subrayados por Liu Junnin o Michael Anti. En Weibo se desea una China descentralizada, con poderes locales elegidos, y se desea una China confederal en la que se respeten los derechos de las minorías. El Dalai Lama, un diablo para el Partido, es idolatrado en Weibo.

¿Bastará la no violencia para doblegar al Partido? Los aparatchiks chinos no tienen estados de ánimo, pero, señalan los disidentes, ¿por qué razón envían estos dirigentes a su familia a estudiar y a vivir en Estados Unidos? Los llaman, en Pekín, los just in case: los por si acaso. Por tanto, los dirigentes comunistas no tienen totalmente asegurado su futuro personal en China.

Pero la verdadera amenaza que pende sobre la dictadura es un desastre económico. Es posible, asegura Mao Yushi, un economista independiente unánimemente respetado. El crecimiento se ralentiza debido al estancamiento relativo de la demanda mundial: al bajar del 10% al 8%, la industria china ya no logra integrar el flujo de trabajadores rurales. Para mantener el crecimiento, el régimen comunista ha recurrido al repertorio keynesiano, a la bajada de los tipos de interés bancario y a una reactivación mediante las obras públicas. Como las leyes de la economía son válidas incluso en China, algunas autopistas y aeropuertos suplementarios no han dado lugar a empleos duraderos ni a inversiones productivas. La bajada de los tipos de interés ha agravado la especulación inmobiliaria, sembrando el territorio de edificios de viviendas y de oficinas vacíos. Los precios del sector inmobiliario bajan por tercer año consecutivo, lo que arruina a los ahorradores (el sector inmobiliario es la hucha de las clases medias, mientras que la inflación real es del 20%) y a las provincias, cuyo principal recurso es la venta de terrenos para construir. Los bancos locales que financiaron estas aventuras están prácticamente en quiebra. El Gobierno ha anunciado que el sistema bancario podría sobrevivir a una bajada del 40 por ciento del valor de los bienes inmobiliarios: según Mao Yushi, se están acercando.

Si el sector inmobiliario se hunde y el ahorro desaparece, la esperanza de que el mercado interior tome el relevo de una demanda exterior renqueante se desvanece. Ese mercado interior es un fantasma: los ingresos medios en China son de 4.000 dólares por habitante, el puesto 100 en el mundo. La última salida sería la innovación. ¿Se incorporará China al bando de los innovadores, como Japón y Corea del Sur? No vemos ningún signo precursor; en general, la piratería sustituye a la innovación y condena a las empresas chinas a ocupar eternamente el segundo lugar. Liu Junnin añade que, de momento, no se dan las condiciones intelectuales de la innovación: las ciencias sociales están deterioradas y el clima no es favorable para la comprensión del mundo y su mejora. En cuanto a las escuelas de ingenieros, su nivel, asegura Liu, apenas es suficiente para ser admitido para cursar estudios superiores en Norteamérica.

¿Debería China cambiar de modelo, hacerle hueco a la pequeña empresa innovadora como en Japón y deshacerse de los grandes conglomerados públicos que siguen siendo numerosos, contaminantes y costosos? ¿Deberían interesarse por fin por el desarrollo de la agricultura y la economía de la sanidad? En respuesta a unos estudiantes de administración pública en la Universidad del Pueblo, propuse que jubilaran al famoso gato de Deng Xiaoping. En 1979, Deng inauguraba una nueva era, señalando que poco importaba el color del gato, siempre que atrape a los ratones. Ese gato ha realizado su cometido: ha sacado de la pobreza a varios centenares de millones de chinos. Asimismo, ha permitido a los occidentales disminuir los precios al consumo… sacrificando a la vez algunos de nuestros empleos. Pero el gato de Deng está cansado: cada vez coge menos ratones, no tiene espíritu creativo y abandona en la miseria a la mitad de la población china. Los alumnos me preguntaron con qué se podía sustituir. Con una economía libre, sin duda alguna, donde la moneda fuera convertible, donde se respetara la propiedad intelectual y donde los créditos se concedieran según unos criterios de eficiencia económica y no de clientelismo político.

¿Se salvará la nomenklatura roja salvando a China? Lo dudo, pero China sorprende más de lo que inquieta. A un periodista de China Weekly, que me preguntaba acerca de los cambios en su país, le contesté: ¿qué China? En cada visita, desde 1967, descubro una nueva.

Saturday marked both International Human Rights Day and one year since Chinese intellectual Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work promoting human rights and democracy in China. Human Rights Day, which commemorates the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is an occasion to affirm our commitment to advancing the values of human rights common to us all. Nobel Laureate Liu’s continued imprisonment in a Chinese jail is a stark reminder of the urgency of this task.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines fundamental human rights standards, such as the freedoms of expression, association and religion and freedom from arbitrary detention. The Chinese government – a signatory to the declaration – disregards its obligations to uphold those rights and continues to punish citizens who defend them. Mr. Liu is a case in point.

Chinese authorities took Mr. Liu into custody in December 2008, one day before Chinese citizens released Charter 08, a treatise calling for political reform and human rights protections in China. Authorities cited Mr. Liu’s involvement in the charter and six essays he had written as the basis for sentencing him in 2009 to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power,” the longest known sentence for that “crime.” The case was marred by severe violations of due process under both Chinese and international law.

Mr. Liu’s “crime” was speaking out against Chinese government repression and promoting peaceful reform. Other Chinese citizens are held in prison or under house arrest for acts such as worshipping in house churches, organizing labor protests, petitioning against official abuses or challenging China’s barbaric one-child-per-couple policy.

Chinese citizens who aim to defend their rights, promote reform or advocate on behalf of others – actions that embody the very spirit of the UDHR and Human Rights Day – have been particularly vulnerable in the past year. As democracy movements brought new freedoms in other parts of the world, Chinese authorities launched one of the harshest crackdowns in recent memory against lawyers and activists.

Other rights advocates, like Mr. Liu, were the victims of earlier repression and continue to suffer in detention, their whereabouts unknown, or under illegal house arrest. Authorities “disappeared” lawyer Gao Zhisheng in 2009 for his efforts defending workers and religious believers. Local authorities currently hold blind, self-trained legal advocate Chen Guangcheng under extralegal house arrest following more than four years in prison for his work to expose abuses and the coercion inherent in the one-child-per-couple policy. Mongolian activist Hada, who had organized peaceful protests for minority rights, suffers in a similar legal limbo as he remains in custody a year since his 15-year prison sentence expired.

Other Chinese citizens escape direct harassment or detention, but no one is free from the state’s far-reaching policies of control. No Chinese citizen enjoys the right to worship freely in accordance with international human rights protections for religion. No woman in China may make decisions about her family size, free from the restrictions of China’s invasive one-child-per-couple policy, which includes forced abortion and forced sterilization. No worker in China may organize into independent unions to defend labor rights. Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols and other ethnic groups face additional curbs on how they preserve their cultures and express their identity.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, for which I serve as chairman, continues to monitor these ongoing rights violations. Recent commission hearings have addressed the toll of China’s censorship policies and conditions for political prisoners. Along with our annual report issued each October, the commission hearings serve as an important mechanism for documenting China’s actions.

Despite China’s brutal suppression of human rights, Chinese authorities claim to uphold the values of the UDHR and other human rights instruments. The government announced several months ago that it would issue a National Human Rights Action Plan for the coming years, following on the heels of a similar action plan issued in 2009. The earlier plan showed the Chinese government has improved its rhetorical strategy for asserting compliance with human rights standards but has improved little else. In the end, the plan has done nothing to better human rights conditions in China, which actually have regressed.

If we are to give real substance to human rights, we must hold China accountable to its obligations to abide by the values enshrined in the UDHR and to guarantee fundamental human rights. By keeping a constant spotlight on China’s behavior, ensuring the Chinese government faces consequences for its actions and supporting Chinese citizens in their rights defense efforts, we can give real meaning to International Human Rights Day and the values of freedom and democracy championed by Liu Xiaobo.

The year 2011 will have a unique place in history for the dramatic changes in the global landscape and the world economy. The most frequently asked questions from my European colleagues are: “How does China see Europe?” “Where are China-EU relations going?”

Co-operation and partnership with Europe has been running through China’s foreign policy for decades. This commitment remains strong.

China-Europe relations have come a long way. In the mid-1970s China’s trade with the European Economic Community was a mere $2.5bn a year; with the 27-member EU it now totals $480bn a year. The EU has become China’s top trading partner and premier source of technology and investment.

In the decade following China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, China imported more than $100bn worth of goods and services from Europe every year. This has created 1m jobs for Europe. In the past 30 years of reform and opening up, China has looked to Europe to learn from its rich experience in governance and institution-building wherever applicable. President Hu Jintao told Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, last May: “An economically stable and prosperous Europe is in the interest of China and the world.”

Premier Wen Jiabao stressed that, no matter how the world changes, Europe will always be a strategic priority for China. In 2011, China and European countries exchanged visits more frequently and at higher levels. Our joint efforts to address the crisis have created a strong bond between Chinese and European leaders.

The EU has surpassed Japan as the top source of Chinese imports. According to the European Chamber of Commerce in China, 59% of European companies saw their profits in China grow last year and 70% have benefited from China’s economic growth. And from January to July this year, China’s direct investment in Europe topped $1bn.

As the European sovereign debt crisis deepens, the pessimists seemed to have won the day. The majority view in China, however, is to give Europe a vote of confidence. In China’s eyes, Europe remains the strongest, most wealthy and best integrated region in the world, with enormous advantages to fall back on: advanced science and technology, high-quality human resources and the capacity to reform and innovate.

Europe has been through numerous crises in the past. Each time, it moved on and became stronger. We have every reason to believe that Europe has the wisdom, capacity and resources to overcome its problems through reform and readjustment. Closer European integration may be just around the corner.

An interesting debate has emerged about whether China can and will ride to the rescue of the euro. Some thought China should help Europe out. Others worry that China may put an exorbitant price tag on any rescue. Still others claimed that it would be humiliating to seek help from China.

Yet people in China ask: how can China, with a per capita GDP of $4,000, help Europe, whose per capita is higher than $30,000?

China has no intention of seeking advantages through financial manipulation. China has endeavoured to help, by contributing resources to the IMF, purchasing European bonds, increasing imports and expanding investment in Europe to support job creation and growth. We see this as being in the interest of China as well.

More trust and closer co-operation is what is needed for Europe and China. Fearmongering will only hinder the potential for co-operation. Europe needs to come to terms with the two opposing forces at play in its perception of China: one that calls for co-operation, and the other that spreads fear and suspicion. This is reflected in the European media’s view on China. Such a conflict will only hinder Europe’s capacity to forge a consistent and effective China policy.

Drifting apart will hurt both of us. Our best option is to turn the crisis into a fresh opportunity to build a new partnership, based on three pillars.

First, equality and mutual respect. It took the west 300 years to industrialise and build a mature society with strong institutions. And even now serious inequalities and social tension remain. For China, a country with a population twice that of Europe, industrialisation is still a work in progress. What we need from the Europeans is understanding and a historical perspective. China, for its part, will accept reasonable criticisms from Europe for its own improvement.

Second, a strong commercial partnership. In the next five years, China will import $8trn worth of goods and its annual outbound investment is projected to top $100bn. Farsighted European business leaders are making efforts to grasp these opportunities. We should make things easier for our investors.

Third, people-to-people exchanges. The China-Europe Year of Youth in 2011 has helped young people from different countries deepen their mutual understanding and forge bonds of friendship. Next year, China and Britain will celebrate 40 years of full diplomatic ties. As we launch a high-level people-to-people dialogue, we have a unique opportunity to raise our educational and cultural links to a new level.

Our world is destined to continue its profound changes. China and Europe are at the far ends of the Eurasian continent, yet our shared destiny is as solid as the vast landmass that joins us. It is incumbent on us to develop a stable, lasting and co-operative partnership to the benefit of our peoples and the whole world.

Cabe preguntarse hasta qué punto la expansión económica de China ha beneficiado a los países latinoamericanos. Es conocido que la mayoría de estos afrontaron la globalización en función del Consenso de Washington, esto es, una rápida liberalización comercial y una disminución general del papel del Estado en temas económicos. A diferencia de ellos, China realizó las reformas económicas desde dentro y, desde 1978, el objetivo fue reestructurar gradualmente la economía bajo control estatal.

El enfoque chino de la liberalización no pudo ser más distinto al latinoamericano. En abierto contraste con la “terapia de choque” practicada en América Latina, China ha venido globalizando en virtud de lo que Deng Xiaoping denominó “cruzar el río sintiendo una a una cada piedra”, lo que permitió el desarrollo previo de empresas e industrias locales antes de liberalizar por completo. Tal como sostiene Kevin Gallagher, a causa de estas diferentes trayectorias de liberalización, el Estado chino todavía mantiene la capacidad de controlar e impulsar el proceso de globalización de su economía, mientras que la liberalización en América Latina ha dejado básicamente al Estado como subsidiario. En China, resulta obvio que las multinacionales han ganado terreno, pero el Gobierno ha impulsado eficazmente las empresas locales, mediante masivas inversiones públicas y público-privadas.

Antes de la crisis financiera de 2008, numerosos analistas sostenían que el rápido crecimiento chino impulsaría el desarrollo económico latinoamericano. Sabemos que el auge del gigante asiático condujo a un incremento de las exportaciones de las materias primas y a un aumento generalizado de los precios de las mismas en todo el mundo.

En el caso de que persista la tendencia que lleva a que las exportaciones de productos industriales latinoamericanos sean desbancadas por China, existe el peligro de que América Latina quede reducida a la dependencia exportadora de productos primarios. Recuerda Gallagher que el Gobierno chino aprendió pronto que la adquisición de tecnología extranjera a través de las multinacionales no conduciría necesariamente a la transferencia y desarrollo de la tecnología propia. Era preciso incrementar la capacidad de absorción de las compañías locales y desarrollar la propia capacidad tecnológica.

La estrategia para lograrlo consistió en apoyo gubernamental, en inversión cuantiosa en I+D en empresas concretas y en la creación de institutos y universidades especialmente dedicadas a I+D. Atención especial merecieron las compañías consideradas estratégicas para la industrialización.

A primera vista, la expansión china es muy positiva para América Latina. Sin embargo, si América Latina no aumenta su competitividad industrial, China la suplantará en varios sectores de mercado en casa y en el mundo. Ello resultaría devastador porque Latinoamérica cuenta con los mercados regionales y globales para impulsar su diversificación exportadora.

Ni que decir tiene que la cuestión no consiste en aprender a combatir China, sino en cómo aprender de China. Ninguna otra nación en desarrollo ha logrado en tan poco tiempo cambios tan notables en su estructura industrial. Hay que decir, empero, que China no es un caso que pueda ser mecánicamente traspasado a las estrategias de desarrollo latinoamericanas y que solo Brasil (y, hasta cierto punto, México) disponen de la capacidad industrial, mercados exteriores e internos para intentar imitar a China.

Por cierto, son precisamente Brasil y México quienes recientemente están teniendo importantes fricciones con China. El primero estima que está inundado de productos chinos y exige la revaluación de su moneda, el yuan, para evitar que la industria brasileña sea dañada aún más de lo que ya ha sido.

Además, un creciente sector de opinión considera abusivo que Pekín compre casi exclusivamente materias primas y denuncia la introducción en la región de una cultura empresarial del “vale todo”, con desprecio de las normas de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo. Un dato ilustrativo sobre este particular es que numerosos ejecutivos locales incorporados a empresas chinas que operan en Brasil rompen tempranamente su contrato. De ahí que el Gobierno de Brasilia acabe de anunciar que aplicará controles más rígidos a las importaciones de China, pues teme que estas incluso aumenten en Latinoamérica y que, a causa de la crisis, decrezcan en Estados Unidos y en una Europa que se encamina hacia la recesión. Por su parte, el Gobierno de México denuncia las permanentes prácticas desleales de las empresas chinas, que recurren a diversos métodos para engañar a las autoridades aduaneras mexicanas. La Cámara mexicana de la industria del vestido sostiene que nueve de cada 10 dólares de importación de productos chinos entra ilegalmente.

No se trata de configurar a China como “amenaza”. Es simplemente un gigante político, económico y financiero, capaz de retar a Europa y a Estados Unidos. Tales características exigen a América Latina una concertación política y económica, sencillamente para poder competir. El gran reto de esta parte del mundo es lograr el alto grado de cooperación regional (económica y política) imprescindible para iniciar nuevas estrategias de desarrollo, viables en un mundo de competencia global sin miramientos. La integración y cooperación latinoamericanas son clave para resistir la competencia industrial de Pekín. Intentar hacer frente al desafío que supone el coloso chino individualmente, de Estado a Estado, es una aventura condenada al fracaso. Los líderes latinoamericanos tienen la palabra.

When the young Mao Tse-tung agitated for revolution, he found a vivid way to get his point across to an uneducated audience: He picked up a single chopstick and snapped it in two. Then he picked up a handful of chopsticks: They would not break. Thus he showed that so long as everyone stood side by side, no force could withstand the tide of revolution. By gathering together China’s scattered, indignant chopsticks, Mao finally was able to ascend Tiananmen — the Gate of Heavenly Peace — on Oct. 1, 1949, and announce the establishment of his republic.

Whether chopsticks come singly or in a handful is now an issue in China again. Mao’s successors, however, do the opposite of what he advocated, mobilizing immense resources to keep chopsticks from gathering together. The government knows that angry chopsticks are everywhere, but as long as they stay scattered, it believes it can break them in two, whatever their numbers.

Thus it is that “stability maintenance” has become a key term in contemporary China. The government does not make public what it spends to maintain stability, but popular estimates go as high as 600 billion yuan. As mass protests become more frequent, that figure can only increase.

Most of these incidents are triggered by something relatively minor. A young woman’s unexplained death in 2008 in Wengan County, in Guizhou province, led to the burning of 160 offices, the destruction of 40 vehicles and injuries to more than 150 people. When a cook in the town of Shishou, in Hubei province, was found dead in 2009, his family, rejecting police statements that it was a suicide, refused to allow an autopsy and laid the body out in the foyer of the hotel where the cook had worked, attracting a crowd of thousands. Many clashes with the police followed, leaving the hotel damaged, police officers injured and fire engines and police cars overturned. Such incidents are a signal that China’s scattered chopsticks are angry. Sometimes all it takes is a family dispute or an argument between neighbors to get people venting their rage at the government.

Maintaining stability, we’re told, is more important than anything else. Our government likes to stress the rule of law, but when stability needs to be maintained, the law goes out the window. Now that human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng and his family have been confined to house arrest in their home village, many people have attempted to visit them and express their support. But as soon as they get anywhere near his home, they are waylaid by toughs who beat them up and steal their wallets. “What happened to the rule of law?” people ask online. The rule of law must be taking a vacation up in heaven, too far away to hear.

Sometimes stability maintenance reaches truly comic levels. When the Jasmine Revolution roiled North Africa this spring, the traditional ballad “Jasmine Flower” was banned in China. A friend of mine who had used the song in a just-completed TV program was told to remove it, and a substitute song about peonies got the thumbs down too. In the end, he learned that no song involving flowers of any description would be permitted.

Everywhere threats are seen. When the Occupy Wall Street movement began in the U.S., our official media reported on it with relish, thinking it had found a stick it could use to beat Western society. But when activists called for a worldwide protest Oct.15, some Chinese began to contemplate occupying China’s central bank and securities regulatory commission. The government finally realized that protest movements in Western democracies are just as capable of inspiring revolutionary sentiments among Chinese chopsticks as protest movements in dictatorships. And so Occupy Wall Street, like “Jasmine Flower” before it, was blocked on the Web and in the media.

When China’s leadership saw how Moammar Kadafi was shot in the street, how Saddam Hussein was marched onto the scaffold and how Hosni Mubarak was tried as he lay in a cage — when they saw, as those autocrats lost power, how their families lost everything too — they must have sensed, I think, that it is not democracy they should fear but revolution. As the relatives of our high officials grow more wealthy, they emigrate to democratic countries (never to dictatorships); they know that the possibility of revolution in China is growing by the day. They know that revolution is never reasonable, that it drips with blood.

When chopsticks group themselves together into handfuls, revolution will erupt. Although our top officials dislike democracy, democracy is actually the key to their being able to hold onto their wealth and protect their lives. That’s because in a democracy right and wrong are never entirely clear-cut. These people have money to burn, and in a democracy they can always hire some smooth-talking lawyers to plead their case and get them off the hook.

So in my view, there are only two roads ahead for China: democratization or revolution. Either road is likely to be long. In the first case, the Communist Party will never willingly relinquish its privileges but will only give them up incrementally, under pressure. In the second, it’s no easy matter for the scattered, isolated chopsticks to consolidate in the face of lavishly financed stability maintenance.

On July 1, 1921, 13 representatives of the Chinese Communist Party slipped away from Shanghai in an effort to avoid arrest by the Kuomintang police. They convened their party’s first congress on a boat in Jiaxing’s South Lake. On July 1 this year, a meeting was held to celebrate the party’s 90th anniversary, and Hu Jintao gave the keynote address, listing the party’s many great achievements. At the same time, a post began to circulate on the Internet.

“If I could go back in time,” someone says, “I’d want to be at the South Lake in Jiaxing on July 1, 1921.”

“Why’s that?” he is asked.

“I could have called the police.”

In 1995, a middle-aged Chinese man walked into a C.I.A. station in Southeast Asia and offered up a trove of secret Chinese documents. Among them was a file containing the top-secret design of the American W-88 nuclear warhead that sits atop the missiles carried by Trident submarines.

He told a story to the C.I.A. that was so bizarre it might just be true. He said that he worked in China’s nuclear program and had access to the archive where classified documents were stored. He went there after hours one night, scooped up hundreds of documents and stuffed them into a duffel bag, which he then tossed out a second-story window to evade security guards. Unfortunately, the bag broke and the papers scattered.

Outside, he collected the files and stuffed them back into the torn bag. Although many of the documents were of interest for their intelligence content, it was the one about the W-88 that roiled American counterintelligence most because it contained highly classified details about a cutting-edge warhead design.

The United States had been producing small nuclear warheads for decades, and the Chinese were desperate to find out how to build miniaturized warheads themselves. China’s military was, and still is, playing catch-up to the United States.

China’s success in obtaining the secret design of the W-88 is the most dramatic example of a fact that United States counterintelligence agencies have been slow to recognize: just as China has become a global economic power, it has developed a world-class espionage service — one that rivals the C.I.A.

During the cold war, dozens of counterintelligence agents in the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. pursued Soviet and then Russian spies. The K.G.B. was seen as the enemy; China took a back seat. Only a handful of F.B.I. agents specialized in Chinese spy cases, and their work was not regarded as career-enhancing. Washington’s ongoing failure to make Chinese espionage a priority has allowed China to score a number of successes in its espionage efforts against the United States.

China’s foreign intelligence service and its military intelligence agency actively spy on the American defense industry, our nuclear weapons labs, Silicon Valley, our intelligence agencies and other sensitive targets.

In January, when Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, was visiting China, Beijing unveiled a stealth fighter jet, the J-20. The disclosure demonstrated that China had achieved a stealth capability, allowing it to conceal its planes, ships and missiles from radar — similar to the American stealth technology that China has been seeking to acquire by clandestine means for years.

Later that month, an engineer who worked on the B-2 stealth bomber for Northrop Grumman was sentenced to 32 years in prison for passing defense secrets to China. In exchange for more than $100,000, he had helped design a stealth exhaust system for China’s cruise missiles to make it difficult to detect and destroy them.

And in August, reports attributed to American intelligence officials asserted that Pakistan had allowed Chinese experts to inspect the remains of the stealth helicopter that crashed during the May mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Although Pakistan and China denied the reports, Beijing would have a great interest in examining the tail of the Black Hawk helicopter, the part of the aircraft that was not destroyed by the Navy Seals team, to learn more secret details of American stealth technology.

Meanwhile, the mystery of the leaked W-88 warhead design remains unsolved. At first, the American government suspected that Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos nuclear scientist, had leaked the W-88, but it produced no evidence that he had done so. He was held in solitary confinement for nine months, eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling classified information and won an extraordinary apology from the federal judge who presided over the case.

Misled by the Energy Department, the F.B.I. had chased the wrong person for three years. Finally, in 1999, Robert Bryant, then the bureau’s deputy director, enlisted Stephen Dillard, a veteran counterintelligence agent, to head a major investigation of how China had acquired the design of the W-88.

The inquiry was led by the F.B.I. and run by a task force of 300 investigators from 11 federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. On Sept. 11, 2001, some of the investigators were killed when American Airlines Flight 77 was flown by terrorists into the Pentagon.

But the investigation went on. Mr. Dillard’s task force, operating out of public view, looked at the nuclear weapons laboratories, government agencies and defense contractors in California and several other states who had manufactured parts of the warhead. The F.B.I. interviewed the walk-in, who was by now living in the United States, but he could shed no light on the source of the document.

Finally, after four years, the investigation ended with American intelligence agencies no closer to knowing how China obtained the secret design of the nuclear warhead. The answer remains locked up in Beijing.

More than a decade later, China’s spies continue to conduct espionage against military targets. Last year, a Pentagon official was sentenced to prison, the last of 10 people rounded up by the F.B.I., all members of a loosely connected Chinese spy network on the West and East Coasts that was run by Lin Hong, a spymaster in Beijing. The data that made its way to China included information on the Navy’s Quiet Electric Drive, designed to make submarines harder to detect, the B-1 bomber and projected American arms sales to Taiwan.

China has even penetrated the F.B.I. In 2003, Katrina Leung, an F.B.I. informant for two decades, was found to be working as a double agent for Beijing. Astonishingly, the two top F.B.I. agents in California responsible for Chinese counterintelligence were having affairs with Ms. Leung at the same time, allowing her to help herself to classified documents that were brought to her home by one of the agents.

China’s success in stealing American secrets will provide a continuing challenge to the spy catchers. And Washington’s counterintelligence agents, accustomed to the comfortable parameters of the cold war and more recent battles against Al Qaeda, must rethink their priorities and shift their focus, resources and energy eastward to counter China’s spies.

If not, more secrets like the W-88 nuclear warhead will continue to find their way to Beijing.

Will China help to rescue the euro, or not? In August, Premier Wen Jiabao said that China was ready to assist Europe in its hour of need. But, in December, at the Lanting Forum in Beijing, Deputy Foreign Minister Fu Ying declared that China could not. “The argument that China should rescue Europe does not stand, as reserves are not managed that way,” she announced.

For months, European leaders and International Monetary Fund officials have been hoping that China would lend a hand to save the euro. But Wen proposed certain conditions, including the European Union’s recognition of China as a market economy. Europe’s leaders, however, have not agreed to this or any other of Wen’s conditions. Hence, Fu’s insistence that China can do nothing to help.

Market-economy status is largely symbolic, but it is important to China. European Commissioners and lawyers are currently engaged in a heated debate about whether the World Trade Organization should automatically grant China this status in 2016. Whatever the outcome, the benefits are marginal; the primary benefit of market-economy status for China is that it would preclude anti-dumping charges under WTO regulations.

Nevertheless, it is a symbol that matters to China. Many Chinese believe that to deny China market-economy status is to dismiss the last 30 years of often wrenching reforms. Above all, China wants a sign of acceptance by the advanced Western economies, which continue to regard the country not only as repressive, but as representing an alternative economic model: state capitalism, rather than the free-market variety.

Both of these Western characterizations are too extreme. The Chinese system is authoritarian in many respects, but the picture is not black and white. After 30 years of transformation, China’s economy, society, and, to some extent, its political system, have changed profoundly.

To be sure, China’s government keeps a tight rein on the economy. At the same time, the private sector has taken off, and now accounts for two-thirds of China’s GDP and urban employment.

Despite this progress, the West seems to be losing patience with China. Before 2004 (when China’s burgeoning current-account surplus became an international issue), the West believed that China was moving in the right direction – becoming “more like us.” Now that belief is faltering, especially because China has become more assertive since the global financial crisis began in 2008.

But China’s assertiveness is not entirely groundless. Given its extraordinary economic record, China has reason to feel proud; and, having long been a student of the West, China has equal reason to ask why the teacher has gone so wrong.

In the end, admitting China fully into the international community would help to transform it into a more open society. But the West must keep in mind that China is not interested only in material benefits, such as access to Western markets, or a greater presence in international organizations. The Chinese also want respect.

Europe cannot afford to see the euro fail. But current proposals, such as national redemption funds, or a Europe-wide version with joint liability, would increase the burden on EU taxpayers drastically. Meanwhile, pressure on the European Central Bank to buy eurozone government bonds is placing the Bank’s credibility at risk. External help is the best solution to boost market confidence and save the indebted countries from depression and default.

A failed euro, moreover, would be bad for China, leaving the US dollar as the single international reserve currency. It would also mean that the European market, currently China’s largest source of export demand, would be far weaker.

But China will not provide substantial financial assistance without the EU’s ironclad guarantee of the investment. Equally important, China will withhold aid unless and until the EU meets certain conditions, including conferral of market-economy status. China has said what it wants. It is up to Europe to strike the deal.

Hardly a day goes by without news of yet another economic problem facing China. A frothy real estate market. Quickly rising wages. A weakening manufacturing sector. Tightening lending standards. The list can seem endless and frightening.

But after a recent visit to China, I remain staunchly optimistic that it will continue to be the world’s greatest machine for economic expansion. While developed countries bump along with little growth, China’s gross domestic product is expected to increase by 9.2 percent in 2011 and an equally astonishing 8.5 percent next year.

The country pulses with energy and success, a caldron of economic ambition larded with understandable self-confidence. Visit the General Motors plant on the outskirts of Shanghai and watch Buicks churned out by steadily moving assembly lines almost indistinguishable from those in plants in Michigan.

That shouldn’t surprise, as G.M. strives for uniformity across its Chinese facilities. Perhaps more startling is that G.M. achieves American levels of productivity, quality and worker safety — with pay that is a small fraction of levels in the United States.

This illustrates China’s great strength: its ability to relentlessly grind down costs by combining high labor efficiency with wages that remain extraordinarily low. At Foxconn’s largest plant, in Shenzhen, 420,000 Chinese earning about $188 per month assemble electronic components for megacustomers like Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Often criticized for just being a nation of “assemblers,” China has been increasing the value it adds to exports as more components are produced there. G.M., for example, uses 350 local suppliers.

China’s economic success is colored by its opaque political system, repressive and riddled with corruption. But the unusual mix of authoritarianism and free enterprise should continue to work because of its ability to deliver rising incomes, satisfying a populace that appears more interested in economic advancement than in democracy.

China has a plethora of tasks on its economic to do list, but none are impossibly daunting. Just as in the United States a century ago, jobs are needed for vast numbers of rural migrants moving into cities. Inefficient state-owned companies must be restructured (as they were in recent decades in many European countries). The other evident stresses, like the indisputable property bubble, are manageable and far short of what brought down the American economy.

Meanwhile, an opportunity lurks in China’s seeming inability to create innovative products with international identities. In an era of global corporations, a country that reveres brands, especially luxury ones like BMW and Louis Vuitton but also Starbucks and Häagen Dazs, has yet to give birth to its first.

Lenovo, one of the best-known Chinese companies, has achieved limited success with its 2005 acquisition of IBM’s personal computer business. Astonishingly, Chinese auto companies have the lowest share of their home market of any major country. So China has emphasized building products like ships, where brands don’t matter.

Not unlike the United States in the 19th century, China’s early stage of industrialization has brought with it an unsavory wild West flavor, from cronyism to fraudulent accounting, that justifiably worries investors. But behind those distractions is a country that is investing substantially in its future — about 46 percent of its gross domestic product, compared with 12 percent in the United States.

And while total government debt in China is high — by some estimates, higher than in the United States — much of the Chinese debt was incurred for investment rather than consumption, far better for longer-term growth. Notwithstanding accounts of “roads to nowhere,” China has vastly improved its core infrastructure. Its government arguably does better than ours at allocating capital.

The antipathy of Chinese households toward personal debt (a quarter of homes are bought with cash) has resulted in a savings rate of nearly 40 percent of income, compared with less than 5 percent for Americans.

Underpinned by a reverence for entrepreneurship, China has made starting new businesses easier, paving the way for the accumulation of vast fortunes; there are more billionaires in China than in any country except the United States. (China’s income inequality also rivals that of the United States.)

A gradual move toward reform appears evident. Controls over interest rates, foreign exchange, cooking oil and gasoline, to name a few, are being liberalized. There is even attention to the environment, with tax subsidies for fuel-efficient autos and limits on new-car purchases in the largest cities.

The frustrating mercantilist approach taken by China — it manipulates its currency and trade rules with abandon — has served it well. It has accumulated vast foreign currency reserves ($3.2 trillion and rising) while blocking access to its market and gaining competitive advantages internationally in everything from solar panels to toys. Congressional saber rattling notwithstanding, China is likely to continue to get away with reforming only slowly.

While China hardly lacks challenges, I am betting on its continued success.

La locura de China por construir represas se topó con una pared recientemente en Birmania (Myanmar), donde la decisión audaz del gobierno de frenar un polémico proyecto de represa liderado por China ayudó a facilitar el camino a la primera visita de un secretario de Estado norteamericano a ese país en más de medio siglo.

La represa de 3.600 millones de dólares de Myitsone, hoy interrumpida, está situada en la cabecera del río más grande de Birmania, el Irrawaddy, y estaba destinada a bombear electricidad exclusivamente a la grilla eléctrica de China, a pesar de que Birmania sufre diariamente cortes de energía. La Comisión de Supervisión y Administración de Activos del Estado del Consejo de Estado de China calificó a Myitsone como un proyecto modelo en el exterior que servía a los intereses chinos. La decisión de Birmania, en consecuencia, sorprendió al gobierno de China, que había empezado a tratar a Birmania como un estado cliente confiable (donde todavía tiene intereses importantes que incluyen la construcción en marcha de un multimillonario oleoducto y gasoducto de gas natural).

A pesar de ese revés, China sigue siendo el mayor constructor de represas del mundo fronteras adentro y en el exterior. De hecho, ningún país en la historia ha construido más represas que China, que se jacta de tener más represas que el resto del mundo en su conjunto.

Antes de que los comunistas llegaran al poder en 1949, China sólo tenía 22 represas de tamaño significativo. Hoy el país cuenta con más de la mitad de las aproximadamente 50.000 represas grandes del mundo -aquellas que tienen una altura de por lo menos 15 metros o una capacidad de almacenamiento de más de tres millones de metros cúbicos-. Por lo tanto, China concretó, en promedio, al menos una represa grande por día desde 1949. Si se cuentan las represas de todos los tamaños, el total de China supera las 85.000.

Según la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura, las represas de China tenían una capacidad para almacenar 562,4 kilómetros cúbicos de agua en 2005, o el 20% de los recursos de agua renovables totales del país. Desde entonces, China construyó decenas de nuevas represas, incluida la más grande del mundo: la Represa de las Tres Gargantas en el río Yangtze.

China también es el líder global en exportación de represas. Sus compañías estatales están construyendo más represas en el exterior que todos los constructores de represas internacionales juntos. Treinta y siete entidades financieras y corporativas chinas están involucradas en más de 100 proyectos de represas importantes en el mundo en desarrollo. Algunas de estas entidades son muy grandes y tienen múltiples subsidiarias. Por ejemplo, Sinohydro Corporation -la compañía hidroeléctrica más grande del mundo- se jacta de tener 59 filiales en el exterior.

Detrás de los esfuerzos de China por construir represas en el exterior está no sólo el interés de China de generar ganancias sino un esfuerzo diplomático por demostrar sus proezas en materia de ingeniería. La política declarada de China de “no interferencia en los asuntos internos” en realidad sirve como una licencia virtual para llevar a la práctica proyectos de represas que inundan tierras y obligadamente desarraigan a poblaciones -inclusive, como en el caso de Myitsone, minorías étnicas- en otros países. Pero está haciendo lo mismo en el país al desviar su foco de los ríos internos saturados de represas a los ríos internacionales que originan la meseta tibetana, Xinjiang, Mongolia Interior y Manchuria.

China sostiene que su papel como líder global en exportación de represas ha creado una situación “en la que todos ganan” para los países donde se construyen las represas y sus propias compañías. Pero la evidencia de una cantidad de proyectos revela que las represas les están generando un costo ambiental muy alto a esos países.
En consecuencia, los proyectos en el exterior suelen encender el sentimiento anti-chino, reflejado en protestas populares en varios lugares de Asia, África y América Latina. Es más, al usar una fuerza de trabajo china para construir las represas y otros proyectos en el exterior -una práctica que va en contra de sus propios requisitos de “localización”, adoptados en 2006- China refuerza la percepción de que está ejerciendo prácticas de explotación.

Por ser el país con más represas del mundo, China ya es el mayor productor de energía hidráulica a nivel global, con una capacidad generadora de más de 170 gigavatios. Sin embargo, planes ambiciosos de fomentar su capacidad de generación de energía hidráulica de manera significativa al construir represas en ríos internacionales han enredado al país en disputas por aguas con la mayoría de sus vecinos, incluso con Corea del Norte.

En términos más amplios, la pasión de China por construir represas ha generado dos desenlaces esenciales. Primero, las compañías chinas hoy dominan el mercado global de exportación de equipos de energía hidráulica. Sólo Sinohydro, tras eclipsar a proveedores de equipos occidentales como ABB, Alstom, General Electric y Siemens, dice controlar la mitad del mercado.

Segundo, la creciente influencia de la industria de energía hidroeléctrica estatal dentro de China ha llevado al gobierno a fomentar de manera agresiva proyectos de represas en el exterior ofreciendo préstamos a bajo interés a otros gobiernos. Fronteras adentro, recientemente dio a conocer un nuevo programa gigantesco de inversión de 635.000 millones de dólares en infraestructura hidráulica en la próxima década, más de un tercio del cual será canalizado a la construcción de represas, reservorios y otras estructuras de suministro.
La construcción excesiva de represas por parte de China en ríos y sus transferencias de agua entre ríos y entre cuencas ya han causado estragos en los ecosistemas naturales, generando la fragmentación y la extinción de ríos y promoviendo la explotación de aguas subterráneas más allá de la capacidad de reabastecimiento natural.

Los costos sociales han sido incluso más altos, algo que se refleja en la sorprendente admisión por parte del primer ministro chino, Wen Jiabao, en 2007 de que, desde 1949, China ha trasladado un total de 22,9 millones de chinos para trabajar en proyectos hidráulicos -una cifra mucho mayor que las poblaciones de Australia, Rumania o Chile. Desde entonces, otros 350.000 residentes -principalmente habitantes de poblaciones pobres- han sido desarraigados.

En consecuencia, sólo teniendo en cuenta las cifras oficiales, 1.035 ciudadanos en promedio por día han sido desalojados por la fuerza y enviados a proyectos hidráulicos durante más de seis décadas. En vistas de que China hoy construye cada vez más represas en ríos transnacionales como Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Irtysh, Illy y Amur, los nuevos proyectos amenazan con “exportar” a esos ríos la grave degradación que acecha a los ríos internos de China. Llegó la hora de ejercer una presión externa concertada sobre China para que frene su locura por las represas y abrace los estándares ambientales internacionales.

Whenever a Western official criticizes China for its record on human rights, the reply comes back that China is a sovereign country and doesn’t respond to such finger-pointing. And that is bound to continue for a long time. There are real differences between different countries’ interests and values that cannot be wished away.

But there are also many areas where China and the United States face similar social problems and share fundamental interests. In grappling with those similar problems, each country’s laws are developing along paths that, although different in some ways, are strikingly similar in others. It is in those areas that the West can certainly begin a dialogue with China that includes political reform and human rights, and builds a common language for such discussions that does not seek to assign blame to either side.

Without a firm understanding of each society’s culture and history, discussions of fundamental rights tend to slide toward harsh and automatic conclusions on each side. But when we talk honestly about fundamental concepts like property, punishment of crime and ethnic diversity — in light of their cultural and historical context — the differences can at least be seen to have their own internal logic.

Respecting that logic, we can then begin to talk about how rights under the law might be applied differently.

We also need to remember that good laws in any society don’t just lay down rules. They strike a balance among competing interests — among individuals, and between individuals and their society. So of course there will be differences from one society to another.

I’ve become acutely aware of this while living in Shanghai for the past four years, practicing law in an American firm and teaching at two Chinese law schools, where an introduction to American law is a required course. My Chinese students include Shanghai natives, but most are from small towns and villages throughout eastern China. There are also Americans in their 20s, living here until more job opportunities open up back home. Each group’s members want to know what their counterparts from the other country are thinking, and so the questions of what concepts they share and where they differ come up often.

In the spring semester, I asked my students to choose from a list of several United States Supreme Court cases covering different fundamental rights — including free speech, free exercise of religion, abortion rights and the right to counsel in criminal cases — and offer comment. The ones below were the most popular. Judge for yourself whether finger-pointing and lecturing the Chinese would have been the right response to Chinese attitudes.

Kelo v. City of New London (2005)

This is a classic case of balancing private property rights and the public good. The city of New London, Conn., having lost traditional industries, needed economic development to reverse urban decay. But could private companies get rich in the process?

The Supreme Court found that economic development under the city’s plan would not violate the Fifth Amendment (which prohibits the taking of private property for public use “without just compensation”) solely because there was some private gain. My Chinese students, however, would have added another consideration: such private gain and fair compensation would have to be shown to be free from corruption.

Why was that so important? Why could fairness not be taken for granted? It’s because hundreds of millions of Chinese are moving from the countryside to the city, and local governments often take rural property to create vast expanses of new urban housing. But many relocated homeowners feel abused, and private developers often get rich in the process.

In both American and Chinese law, “just compensation” is required when the government takes property for a public purpose. But under American law, this is fairly straightforward, because the fair-market value of land is relatively easy to determine. In China, by contrast, there was until recently no market at all, and government officials exercise wide discretion and can have inordinate power — one reason that anger at corrupt government officials has become an organizing principle for common people, and now is a consideration in the way law students think about basic fairness.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007)

Can a city school board use race or ethnic identity as a factor in school admittance? I tell my students that if they want to understand modern American society, they should study both the evolving idea of equal protection and the history behind it: slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education. But the concept continues to evolve, as is shown by this case; in it, the Supreme Court, while recognizing that school districts have a compelling interest in diversity, ruled against school district plans that used race as a factor in assigning students to public schools.

China, too, has questions about how to treat its citizens equally, but those issues have different roots. In China, the Han make up about 92 percent of the total population; other large ethnic groups include Zhuang, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, Uighur, Miao and Tibetan, and there are dozens more. The government has been trying to increase the university enrollment of ethnic minority groups, and several of my students have told me that extra points are added to minority students’ test scores on the all-important college-entrance exam — a policy that many Han Chinese resent.

Conflict among these ethnic groups goes back centuries; it was the Manchus who led China’s last dynasty, from 1644 until the revolution that ended imperial rule in 1911. Just as young Chinese cannot fully understand equal protection in the United States without studying the history of slavery and Jim Crow, so my young American students have learned that they need to study the historic interaction of these ethnic groups before advising — or criticizing — the Chinese on their ethnic policies.

Stanford v. Kentucky (1989 ) and Roper v. Simmons (2005)

Can the death penalty be imposed on a defendant who committed murder as a juvenile? In a 1989 case in Kentucky, the Supreme Court held that executing a juvenile offender did not violate “common standards of decency,” or the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment. But it reversed this decision in 2005, finding that the standards had evolved to a point at which such executions were unconstitutional. My students were especially interested in the idea that “evolving standards of decency” applied to the death penalty — a punishment that has come under increasing scrutiny around the world since World War II.

China retains the death penalty but is reconsidering the offenses to which it can apply, and there is considerable debate in the Chinese blogosphere about that. In fact, during the years between Stanford and Roper, China rejected the death penalty for juvenile offenders — a fact that the Roper court noted.

The Chinese Constitution does not expressly forbid cruel and unusual punishment, as the American Constitution does. But the degree of moral culpability required for the death penalty is very much part of the debate here, and my students were surprised (and pleased) to learn that China had been ahead of the United States in abolishing any aspect of capital punishment.

On the other hand, another aspect of this debate — applying the death penalty for economic crimes like bribery and embezzlement — often evokes shock among Americans, while many Chinese consider it just another example of how seriously they take the danger of official corruption.

The underlying lesson? By different historical pathways, China and the United States find themselves struggling with many of the same issues.

And those issues deserve a discussion, not a lecture by one side to the other. My students are very respectful of America’s constitutional system, but also deeply proud of their own country and its rise in the world. They are prepared to find deep meaning — and understanding of us — in studying why their laws often read differently from ours. We should be ready to do the same with them before we criticize.

La economía de China está dando ahora su nuevo gran salto adelante: algunas partes de su sector manufacturero están subiendo por la cadena del valor añadido y saliendo del país. La amenaza china es ahora mundial.

Las razones no son difíciles de entender. Los costos de producción (salarios, alquileres de oficinas, tierras, capital, etcétera) en las provincias costeras de China, donde están radicadas la mayor parte de la producción manufacturera y de servicios del país y la inversión extranjera directa, han ido aumentando rápidamente. Tan sólo desde el año pasado, los salarios mínimos en nueve de las doce provincias costeras (incluida Beijing) aumentaron más del 21 por ciento por término medio:

Al mismo tiempo, el renminbi se está apreciando, con lo que la producción nacional de bienes y servicios destinados a la exportación resulta aún más cara. Es algo que cuenta, en particular en el caso de las actividades con gran densidad de mano de obra (desde la manifactura de juguetes hasta los servicios de introducción de datos), ya correspondan a filiales de empresas multinacionales extranjeras (que representan más de la mitad de las exportaciones de China) o a empresas locales, que están perdiendo competitividad en los mercados internacionales.

Para mantener su base de producción destinada a la exportación, los productos deben ascender por la escala del valor añadido haciéndose más refinados. Las empresas multinacionales pueden hacerlo dentro de sus redes integradas de producción mundial, lo que les permite organizar una división intraempresarial e internacional del trabajo. Cualquier parte de esas cadenas de producción puede localizarse donde resulte más idóneo para la competitividad internacional de las empresas y éstas cuentan con la experiencia para explorar el planeta en busca de las localizaciones adecuadas para la inversión.

También las empresas nacionales chinas han de reaccionar ante esas presiones. Se ven ayudadas en ese empeño por la rápida profundización de la base de aptitudes y tecnología de China, lo que en parte refleja la capacitación en filiales extranjeras, pero la razón principal ha sido el empeño sostenido del Gobierno de China de fomentar la educación y la capacitación, alentar las transferencias de tecnología de las empresas extranjeras a las nacionales y, en particular, crear capacidades en materia de investigación e innovación.

En una palabra, los productores de bienes y servicios más complejos de los países desarrollados y de los que cuentan con mercados en ascenso han de estar preparados para afrontar una competencia en aumento de China.

Al mismo tiempo, la producción china con gran densidad de mano de obra se trasladará cada vez más a países con menores costos laborales, incluidos Bangladesh, la India, Indonesia y el vecino Vietnam (donde las empresas chinas ya han establecido unas 1.000 filiales), además de diversos países africanos. Ese proceso ya ha comenzado y ha contado desde el comienzo del último decenio con el respaldo de la política “Hacerse mundial” del Gobierno, mediante la cual fomenta la inversión extranjera directa por parte de China.

Los datos lo confirman: las corrientes de inversión directa en el extranjero se duplicaron en 2008, hasta alcanzar 52.000 millones de dólares, frente a 23.000 millones en 2007, y aumentaron aún más en 2009 (cuando las corrientes de inversión extranjera directa mundiales se redujeron en un 50 por ciento, aproximadamente, a consecuencia de la crisis económica y financiera occidental), antes de alcanzar los 68.000 millones de dólares en 2010, lo que, sin contar a Hong Kong, situó a China aquel año en el quinto puesto del mundo por su volumen de inversión en el extranjero.

Ese desarrollo brinda a otros países en desarrollo nuevas oportunidades de cosechar los beneficios comerciales de su introducción en la división internacional del trabajo. Los organismos de promoción de la inversión de esos países –de hecho, los de todos los países, incluidos los desarrollados– deben poner la mira cada vez más en las empresas de China para atraerlas hasta sus costas. Al hacerlo, no deben fijarse sólo en las grandes empresas de propiedad estatal, sino también en el número cada vez mayor de empresas pequeñas o medianas privadas y pujantes que se pueden encontrar en todos los sectores de la economía de China.

Pero conviene hacer una importante salvedad: el inmenso interior de China está mucho menos desarrollado que las provincias costeras. El Gobierno está adoptando medidas especiales para desarrollar esas zonas en el marco de su “Gran Estrategia de Desarrollo Occidental”, que abarca, entre otras cosas, la construcción de infraestructuras modernas, el fomento de la educación de gran calidad, el apoyo a la ciencia y la tecnología (factores, todos ellos, determinantes para la localización de la producción) y la promoción de la inversión en ellas. Gracias a ello, las empresas radicadas en las provincias costeras que deban trasladar su producción (y no vean la necesidad de diversificarse fuera de China) pueden optar por establecerse en el interior de China, en lugar de salir al extranjero.

El modelo está claro: esa clase de transición consistente en el abandono de la manufactura con gran densidad de mano de obra ya se produjo antes en los países actualmente desarrollados, cuando las empresas con sede en Europa, el Japón y los Estados Unidos trasladaron su producción a países en desarrollo. En Asia, Hong Kong, Corea del Sur, Singapur y Taiwán fueron (y han sido) algunos de los beneficiarios.

Cuando los costos de los bienes y servicios con gran densidad de mano de obra llegaron a ser demasiado elevados en esos países, se trasladó la producción a otras localizaciones. Dicho traslado de la manufactura ha ido acompañado desde entonces por el traslado al extranjero de servicios cuyos componentes con gran densidad de información han llegado a ser comercializables.

La propia China se ha beneficiado del actual régimen abierto de inversión y comercio internacionales, que permite a las empresas establecer la producción donde resulte más beneficiosa para su competitividad internacional, y ahora está empezando a deshacerse de sus industrias con gran densidad de mano de obra.

Los gobiernos necesitan políticas para adaptarse a esa transformación mundial de la producción. Deben ayudar a las empresas de sus países a adaptarse a la salida de algunos productores estableciendo programas de capacitación, estimulando la innovación y manteniendo o creando un medio competitivo que fomente la “destrucción creativa” sin por ello dejar de facilitar una red de seguridad social.

Asimismo, los gobiernos que atraigan la producción que se haya abandonado en otros países deben contar con políticas que les permitan beneficiarse lo más posible de esa transformación mundial, con lo que impulsarán su propio desarrollo económico.

In recent months, bearish sentiment about the Chinese economy has surged, owing largely to three conjectures. First, China’s housing market is on the brink of collapse. Second, China’s fiscal position will worsen rapidly because of massive local government debt. And, third, the collapse of underground credit networks in bustling cities such as Wenzhou will lead to a broad financial crisis across the country.

In fact, despite its problems, China’s economy remains in good condition – at least so far. Indeed, it is not yet near to hitting the rocks.

Since the twenty-first century began, skyrocketing housing prices in China, except for a short respite during the global financial crisis, have caused serious social discontent. After years of half-hearted effort, China’s government has finally clamped down on housing speculation. As a result, prices fell in October for the first time this year, while real-estate investment growth fell as well.

But the fall in housing prices is unlikely to turn into a rout, because real demand for houses will remain strong after speculative demand is driven from the market. As soon as housing prices fall to an affordable level, buyers will enter the market and set a floor under the decline.

Moreover, because there are no subprime mortgages in China and down payments are as high as 50-60%, even a significant fall in housing prices will not seriously damage China’s mega-banks.

Over the past decade, real-estate investment in China has been the single most important contributor to fixed-asset investment growth and therefore, to the economy. Indeed, since the late 1990’s, the real estate investment-to-GDP ratio has been far higher than it was in countries like Japan and Korea during their high-growth periods.

It is simply wrong for a developing country with per capita income of $5,000 to concentrate its resources on producing concrete and cement. Although a significant decline in real-estate investment will have a very serious negative impact on China’s growth –  which can and should be prevented – as long as the fall is not too drastic, it is a welcome development.

Meanwhile, local government debts are a relatively new phenomenon. In 2009, local governments were encouraged to create Special Purpose Vehicles, specifically “local finance platforms” (LFPs), to supplement China’s RMB4 trillion ($628.7 billion) stimulus package. The LFPs would borrow from banks using future government revenue as collateral to finance packaged-investment projects in Chinese localities. By 2010, some 6,576 LFPs had been created.

There is no denying that local-government debt is a ticking time bomb for the Chinese economy. According to China’s National Audit Office (NAO), these LFPs’ total borrowing amounts to RMB10.7 trillion, of which 79.1% is bank loans. But it is equally true that China’s local-government debt has so far been manageable, and there is no reason to believe that all of it is bad. In fact, for the majority of the LFPs, the cash flow generated by investment so far has been enough to meet repayment of principal and interest. According to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) – the largest of China’s “big four” banks – 93% of its loans to LFPs are being repaid regularly.

Indeed, the ICBC’s non-performing loan (NPL) ratio for LFP loans is as low as 0.3%, while the corresponding coverage ratio – the bank’s ability to absorb losses from NPLs – is 1,066%. According to the NAO, the NPL ratio for the RMB10.7 trillion in local-government debt is roughly 2.3%.

A significant proportion of total local-government debt either has no direct relation to local governments, or cannot be guaranteed by them. Therefore, in legal terms, it is not government debt at all. In addition, given that local-government debt comprises 27% of China’s 2010 GDP, while central government debt and policy loans stand at 20% and 6% of GDP, respectively, the total public debt-to-GDP ratio is approximately 53% – lower than Germany’s. So, while China should not be complacent about local-government debt, panic is unwarranted.

Finally, there is a long history of underground lending and borrowing in some of China’s east coast region, especially in Wenzhou. Whenever monetary tightening causes bank credit to shrink, small and medium-size private enterprises are prepared to borrow at suicidally high interest rates from relatives or loan sharks.

In recent years, real-estate speculation has become another important source of demand for underground loans. When real asset prices fall and cause local credit networks to collapse, not only are hundreds of families left financially shattered and enterprises bankrupted, but banks suffer collateral damage, as occurred recently in the Wenzhou region.

But the severity of Wenzhou’s underground credit crisis has been exaggerated. In fact, Wenzhou’s underground credit accounts for less than 20% of total credit in the region, while the region accounts for less than 1% of China’s GDP. The total volume of affected bank credit in the crisis was just above RMB3 billion – roughly 0.5% of bank loans in the Wenzhou region. So, the damage that the breakdown of Wenzhou’s underground credit networks has inflicted on the regional banking system is limited, with scant national impact.

Thus, despite the high likelihood that China’s economic growth will slow significantly in 2012, a hard landing is unlikely. Nevertheless, while there is no need to be overly bearish about China’s short-term economic prospects, because of the slow progress in fundamental adjustment and further reform, even Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has noted that China’s growth is ultimately unsustainable. The real test has yet to come.

For the second time in three years, global economic recovery is at risk. In 2008, it was all about the subprime crisis made in America. Today, it is the sovereign-debt crisis made in Europe. The alarm bells should be ringing loud and clear across Asia – an export-led region that cannot afford to ignore repeated shocks to its two largest sources of external demand.

Indeed, both of these shocks will have long-lasting repercussions. In the United States, the American consumer (who still accounts for 71% of US GDP) remains in the wrenching throes of a Japanese-like balance-sheet recession. In the 15 quarters since the beginning of 2008, real consumer spending has increased at an anemic 0.4% average annual rate.

Never before has America, the world’s biggest consumer, been so weak for so long. Until US households make greater progress in reducing excessive debt loads and rebuilding personal savings – a process that could take many more years if it continues at its recent snail-like pace – a balance-sheet-constrained US economy will remain hobbled by exceedingly slow growth.

A comparable outcome is likely in Europe. Even under the now seemingly heroic assumption that the eurozone will survive, the outlook for the European economy is bleak. The crisis-torn peripheral economies – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and even Spain – are already in recession. And economic growth is threatened in the once-solid core of Germany and France, with leading indicators – especially sharply declining German orders data – flashing ominous signs of incipient weakness.

Moreover, with fiscal austerity likely to restrain aggregate demand in the years ahead, and with capital-short banks likely to curtail lending – a serious problem for Europe’s bank-centric system of credit intermediation – a pan-European recession seems inevitable. The European Commission recently slashed its 2012 GDP growth forecast to 0.5% – teetering on the brink of outright recession. The risks of further cuts to the official outlook are high and rising.

It is difficult to see how Asia can remain an oasis of prosperity in such a tough global climate. Yet denial is deep, and momentum is seductive. After all, Asia has been on such a roll in recent years that far too many believe that the region can shrug off almost anything that the rest of the world dishes out.

If only it were that easy. If anything, Asia’s vulnerability to external shocks has intensified. On the eve of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, exports had soared to a record 44% of combined GDP for Asia’s emerging markets – fully ten percentage points higher than the export share prevailing during Asia’s own crisis in 1997-1998. So, while post-crisis Asia focused in the 2000’s on repairing the financial vulnerabilities that had wreaked such havoc – namely, by amassing huge foreign-exchange reserves, turning current-account deficits into surpluses, and reducing its outsize exposure to short-term capital inflows – it failed to rebalance its economy’s macro structure. In fact, Asia became more reliant on exports and external demand for economic growth.

As a result, when the shock of 2008-2009 hit, every economy in the region either experienced a sharp slowdown or fell into outright recession. A similar outcome cannot be ruled out in the months ahead. After tumbling sharply in 2008-2009, the export share of emerging Asia is back up to its earlier high of around 44% of GDP – leaving the region just as exposed to an external-demand shock today as it was heading into the subprime crisis three years ago.

China – long the engine of the all-powerful Asian growth machine – typifies Asia’s potential vulnerability to such shocks from the developed economies. Indeed, Europe and the US, combined, accounted for fully 38% of total Chinese exports in 2010 – easily its two largest foreign markets.

The recent data leave little doubt that Asia is now starting to feel the impact of the latest global shock. As was the case three years ago, China is leading the way, with annual export growth plummeting in October 2011, to 16%, from 31% in October 2010 – and likely to slow further in coming months.

In Hong Kong, exports actually contracted by 3% in September – the first year-on-year decline in 23 months. Similar trends are evident in sharply decelerating exports in Korea and Taiwan. Even in India – long thought to be among Asia’s most shock-resistant economies – annual export growth plunged from 44% in August 2011 to just 11% in October.

As was true three years ago, many hope for an Asian “decoupling” – that this high-flying region will be immune to global shocks. But, with GDP growth now slowing across Asia, that hope appears to be wishful thinking.

The good news is that a powerful investment-led impetus should partly offset declining export growth and allow Asia’s landing to be soft rather than hard. All bets would be off, however, in the event of a eurozone breakup and a full-blown European implosion.

This is Asia’s second wake-up call in three years, and this time the region needs to take the warning seriously. With the US, and now Europe, facing long roads to recovery, Asia’s emerging economies can no longer afford to count on solid growth in external demand from the advanced countries to sustain economic development. Unless they want to settle for slower growth, lagging labor absorption, and heightened risk of social instability, they must move aggressively to shift focus to the region’s own 3.5 billion consumers. The need for a consumer-led Asian rebalancing has never been greater.

With China’s growing influence over the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, competition between the United States and China is inevitable. Leaders of both countries assert optimistically that the competition can be managed without clashes that threaten the global order.

Most academic analysts are not so sanguine. If history is any guide, China’s rise does indeed pose a challenge to America. Rising powers seek to gain more authority in the global system, and declining powers rarely go down without a fight. And given the differences between the Chinese and American political systems, pessimists might believe that there is an even higher likelihood of war.

I am a political realist. Western analysts have labeled my political views “hawkish,” and the truth is that I have never overvalued the importance of morality in international relations. But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers.

I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage.

It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.

China was unified by the ruthless king of Qin in 221 B.C., but his short-lived rule was not nearly as successful as that of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, who drew on a mixture of legalistic realism and Confucian “soft power” to rule the country for over 50 years, from 140 B.C. until 86 B.C.

According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny — based on military force — inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.

Such theories may seem far removed from our own day, but there are striking parallels. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once told me that he believed that ancient Chinese thought was more likely than any foreign ideology to become the dominant intellectual force behind Chinese foreign policy.

The fragmentation of the pre-Qin era resembles the global divisions of our times, and the prescriptions provided by political theorists from that era are directly relevant today — namely that states relying on military or economic power without concern for morally informed leadership are bound to fail.

Unfortunately, such views are not so influential in this age of economic determinism, even if governments often pay lip service to them. The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.

Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.

Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.

How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.

This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.

In other countries, China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States, which remains the world’s pre-eminent hegemonic power. Military strength underpins hegemony and helps to explain why the United States has so many allies. President Obama has made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but his actions also demonstrate that Washington is capable of leading three foreign wars simultaneously. By contrast, China’s army has not been involved in any war since 1984, with Vietnam, and very few of its high-ranking officers, let alone its soldiers, have any battlefield experience.

America enjoys much better relations with the rest of the world than China in terms of both quantity and quality. America has more than 50 formal military allies, while China has none. North Korea and Pakistan are only quasi-allies of China. The former established a formal alliance with China in 1961, but there have been no joint military maneuvers and no arms sales for decades. China and Pakistan have substantial military cooperation, but they have no formal military alliance binding them together.

To shape a friendly international environment for its rise, Beijing needs to develop more high-quality diplomatic and military relationships than Washington. No leading power is able to have friendly relations with every country in the world, thus the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.

China must also recognize that it is a rising power and assume the responsibilities that come with that status. For example, when it comes to providing protection for weaker powers, as the United States has done in Europe and the Persian Gulf, China needs to create additional regional security arrangements with surrounding countries according to the model of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a regional forum that includes China, Russia and several central Asian countries.

And politically, China should draw on its tradition of meritocracy. Top government officials should be chosen according to their virtue and wisdom, and not simply technical and administrative ability. China should also open up and choose officials from across the world who meet its standards, so as to improve its governance.

The Tang dynasty — which lasted from the 7th century to the 10th and was perhaps China’s most glorious period — employed a great number of foreigners as high-ranking officials. China should do the same today and compete with America to attract talented immigrants.

Over the next decade, China’s new leaders will be drawn from a generation that experienced the hardships of the Cultural Revolution. They are resolute and will most likely value political principles more than material benefits. These leaders must play a larger role on the world stage and offer more security protection and economic support to less powerful countries.

This will mean competing with the United States politically, economically and technologically. Such competition may cause diplomatic tensions, but there is little danger of military clashes.

That’s because future Chinese-American competition will differ from that between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Neither China nor America needs proxy wars to protect its strategic interests or to gain access to natural resources and technology.

China’s quest to enhance its world leadership status and America’s effort to maintain its present position is a zero-sum game. It is the battle for people’s hearts and minds that will determine who eventually prevails. And, as China’s ancient philosophers predicted, the country that displays more humane authority will win.

The Chinese government often tolerates, and even encourages, abuses of power and extrajudicial punishments by law enforcement officials. These are the underlying evils that sustain a regime that values its own preservation above all else, including human rights and the rule of law.

But how is this possible in a world where outsiders feel free to criticize China’s human rights record? Why does the Chinese government respond to some forms of protest, while stonily ignoring others? The answer can be found in the way the Chinese leaders, at all levels, think about their authority, their reputations and their power.

Consider the case of Chen Guangcheng, a human rights advocate who has been under house arrest with his family in Shandong Province. Recently, the public received news that his 6-year-old daughter would be allowed to leave the house to attend school, a concession that seemed to signal more lenient treatment.

But then, on Oct. 23, a group of Internet activists who had set out to visit him were brutally attacked by a local mob. Witnesses who described the attack on the Internet said it appeared to have been well planned — a sign that Mr. Chen’s ordeal was not yet over.

Why won’t the authorities simply let Mr. Chen and his family go? The most critical reason is mianzi, or “face,” as it is usually translated in English.

The authorities know that what they have been doing is unjust and illegal. But they saw the gathering of activists as an affront, and responded harshly because the government could not afford to lose face — which would undermine its power in the public’s eyes.

Petty cruelties and crackdowns are everyday occurrences in today’s China. Officials, especially low-level ones, have never cultivated respect for the rule of law, due process or habeas corpus.

If they were held accountable for strictly following the law in all cases, most would probably lose their jobs, bringing the state apparatus at the local level to a halt and endangering the system of government control. That is why, even though the powerful know what lesser officials do, they usually turn a blind eye — as long as they can cover up the misdeeds and the public doesn’t become outraged.

When public outrage does ensue, another mechanism of control — intervention by senior officials — sometimes occurs. That happened in September 2010 after a man set himself on fire to protest a building demolition in Jiangxi Province. High-level leaders fired a party boss and mayor for negligence.

But the case of Mr. Chen evidently didn’t qualify for such intervention, because another rule of power in China came into play: Never seem to bend to the demands of foreign powers. In such cases, it is the central government that digs in its heels, and the louder the outcry grows, the worse the situation becomes. In the government’s eyes, there is a stark difference between a homegrown problem like the one in Jiangxi and a case like Mr. Chen’s, in which the government perceives foreign meddling.

Congress has passed an amendment expressing support for Mr. Chen, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently criticized his house arrest in a speech. China saw these developments as an intolerable slap in the face.

Beijing does not indiscriminately reject all such “interference”; China and the United States conduct a dialogue on human rights through diplomatic channels. But Chinese leaders believe such dialogue belongs behind closed doors.

The Chinese are saying to Americans, if you grant me face, I can be reasonable; if solving the problem will help me, I’ll consider it. But don’t expect me to make concessions under pressure.

Such concessions would call into question the regime’s legitimacy. And once the issue is survival, the government is in effect cornered, leaving it no choice but to resort to drastic measures from which nothing — sense, humanity or law — can dissuade it.

The problem turns into one of “sovereignty,” which in the Chinese government’s vocabulary means the absolute, non-negotiable right to rule over a billion subjects. When sovereignty is in play, there is no longer a right or wrong side of an issue, just winning or losing.

A similar logic was involved 22 years ago at Tiananmen Square. The protesters there asked for nothing more than dialogue, but the government stubbornly refused because it didn’t want to set a precedent. To Chinese leaders, “governing” means absolute control. Allowing the people to become a rival to the government might bring down the system.

The same is true in Mr. Chen’s case, but with an important difference: in 1989, the government refused to set a precedent of yielding to popular demand at home. Today it refuses to set a precedent of yielding to American pressure.

China and the United States have been discussing human rights issues for so many years that it is baffling that American leaders remain so clueless about the Chinese government’s mind-set. Previous high-profile cases were resolved behind the scenes. Mr. Chen’s case should have been approached this way, too — not through public pressure.

I welcome American politicians’ concerns about China’s human rights situation. But I have one request: please be a bit more considerate, a bit more flexible, and a bit more tactful about our leaders’ mind-set. That way, you — and we — might have more success.

Lorsque Barack Obama s’adressera au Parlement fédéral australien, le 17 novembre, son propos sera surtout destiné aux pays de l’Asie-Pacifique, inquiets de l’influence grandissante de la Chine dans la région. En faisant escale à Canberra, la capitale australienne, avant de se rendre au sommet de l’Asean, à Bali (Indonésie), le président américain devrait réaffirmer l’engagement des Etats-Unis aux côtés de ses alliés traditionnels dans la zone, à commencer par l’Australie, la plus grande île du monde.

Les liens entre ces deux pays-continents vont bien au-delà des affinités linguistiques et culturelles entre deux anciennes colonies britanniques, même si la reine d’Angleterre est toujours formellement le chef de l’Etat australien. Le sens de ce déplacement a été énoncé sans fioritures, en septembre, par Leon Panetta, secrétaire américain à la défense. Lors de la rencontre annuelle entre les dirigeants des deux pays (Ausmin), à San Francisco, le patron du Pentagone a fermement mis en garde Pékin, en des termes à peine voilés. “Nous envoyons un message très clair à la région Asie-Pacifique : les Etats-Unis et l’Australie continueront à travailler ensemble pour démontrer à ceux qui nous menaceraient que rien ne nous séparera.”

Pour enfoncer le clou, Barack Obama et Julia Gillard, première ministre travailliste de l’Australie, devraient ratifier de nouveaux accords de coopération militaires entre Washington et Canberra. Ils s’inscrivent dans la continuité de l’Anzus, le pacte de défense conclu, en 1951, entre les Etats-Unis, l’Australie et la Nouvelle-Zélande, souvent présenté comme un “mini-OTAN” régional. Au terme de ces nouvelles dispositions, les Etats-Unis, qui n’ont jamais disposé de bases militaires sur le territoire australien, vont renforcer leur présence en Asie du Sud-Est en partageant des installations avec l’Australie dans l’océan Indien, dont les détails n’ont pas encore été révélés. Ils auront aussi un plus grand accès aux ports australiens, ainsi qu’aux centres de stockage pour leur matériel. La principale nouveauté porte sur la coopération dans la lutte contre la cybercriminalité, qui passera par des échanges de données approfondis. Une mesure, là encore, qui vise la Chine, soupçonnée par Washington de se livrer à un intense espionnage électronique.

Tout cela n’est pas très surprenant au vu des liens qui unissent l’Australie et les Etats-Unis depuis la seconde guerre mondiale. Leur coopération a été scellée après la prise de Singapour par les Japonais, en 1942, qui marque le déclin de l’influence britannique en Asie. Dès ce moment, les Australiens ont jugé que seul Washington était en mesure de garantir leur sécurité.

La visite de Barack Obama marque cependant un tournant car elle illustre de façon éclatante le nouveau “dilemme chinois” de l’Australie. “Pour la première fois de notre histoire, nous nous trouvons dans la situation où notre plus grand partenaire commercial, la Chine, est en concurrence frontale avec notre allié historique, les Etats-Unis”, relève Hugh White, ancien haut fonctionnaire au ministère de la défense et professeur d’études stratégiques à l’université nationale de Canberra.

L’Australie est un cas d’école intrigant. C’est sans doute le pays qui incarne le mieux les opportunités et les défis posés par l’émergence de la Chine au monde occidental. A la différence de l’Europe et des Etats-Unis, où la montée en puissance chinoise est vécue comme une menace, elle est largement perçue comme une chance par les Australiens.

La première ministre, Julia Gillard, s’en est fait l’écho de façon évocatrice : “La nouvelle classe moyenne en Asie vit dans des appartements et voyage dans des trains construits avec nos minerais et notre charbon”, a-t-elle insisté, à la fin septembre, lors d’une intervention devant l’Asia Society, à Melbourne. Elle faisait ainsi référence à l’extraordinaire richesse du sous-sol australien, qui abrite toutes les matières premières indispensables au boom économique chinois (zinc, uranium, cuivre, etc.). Il n’y a jamais eu, a-t-elle souligné, “un tel engouement pour les ressources du pays depuis la ruée sur l’or dans les années 1850″.

Cet appétit vorace des Chinois a métamorphosé l’Australie. Les régions de l’ouest du pays, naguère délaissées, sont en pleine expansion grâce à la mise en valeur de leur potentiel minier. Au point de créer une pénurie de main-d’oeuvre dans les Etats de la côte est, historiquement les plus prospères. Les contrats mirobolants se succèdent les uns les autres. Rien que cette année, il y en a eu quatre de plusieurs milliards de dollars. En septembre, le géant américain Chevron a ainsi déboursé 29 milliards de dollars australiens (22 milliards d’euros) pour l’exploitation d’un terminal de gaz liquéfié à Wheatstone. Au total, constate Hugh White, “l’Australie exporte un million de tonnes de minerais de fer par jour”…

L’émergence de la Chine a été le moteur de l’exceptionnelle longévité de la croissance (3,75 % prévus en 2011) de l’Australie, ininterrompue depuis 1992, un record parmi les pays industrialisés ! Le chômage est limité (5,2 %) et la dette publique insignifiante (22 % du PIB). Le tournant a été atteint en 2007, lorsque la Chine est devenue le premier partenaire commercial du pays, détrônant le Japon et les Etats-Unis. Aujourd’hui, la Chine absorbe 22,6 % des exportations australiennes, contre seulement 5 % en 1995.

Cette évolution a bouleversé la donne. “Dans le siècle asiatique, nos faiblesses de jadis – notre dépendance envers les matières premières et notre situation géographique – sont devenues nos grands atouts”, a souligné Julia Gillard. Mais cette prospérité pose aussi de nouveaux défis à l’Australie. Comment peut-elle concilier sa diplomatie pro-occidentale avec un ancrage économique de plus en plus oriental ? “Pour l’instant, note Hugh White, le pays n’a pas eu à trancher car ni la Chine ni les Etats-Unis ne lui ont demandé de choisir son camp.”

Toutefois, des signes avant-coureurs de ces tensions latentes se sont déjà manifestés. En 2004, le ministre australien des affaires étrangères, Alexander Downer, a été sèchement rappelé à l’ordre par son gouvernement et par Washington, lorsqu’il a déclaré que l’Australie se tiendrait à l’écart de tout conflit entre la Chine et Taïwan. Plus récemment, les autorités de Pékin ont exprimé leur courroux, en 2009, après la publication du rapport sur la stratégie de défense de l’Australie, jugée inamicale à l’égard de la Chine, car ce rapport réaffirmait l’attachement de l’Australie à sa coopération militaire avec les Etats-Unis.

Les conséquences de ce défi chinois émergent à peine dans le débat public. “Nous sommes dans une situation inconfortable, constate Hugh White, car nous avons pris conscience de cette nouvelle réalité, mais nous n’avons pas encore trouvé de réponse à ce dilemme.” Signe de ces interrogations : le gouvernement a commandé, en septembre, un Livre blanc, intitulé “L’Australie dans le siècle asiatique”. Il devra passer au crible tous les enjeux posés par l’essor de la Chine. Ses conclusions seront rendues publiques à la mi-2012. Nul doute qu’elles seront scrutées à la loupe à Washington et à Pékin.

The following is an excerpt from the book Bowing to Beijing.

Mutual dependency can guarantee a certain amount of pragmatic behavior by both sides, but there should be no romantic illusions about how the Chinese communists feel about America. “We hate you guys,” China Banking Regulatory Commission Director General Luo Ping fumed about the PRC being forced into buying U.S. Treasuries to protect Beijing’s massive U.S. debt holdings. “Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion … we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do.”

He says there is nothing they can do because Beijing needs Americans to keep buying their consumer goods. Approximately 20 percent of imports into America come from the PRC, and that percentage is on the rise. China’s huge pool of cheap labor means the country can produce more stuff at lower cost than anyone else. As if the peasant advantage weren’t enough for its production facilities, Beijing has pursued monetary policies to keep the yuan artificially low to guarantee that its products can undercut any competitors’ prices even more.

This is a mixed blessing, or mixed curse, depending on one’s point of view. With a flood of inexpensive products coming from China, American homemakers can spend less on most household goods, which leaves more income to save, invest, spend on luxury goods, or dedicate to children’s education. On the downside, artificially low prices for Chinese goods create an unlevel playing field on which U.S. companies can’t compete, a situation that unquestionably led to millions of U.S. jobs being sent overseas and the resultant collapse of America’s domestic manufacturing base.

There is an uneasy alliance of some political factions on the left and right on this issue. Even devout free-traders agree that a working system of free trade depends on a regime of rules that prohibits uncompetitive national practices that prop up or unduly support domestic industries. A May 2011 editorial in the New York Times offers a critique of Beijing practices with which almost anyone on the ideological spectrum can agree. “The list of complaints is long: 80 percent of the computer software in China is counterfeit. Beijing just published a new investment catalog that keeps a long list of industries off limits for American firms,” the old Gray Lady protested. “It changed the investment vetting process to allow Chinese companies to recommend barring acquisitions by foreign rivals. It has done nothing to reduce the enormous subsidies in the form of cheap credit to favored state-owned firms.”

The catalog of Beijing’s sins goes on and on, but the point is that the People’s Republic can essentially do what it wants and it gets away with it. As Thea M. Lee, policy director for the AFL-CIO, testified before the Commission on U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, “Enforcement of wages, hours and health and safety rules is lax or nonexistent in many areas of the country, and forced and child labor are prevalent in some sectors.” It’s no surprise many U.S. labor unions have staked out a tough stance on the PRC, and some of it for good reason. Along with child labor, Beijing has a penchant for openly pursuing unfair trade practices and violating international trade rules. One of the most common practices is direct government financial subsidies for PRC industries so they can sell goods below the price of production, thereby stealing market share.

The other major way Beijing cheats to get its companies ahead is by forcing state-owned banks to provide low-interest loans to businesses and making these financial institutions absorb losses by exporters. Chinese businesses have a significant and unfair competitive advantage by not having to pay market-priced interest rates on borrowed money and not having to cover losses on their books. As Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter put it succinctly, “China is cheating on trade.”

At the center of the PRC’s trade strategy are machinations to keep their currency undervalued, which makes the price of their exports cheaper in relation to products from nations with stronger currencies. Washington’s sale of so much U.S. debt to Beijing unwittingly strengthens this communist ploy. “Because of their undervalued currency (and large trade surplus), abundant U.S. dollars are officially overpriced in China,” Jonathan Rothwell, a research analyst at the Brookings Institution, explains. “Chinese banks take deposits from exporters in dollars, convert them to yuan, lend them out, and get artificially high returns by virtue of the enhanced buying power of yuan.”

In effect, the Chinese get more bang for the buck than Americans do by using the relative high value of the dollar in their own markets, where prices are low because of the artificially depressed value of their own currency. To keep the value of the yuan low, China has bought more than $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves. “Its reserves are the world’s largest, accounting for 31 percent,” according to BusinessWeek. “China still closely manages the level of its exchange rate and restricts the ability of capital to move in and out of the country,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner complained in January 2011. “These policies have the effect of keeping the Chinese currency substantially undervalued.”

The Obama administration is crying wolf about Beijing manipulating its currency, but so what? Secretary Geithner has insisted that Beijing strengthen the yuan to help improve U.S. price competitiveness, but this clearly isn’t in China’s interest, and the U.S. Treasury has little leverage with its biggest creditor. It’s hardly China’s fault that we’re so dependent on their largesse that fluctuations in the yuan are dangerous at home in the place formerly recognized as the Land of the Free. In no uncertain terms, America is not free if we’re shackled to the economic policies and monetary decisions of a communist state.

Mr. Geithner has warned that President Obama believes the PRC is “manipulating” its currency, but there is nothing the United States can do about it because we depend on the PRC continuing to prop up our markets. As the Augusta Chronicle of Georgia put it so aptly, “If you took out a sizable loan from your neighborhood bank, you’re not likely to strut into the bank president’s office and tell him how to run the place.” But that’s what Obama and Geithner are doing, or at least doing for the cameras. They don’t have a leg to stand on.

America’s addiction to cheap Chinese consumer products, as well as our reliance on a constant flow of Chinese loans to buy the junk, stem from economic indiscipline and weak political leadership in Washington. At the root of the problem is an obstinate refusal to live within our means. While both political parties have had a poor recent track record on spending, it appears that Republicans now understand the imperative to mend our ways while Democrats are bitterly resisting change in a more responsible direction.

This standoff was painfully obvious during budget battles in 2011 over raising the debt ceiling so government can continue to borrow from future generations to pay today’s bills. President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress resisted any Republican attempts to tie an increase in the debt ceiling to corresponding cuts in federal spending or entitlement reform. On April 11, 2011, just a few days before tax payments were due to the IRS, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “We believe that we should move quickly to raise the debt limit and we support a clean piece of legislation to do that.” Translation: give Capitol Hill big spenders a credit card with no limits.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, insisted that any increase in the debt ceiling must be equaled or surpassed by corresponding cuts in government spending, but he was ignored in the other chamber by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. So the cycle continues: A U.S. government on the verge of insolvency spends more than it has on big government programs it cannot afford. The sugar daddy underwriting the spending spree lives in Beijing. Eventually those bills will come due.

“Air in many China cities remains highly polluted.” No, this is not a headline in the Onion (satirical newspaper), but the front-page lead headline in the Shanghai Daily on Nov. 8. Shanghai is a city of 23 million people, which at first glance appears to be, perhaps, the most modern city on the planet. The architecture is spectacular and varied, with some of the new edifices exceeding 100 stories. It looks prosperous – nicely dressed people; wide, tree-lined streets; well-maintained flower beds; and the world’s newest auto stock on its many crowded expressways. To a lesser extent, the same thing can be said about Beijing and other Chinese cities.

By any definition, China has been an economic superstar. For three decades, it has been doubling its gross domestic product (GDP) on the average of every seven years. My first trip to mainland China was almost 30 years ago, near the beginning of the economic reforms. Private cars were almost nonexistent. Almost everyone got around by bicycle. Today, more automobiles are produced and sold in China than in any other country, including the United States. China has rapidly been building its equivalent of the U.S. interstate highway system. Most of the road signs look identical to those in the U.S. and are written in both Chinese and English, as are many other signs in China.

China, arguably, has more people with a middle-class or higher standard of living than any European country and even Japan, only trailing the United States. However, more than 80 percent of its people have yet to enjoy most of the fruits of this prosperity. It is a bit ironic that a country that calls itself communist has, perhaps, the greatest income disparity on the planet. China is both rich and poor at the same time. Last week, European leaders asked “rich” China to help them bail out their debt-ridden economies by purchasing more European government bonds. Chinese officials with whom I spoke indicated this is unlikely because it would not go over well in “poor” China. (China’s per capita income is only about 10 percent of that of the United States, but it is still the world’s second-largest economy because it has about four times the population of the U.S.)

There are several things that could derail China’s headlong rush into the 21st century. China’s Achilles’ heel is that it is still a one-party, authoritarian state. The Chinese understand the benefits of competition more than most, and businesses in China are in a highly competitive environment. This competition gives the Chinese consumer many choices, with an ever-improving variety of goods and services. The Chinese also understand that monopolies result in poorer service, less innovation and higher costs. Yet they still tolerate a monopoly one-party state that limits their freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly. This lack of political competition invariably leads to corruption, particularly without a free press to expose it. The leadership rationalizes this state of affairs by claiming that without the Communist Party monopoly on political power, there would be “instability.”

China, for all of its manufacturing and technological prowess, has a very underdeveloped financial sector, with state ownership of most of the banks. Despite its having the globe’s second-largest economy, China’s currency is still not freely convertible. The financial sector is being held back by political immaturity and an unwillingness to acknowledge and come to terms with the crimes of its communist founders, particularly Mao Zedong. Mao was responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin, yet his picture is still on every bank note. Would Germany be accepted as a member of the community of civilized nations if the face of Hitler appeared on its currency? Even Russia acknowledged many of Stalin’s crimes long before the fall of communism.

For the most part, the Chinese do not practice communism – even though they still call themselves communists – because they understand it does not work and they prefer to be rich rather than poor. Yet they still adhere to some communist claptrap, which is hurting them both economically and politically. Private land ownership is still prohibited even though long-term land leases are allowed. In some cases, this has undermined the incentives to build high-quality long-standing buildings and other privately built and owned infrastructure and also has made it more difficult to create a sound property-tax system.

As countries become wealthier, the demand for political freedoms increases, Thus, most countries that have enjoyed rapid economic development, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Chile, also have evolved into healthy democratic states. The Chinese have proved themselves to be highly pragmatic and flexible. Much of their rapid growth has been the result of being able to copy the advanced products and systems of the United States and other developed countries. But for China to continue to be a high-growth state, it will have to play increasingly by the international economic, financial and political rules, which will add to the pressures for political reform within China. Those in power in China, like most who have power, are reluctant to give up some of it, but many of them also understand that if they do not relax the reins, they may lose everything. It is in all of our interests to encourage and reinforce the positive trends within China by increasing bilateral investment and other interactions. However, we also must not be naive about the many dark forces still within China, such as those that promote the ongoing cyberpenetration of both foreign governments and businesses, that do not wish us – or the even the Chinese people – well.

As President Obama travels to Honolulu for this weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, he will confront a changing game in Asia. During a recent visit to the region, a senior Asian policymaker told me, “We used to ask what we could get from the Americans in return for their military personnel and basing rights. The new question is, what will we have to give them to get them to stay. And it’s all because of China.”

Meetings with Japanese, Australian and Southeast Asian policymakers and business executives have made clear to me that China is misplaying its hand in Asia. Beijing has miscalculated its ability to cater to nationalist sentiment at home without alarming its neighbors and is inadvertently driving Asian states to build closer economic and strategic ties with the United States and each other. This misstep gives Washington an enormous opportunity.

For the past decade, Beijing wagered that its neighbors’ reliance on its economy for trade and investment would buy goodwill, closer ties and space for occasional strategic posturing. In other words, China sought to provide the economic engine for the region while espousing a “peaceful rise” principle that eased suspicion over its geopolitical intentions. And for its neighbors, an economically vibrant and diplomatically modest China provided the perfect partner.

Over the past 18 months, however, China has taken a more aggressive tone toward territorial disputes in the South China Sea and elsewhere. This is partially driven by the leadership transition in Beijing, as factions in the Communist Party seek to curry favor with hawks, hard-liners, the nationalistic press and business. Though a few Chinese policymakers have begun to walk back some of the aggression, their hands are tied by the jockeying for power in Beijing.

Wariness of China is pervasive and increasing among the elites and general populations in Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, Japan and elsewhere. Meanwhile, economic sentiment regarding China is shifting from bullishness to caution. Even without an economic “hard landing,” China may be facing years of slower growth and higher inflation, coupled with rising fears about bad debt. Its neighbors increasingly worry that a weakening in China’s economic trajectory could have drastic effects on their economies. And a more assertive but less economically dynamic China is the region’s worst nightmare.

In response, China’s neighbors are seeking a balance to Beijing. When Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi last year warned members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to “remember how much of your economic prosperity depends on us,” he motivated not a strategic kowtow but increased efforts by regional nations to reduce their economic and strategic dependence on China.

These dynamics are not yet fully appreciated in Washington, but they present a strategic opportunity. We have already taken advantage in the military sphere, strengthening cooperation beyond defense agreements with Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam since 2010. In Japan and South Korea, long-standing alliances with the United States remain extremely popular.

Washington has an even greater opportunity in the economic realm: to shape the emergent Asia-Pacific financial and commercial architecture, enabling the United States to take advantage of the shifting momentum in the world economy and to provide what will probably be necessary economic underpinnings for long-term U.S. military and security commitments to the region.

But Washington has been slow to pursue this opening, even with a path readily available. The ­Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free-trade agreement that includes Australia, New Zealand, four Southeast Asian nations, Chile and Peru. Japan is expected to announce this week its intention to join negotiations. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasized the TPP when speaking about economic diplomacy last month, but negotiations have proceeded slowly. While Washington cannot drive TPP on its own, the Obama administration’s approach to Asian trade and commercial issues has been tepid. This week’s summit is likely to bring only a skeletal outline of the pact’s terms, rather than the full agreement as originally planned.

As Clinton said last month, “America’s economic strength and our global leadership are a package deal.” A vibrant TPP, complete with rules and reciprocity on investment, will ensconce the United States firmly in the emerging economic and political architecture in East Asia. Though the United States is still a leading trade partner for many Pacific Rim countries, its share of regional trade is declining. TPP, especially if it includes Japan, would provide a strategic counterpoint to last year’s China-ASEAN pact. It presents an alternative to Chinese economic and strategic domination that nations in the region are actively seeking, and offers economic and strategic benefits for the United States in a region that has begun to define the international scene.

This opportunity won’t last. After China’s leadership transition is complete, there could be a more decisive shift in Beijing toward a more effective Asian policy. For now, though, driving TPP to a successful conclusion would be an important step to ensuring that the United States has a secure place in the region’s new dynamics.

Today, the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report on Iran’s nuclear program. It provides the most convincing evidence to date that Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon.

But as Iran nears the nuclear threshold, the best way to stop it may be by punishing the Chinese companies that supply Tehran and enable its nuclear progress.

The Obama administration seems to understand this. The late September visit to China by David S. Cohen, the Treasury Department’s new under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, included the most explicit warning yet to Beijing that its banks and financial institutions could face sanctions if they continued to do business with Iranian entities.

The move is significant. More than a year ago, President Obama signed into law a series of sweeping sanctions cumulatively aimed at throttling Iran’s energy sector. Yet so far, China has mostly gotten a pass on its engagement with Iran.

Those ties are broad — and getting broader. In recent years, China’s economic dynamism has brought with it a voracious appetite for energy. This has made energy-rich Iran a natural strategic partner. In 2009, Iran ranked as China’s second largest oil provider, accounting for some 15 percent of Beijing’s annual imports.

In exchange, China has aided and abetted Iran’s quest for nuclear capacity. Diplomatically, it has done so by complicating oversight of Iran’s nuclear program, and by resisting the application of serious sanctions against Tehran. More directly (and dangerously), it has turned a blind eye to Iranian acquisitions of sensitive technology and materiel for its nuclear program from Chinese sources.

Over time, Chinese leaders have become convinced that Washington prioritizes bilateral trade with Beijing over security concerns about Iran, and that it therefore won’t enact serious penalties for China’s dealings with Iran. This has allowed Chinese officials to pay lip service to international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear program while quietly playing a key role in nurturing Tehran’s nuclear quest. The result is clear: when it comes to Iran, China today isn’t part of the solution; it’s part of the problem.

As David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security has noted, China is becoming Iran’s key enabler, supplying much of the equipment that Tehran needs to keep its nuclear effort up and running in the face of international sanctions. “China does not implement and enforce its trade controls or its sanctions laws adequately,” Mr. Albright argued earlier this year. Indeed, a concerted Chinese crackdown on firms involved in nuclear commerce with Iran would effectively cripple Tehran’s atomic program.

Washington, worried about potentially destabilizing economic effects, has historically shied away from putting pressure on Beijing over its ties to Iran. But if the Obama administration is serious about halting Iran’s nuclear program, it must do so by sanctioning companies like the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc, which has been developing Iran’s mammoth North Pars natural gas field since 2006, and PetroChina (which supervises the import of some three million tons of liquefied natural gas annually from Iran). Both are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and therefore subject to penalties under existing law.

Mr. Cohen’s recent jaunt to Beijing was intended to convince the Chinese government that it must decisively curtail its ties to Tehran, or face real economic costs. This message needs to be coupled with the application of concrete economic penalties — from bans on United States-based energy projects to prohibitions on financial transactions that fall under American jurisdiction — that are intended to persuade Chinese companies, including Cnooc and PetroChina, to scale back their economic contacts with Iran. At the same time, greater targeted sanctions and asset freezes are needed to bring to heel Chinese individuals and entities that are currently complicit in Iran’s nuclear advances.

After all, the last, best hope of peacefully derailing Iran’s nuclear drive lies in convincing Beijing that “business as usual” with Tehran is simply no longer possible.

Tema: China se ha convertido en un actor financiero de primer orden y, si se cumplen determinadas condiciones, podría contribuir a garantizar la estabilidad de las finanzas en regiones alejadas de su entorno geográfico.

Resumen: Este análisis señala, en primer lugar, que hace apenas cinco años China estaba poco integrada, desde el punto de vista financiero, en la economía global, con la excepción de sus ya cuantiosas reservas en divisas. En segundo término, documenta cómo, desde entonces, su peso en ese terreno ha progresado de manera espectacular, convirtiendo al país en un actor financiero de primer orden. En tercer lugar, se enumeran algunas de las condiciones que deberían cumplirse para que China pueda contribuir de manera importante a la estabilidad financiera en la UE.

Análisis: Hasta hace pocos años, los análisis sobre China tendían, en su gran mayoría, a reconocer que se había convertido ciertamente en una gran potencia industrial y comercial, pero con un peso bastante escaso en el sistema financiero global (con la importante excepción de sus ya enormes reservas en divisas). Por ejemplo, en el último tercio de los años 2000 los especialistas destacaban que China había conseguido, gracias a una tasa anual media de crecimiento del PIB que había rondado el 10% desde 1980, triplicar su peso en la economía mundial entre 1990 y 2005, hasta el 5%, mientras que, en cambio, la parte de la UE y de EEUU se había mantenido más o menos estable. También se señalaba que la contribución de China al crecimiento de la economía global era entonces relativamente pequeña: menos del 8% en 2000-2005 frente al 40% de la UE y al 20% de EEUU.

No obstante, se mencionaban tres fenómenos de enorme relieve. En primer lugar, el fuerte aumento de China en las exportaciones mundiales de mercancías, que habían pasado del 2,5% en 1993 al 8,0% en 2006, coincidiendo con una importante caída de la proporción de EEUU, Japón y la UE. En segundo término, su cada vez mayor importancia como consumidor de energía: entre 1990 y 2006 su peso relativo en el consumo mundial de energía primaria se había duplicado, mientras que su proporción del consumo de carbón había alcanzado casi el 40% del total mundial y, aspecto notable, su consumo de petróleo había pasado del 3,5% del total mundial en 1990 al 8,9% en 2006. En tercer lugar, se ponía igualmente de manifiesto que China consumía una cantidad desproporcionada de algunos minerales y metales. En 2005, se estimaba que China efectuaba entre el 20% y el 30% del consumo mundial de hierro, zinc, estaño, plomo, aluminio y cobre, entre cinco y seis veces más que su peso en la economía mundial.

Se añadía que, aunque había aumentado, la inversión directa en el extranjero de las empresas chinas apenas sumó 11.300 millones de dólares en 2005, que el turismo emisor de China, que también había crecido mucho, fue de 31 millones de visitantes (casi todos concentrados en el entorno geográfico asiático del país) y que las emisiones de dióxido de carbono habían empezado a superar a las de EEUU (lo hicieron por vez primera en 2006), lo que se achacaba en parte a la industrialización acelerada del país pero sobre todo a su enorme población.

Cuando se hacía referencia a la integración financiera de China en la economía mundial se mencionaban a menudo dos datos. Por una parte, la posición de inversión internacional (que mide el valor y la composición de los activos y pasivos financieros de un país respecto del resto del mundo). En 2005, puesto que la inversión en el extranjero (directa y, sobre todo, en cartera, además de los créditos comerciales y préstamos bancarios) era bastante escasa y ya que las inversiones extranjeras en China eran importantes (sólo la inversión directa en el país ascendió en 2005 a 47.150 millones de dólares), el saldo neto (la posición neta de inversión internacional) era positivo pero relativamente pequeño. Las estimaciones varían según las fuentes, pero las más fiables arrojan un saldo de unos 400.000 millones de dólares en 2005 (el 18% del PIB de China), una cifra importante pero menor que las de Suiza, Hong Kong, Alemania y, sobre todo, Japón (primer acreedor mundial, con 1,5 billones de dólares en ese año, equivalentes al 34% de su PIB). Por otra parte, se mencionaba, sin embargo, que China había alcanzado ya una posición sobresaliente en cuanto a sus reservas en divisas, que habían superado el billón de dólares en octubre de 2006, como consecuencia del superávit de su cuenta corriente y de las entradas de capital extranjero. Pero el fuerte ritmo de acumulación de reservas obedecía también a una política activa de contener la apreciación del yuan, que hubiese sido muy perjudicial para el sector exportador, mediante la compra masiva de moneda extranjera en los mercados de divisas. Es más, las autoridades chinas no veían con malos ojos un nivel tan alto de reservas, que, desde su punto de vista, constituía un seguro ante una eventual crisis de balanza de pagos, como la acontecida en varios países de Asia Oriental en 1997-1998.

Una integración financiera espectacular en cinco años

Desde mediados de los años 2000, la situación ha cambiado de manera extraordinaria. Se ha consolidado el peso de China en el producto bruto mundial (al pasar del 5% en 2005 al 9,3% en 2010), en las exportaciones mundiales de mercancías (el país se convirtió en el primer exportador mundial en 2009 y alcanzó una cuota del 10,4% en 2010, frente al 8,4% de EEUU) y en el consumo de energía (en 2010, realizó, en proporción del total mundial, el 20% del consumo de energía primaria, más que EEUU, el 48% del consumo de carbón, el 10,4% del consumo de petróleo y, aspecto novedoso, empezó a destacar en el consumo de gas natural, con el 3,4%). Además, el aumento del consumo chino de algunos minerales y metales se incrementó de manera notable en la segunda mitad de los años 2000: a finales del decenio, China era responsable del 40% del consumo mundial de aluminio, cobre o zinc y del 35% de la demanda mundial de níquel.

A esos datos se suelen sumar el alza en el turismo chino en el extranjero (54 millones en 2010 y una estimación de 90 millones para el año 2013, lo que hace pensar que la previsión de 100 millones que hizo en su momento la Organización Mundial del Turismo para 2020 se cumplirá muy probablemente antes) y el crecimiento de sus emisiones de dióxido de carbono (se estima que en 2010 fueron un 35% superiores a las de EEUU, cuando en 2006 eran prácticamente iguales).

En lo que atañe a la integración financiera, son de destacar, en primer lugar, que la acumulación de reservas en divisas ha continuado a buen ritmo, alcanzando nada menos que 3,2 billones de dólares en septiembre de 2011. Las razones que explican ese continuado acopio son las mencionadas anteriormente (superávit por cuenta corriente, entradas de capital y política de mantenimiento del tipo de cambio), a las que se han sumado, en los últimos meses, las previsiones de aumento de los tipos de interés y del valor del yuan, dada la persistente inflación. China tiene unas reservas muy superiores a las de otros países emergentes y desarrollados, tal y como figura en la Tabla 1, que recoge a los 10 países más importantes a este respecto. Triplica casi las reservas de Japón y supera a la cantidad acumulada por la suma de los ocho siguientes países de la lista.

Por otra parte, las inversiones directas chinas en el extranjero han aumentado de manera espectacular en el segundo lustro de los años 2000. Si en 2005 el flujo de esa inversión no llegaba a 13.000 millones de dólares, en 2010 alcanzó 68.810 millones (el 5,2% de las inversiones mundiales). En ese último año, China se convirtió en el quinto mayor inversor en el extranjero, siendo superada sólo por EEUU, Alemania, Francia y Hong Kong. Es de destacar que sus inversiones siguieron creciendo en 2008 y 2009 pese a la crisis financiera internacional.

En términos de stock, la cantidad acumulada de inversión china en el extranjero pasó de 27.768 millones de dólares en 2000 a 317.210 millones en 2010, una cantidad similar a la de Suecia, aunque muy inferior a las de Japón (831.000 millones), Alemania (1,4 billones), Francia (1,5 billones), el Reino Unido (1,7 billones) y EEUU (4,8 billones).

La distribución geográfica de la inversión directa china en el extranjero ha registrado cambios notables entre 2005 y 2010. Excluyendo Hong Kong (que recibió el 56% de esa inversión en 2010), es interesante destacar que ha aumentado sustancialmente la inversión en países asiáticos ricos en recursos (Camboya, Irán, Myanmar, Turkmenistán, etc.), que ha disminuido, en términos relativos, la inversión en Europa y América Latina, y que, en cambio, ha aumentado en América del Norte, África y Australia. En otras palabras, se ha reducido mucho la inversión en paraísos fiscales de América Latina (Islas Caimán, en particular) y han aumentado las colocaciones en países ricos en recursos o con grandes mercados y tecnologías modernas. China, por tanto, podría estar dando el salto hacia una pauta de internacionalización más propia de un país de mayor nivel de desarrollo, como hizo, por ejemplo, Corea del Sur en su momento. Un caso interesante ha sido la compra de la empresa sueca Volvo por la china Geely, que recuerda a las incursiones de las empresas japonesas y coreanas del automóvil en EEUU y Europa.

Como consecuencia del fuerte aumento de las reservas en divisas y del crecimiento sustancial de las inversiones directas en el extranjero, la posición inversora internacional de China ha mejorado apreciablemente. Como puede verse en la Tabla 2, el saldo neto positivo ha pasado de 400.000 millones (18% del PIB) en 2005 a 1,8 billones (30% del PIB) en 2010.

Si se observa la composición de los activos y pasivos, lo que destaca es que el fuerte aumento de la inversión en el extranjero, de los créditos comerciales suministrados y de las reservas en divisas (por el lado de los activos) ha compensado sobradamente el incremento de la inversión extranjera, de los créditos comerciales recibidos y de los préstamos bancarios obtenidos (por el lado de los pasivos).

Un aspecto sobresaliente es que, según los datos oficiales, la inversión en cartera, tanto saliente como entrante, es relativamente pequeña (entre 20.000 y 25.000 millones de dólares al año) y, sobre todo, muy estable entre 2005 y 2010. Sin embargo, esa situación puede cambiar a raíz de las compras de deuda soberana europea en 2011 y, si se confirma, de la implicación de China en el rescate de la UE de finales de este año.

La estabilidad de la inversión en cartera contrasta con el dinamismo que han mostrado en los últimos meses los fondos soberanos (SWF) chinos, como China Investment Corporation (CIC), SAFE y el National Social Security Fund. Entre las adquisiciones más llamativas de los fondos soberanos chinos destacó en su momento la de Morgan Stanley por CIC (5.000 millones de dólares).

¿Qué condiciones para un mayor compromiso chino con la estabilidad financiera internacional y de la UE?

Es evidente que China, cuya principal prioridad es el desarrollo económico, necesita estabilidad regional y global. Además, la lucha contra las turbulencias financieras forma parte de la estrategia china de “desarrollo pacífico”, cuya pretensión es que beneficiará al conjunto del mundo. Hasta ahora el discurso se ha concretado en actos: por ejemplo, durante las crisis asiáticas de 1997-1998, cuando China no devaluó el yuan; o con el enorme plan de estímulo fiscal de 2009-2010, que contribuyó mucho a evitar un agravamiento de la recesión internacional.

En la coyuntura actual, no es suficiente argumentar ante los chinos que la estabilidad en la UE redunda en beneficio del conjunto del mundo y, por tanto de China. Ni tampoco que la UE es destinataria del 20% de las exportaciones chinas, siendo el primer mercado exterior del país asiático, delante de EEUU (18%).

Las autoridades chinas ya han declarado que no serán “buenos samaritanos” en el rescate europeo (la ampliación de la facilidad para la estabilidad financiera o EFSF). También han señalado que no cabe esperar de China que sea ni la salvación ni la proveedora de la cura a los males europeos. En otras palabras, no son responsables ni de lejos y no tienen la solución de los problemas. Además, desean algo a cambio de su ayuda potencial (que podría ser, a falta de más detalles sobre las modalidades de expansión de la EFSF, de unos 70.000 millones de euros).

Esas condiciones podrían ser del siguiente tipo: (1) implicación de otros países importantes (EEUU, Rusia, Brasil, etc.) y del FMI; (2) parte de las obligaciones emitidas en yuanes para eliminar el riesgo de cambio; un mayor peso de China en los órganos de decisión del FMI (actualmente cuenta con menos del 4% de los derechos de voto del organismo cuando su peso en la economía mundial ronda ya el 10%); (3) la obtención del estatus, por la UE, de economía de mercado antes de 2016 (lo que dificultaría el proteccionismo comercial); y (4) menores críticas a la política de tipo de cambio del yuan (aunque son claramente menos estridentes que en EEUU).

Hay quien dice que China estaría esperando incluso obtener alguna concesión sobre el levantamiento del embargo de armas vigente desde los acontecimientos de Tiananmen en 1989. Varios países de la UE, como Francia, el Reino Unido y España, llevan tiempo defendiendo el final del embargo, pero el problema reside en que es necesaria la unanimidad de los 27 miembros.

Conclusiones: A lo largo del último lustro, China se ha convertido en una potencia financiera de primer orden. Sus reservas en divisas han crecido de manera espectacular, hasta alcanzar 3,2 billones de dólares en septiembre de 2011. Se estima que 1,1 billones están colocados en títulos de deuda del Tesoro de EEUU y que China tendría, al menos en teoría, interés en diversificar parte de esas tenencias hacia otras monedas, entre ellas, el euro. Además, la inversión directa en el extranjero alcanzó casi 70.000 millones de dólares en 2010. Aunque la inversión en cartera es todavía relativamente pequeña (al menos con los datos hasta 2010), es de destacar la creciente actividad internacional de los fondos soberanos chinos, como CIC y SAFE. En suma, China tiene una posición inversora internacional que presentaba en 2010 un saldo neto positivo de casi 1,8 billones de dólares (el 30% del PIB), sólo superado por el de Japón. Siendo el segundo país acreedor neto del mundo, está en posición inmejorable para contribuir a operaciones de financiación internacional, pese a su todavía baja renta por habitante.

Dadas las características del último plan de rescate europeo, que bien puede ser temporal, al que los propios europeos no aportan muchos fondos (ya que la ampliación del EFSF se hace mediante apalancamiento) y que descansa en la curiosa idea de que una zona rica, como la UE, necesita dinero de países de ingreso más bajo, no cabe esperar mucho entusiasmo por parte de China.

Con todo, por la cuenta que le trae, especialmente para su imagen de país responsable y para la vitalidad de su principal mercado exterior, es muy posible que China acabe contribuyendo, incluso con una cantidad importante, al fondo europeo de rescate. Sin embargo, Occidente tiene que darse cuenta que el auge de las economías emergentes, especialmente cuando se recurre a ellas en situaciones de crisis, hace imprescindible un mayor peso político de los grandes países en desarrollo en el escenario internacional. No se trata sólo de generosidad o de agradecimiento sino, sobre todo, de inteligencia.

La política de “buena vecindad” de China se ve sometida a unas presiones sin precedentes; de hecho, está en su peor momento desde el final de la Guerra Fría. Recientemente, han surgido, una tras otra, fricciones con los países vecinos.

De las disputas territoriales con Vietnam y las Filipinas en el mar de la China Meridional a las tensiones con Birmania (Myanmar) y Tailandia, unas relaciones que eran correctas, ya que no siempre amistosas, se han agriado. La decisión de Myanmar de abandonar el proyecto de presa de Myitsone, que contaba con el respaldo de China, ha asombrado a este país. Asimismo, el asesinato de trece tripulantes de un barco chino en el río Mekong en este mes de octubre sirve para recordar inequívocamente que la supuestamente pacífica frontera terrestre meridional de China, que llevaba veinte años sin causar problemas, hoy parece propia de la vecindad más hostil.

El pueblo y el Gobierno de China se sienten particularmente consternados por los asesinatos en el Mekong, que parecieron demostrar, una vez más, la incapacidad del Gobierno para proteger a sus ciudadanos contra el asesinato en el extranjero, pese a la recién conseguida categoría de potencia mundial por el país. A consecuencia de ello, se han formulado dos preguntas: ¿por qué han optado los vecinos de China por desatender sus intereses? ¿Y por qué, pese al ascenso de China, parecen sus autoridades cada vez menos aptas para garantizar la seguridad de las vidas y los intereses comerciales chinos en el extranjero?

La ansiedad de China por esos asuntos constituye la atmósfera que está inspirando la política china. Con la caída de Muamar El Gadafi del poder en Libia, las empresas chinas han perdido inversiones que ascienden a unos 20.000 millones de dólares y, según ha dado a entender el nuevo gobierno de Libia, no es probable que se recuperen. Muchos chinos se inquietaron ante la decisión de su gobierno de evacuar de Libia a los ciudadanos de China y habrían preferido medidas más audaces para proteger los activos comerciales del país allí.

Asimismo, el posterior y totalmente repentino giro radical de reconocer al Consejo Nacional de Transición rebelde como gobierno de Libia inspiró considerables burlas en el país. Al fin y al cabo, China gastó un valioso capital político al oponerse a los ataques aéreos de la OTAN al comienzo de la intervención, para acabar simplemente respaldando a las fuerzas a las que la OTAN ayudó a tomar el poder. Fue el ejemplo más transparente de la vaciedad de la utilitaria diplomacia de China, impulsada por los intereses comerciales.

Para la mayoría de los chinos, Libia es un país lejano e inalcanzable, dada la limitada capacidad de China para proyectar su poder. Así, pues, se acepta a regañadientes la insistencia en el restablecimiento de los intereses comerciales chinos, aunque no se acaba de entender, pero Myanmar y los demás países ribereños del Mekong son supuestamente los “buenos vecinos” del país y están totalmente al alcance del poder chino, por lo que la irritación ante las amenazas a los intereses del país en ellos es intensa.

Entre esos intereses figura un nuevo oleoducto que enlaza Myanmar con Kunming, la capital de la provincia de Yunnan. China está trabajando también en proyectos de conexión –a saber, una red de ferrocarriles y autopistas– encaminados a incrementar los vínculos económicos y sociales entre China y los países de la ASEAN. Los incidentes de Myitsone y del Mekong han ensombrecido ahora dichos proyectos y han despertado el temor a una reacción en cadena que podría dar al traste con los esfuerzos hechos por China durante dos decenios para lograr una integración regional más profunda.

Evidentemente, el nuevo gobierno de Myanmar no quiere provocar malestar en sus zonas fronterizas, ya inestables, donde grupos de oposición estaban aprovechando el proyecto de la presa para conseguir nuevos partidarios. Las medidas adoptadas por el nuevo gobierno para compartir el poder con las fuerzas políticas de las regiones inestables de Myanmar y debilitar, así, a los señores de la guerra, contribuyeron claramente a la decisión de detener su construcción.

Por su parte, los inversores chinos en la presa confiaron demasiado en la solidez de los vínculos bilaterales entre los dos países, por lo que descartaron totalmente los riesgos políticos del proyecto. Su conducta refleja también la garantía implícita del mercantilismo oficial del Gobierno, como también la complacencia de las empresas de propiedad estatal de China, que representan la mayor parte de las inversiones exteriores chinas. Como dan por sentado que el Gobierno las respaldará –o las rescatará, si fracasan–, pueden permitirse el lujo de adoptar una actitud despreocupada.

El incidente del Mekong constituye otra historia desalentadora. El río, que vincula a cinco países, hace mucho que es famoso como escenario de delitos trasnacionales, como, por ejemplo, el tráfico de drogas, el juego y el contrabando. El auge económico de China ha propiciado una relación cada vez mayor entre China y las economías sumergidas del Mekong. Se ha vinculado el asesinato de los 13 tripulantes del barco chino con esa tendencia, pero la mejor forma como China puede evitar tragedias similares no es la de hacer demostraciones de fuerza, sino la de crear una mayor cooperación multilateral para luchar contra el delito transnacional a lo largo del Mekong.

Los episodios de Myitsone y del Mekong ponen de relieve las relaciones repentinamente tensas de China con sus vecinos meridionales. Resulta que su política de buena vecindad ha conducido la diplomacia regional de China a aguas inexploradas.

De hecho, los vecinos de China no adoptarán una actitud positiva y digna de fiar para con los intereses chinos a no ser –y hasta– que China empiece a aportar bienes públicos esenciales: no sólo comercio, sino también una gobernación regional enteramente basada en el imperio de la ley, el respeto de los derechos humanos y el crecimiento económico regional. De lo contrario, rupturas como las de Myitsone y del Mekong volverán a producirse e intensificarán la sensación de aislamiento y pánico de China.

Si el chino será o no la primera lengua mundial en el futuro es un interrogante que se asocia a la repercusión que puede ejercer cualquier cambio en la geografía lingüística actual y corresponde a un conjunto de variables dinámicas incontrolables. El análisis lingüístico que aborda tanto el espacio poblacional de una lengua como los factores determinantes de la circulación actual de las lenguas más habladas del planeta se vincula no sólo al número de hablantes de una lengua sino también a su mercado potencial y su expansión; este último factor es crucial, porque la movilidad de una lengua es la que garantiza a corto y largo plazo su poder en el mundo.

La velocidad de los medios de comunicación en la sociedad de la información ha favorecido la aceleración de los intercambios comerciales y culturales globales, así como la expansión del monolingüismo social que desempeñan algunas lenguas como el inglés, que siendo la tercera lengua más hablada del mundo ocupa el primer puesto en el ranking. ¿Por qué este interés en saber qué lengua dominará el paisaje lingüístico de las próximas generaciones, si no es porque el lenguaje es la tecnología más sofisticada, más compleja e imprescindible para la comunicación, que exige un duro aprendizaje desde que nacemos? La pregunta que encabeza el artículo coincide con la hipótesis de que EE.UU. deje de ser la primera potencia económica mundial y su lugar sea ocupado por China, que ha conseguido elevarse a segunda potencia. Las lenguas son construcciones colectivas que crean una cultura, sobre la base de un territorio que preserva la identidad de sus hablantes y de una economía que tiende a extender sus fronteras. Forma parte de su naturaleza defenderse de aquellos actores o agentes sociales contaminantes que aprovechan su porosidad para infiltrarse en el tejido lingüístico de una lengua alterando o distorsionando sus límites hasta reemplazar unos usos por otros o desvirtuar las reglas gramaticales y sintácticas que la costumbre consolida. Ninguna lengua se puede librar del contacto ni de la hibridación medioambiental.

Las lenguas se desplazan con sus portadores y establecen rutas de una parte a otra del mundo. Pero también se dejan invadir estratégicamente por lenguas dominantes como el chino y el español en sus respectivas modalidades, el chinglish y el spanglish. El primero se extiende no sólo en las ciudades más cosmopolitas de China, donde se identifica con el mal uso del inglés, sino también en países del Sudeste Asiático. La geografía del spanglish, entendido como una fusión morfosintáctica y semántica del español con el inglés, ocupa comparativamente un territorio más amplio desde la frontera norte de México con la Baja California hasta Nueva York y Puerto Rico. Estos fenómenos refuerzan el poder del inglés como lengua dominante pese a vislumbrarse el declive del inglés angloamericano como lengua hegemónica, entre otras cosas, a causa de la actual crisis económica de Occidente y el auge de la economía china.

¿Es posible que el chino llegue a desplazar al inglés como lengua mundial dominante? En un planeta habitado por 6.950 millones de hablantes y 6.900 lenguas, la demografía y sus variables no se puede ignorar, aunque no sea decisivo: con más de 850 millones de hablantes, el chino mandarín es una lengua menos fuerte que el inglés, cuyos 328 millones de hablantes se hallan distribuidos en 57 países, y que el español con 329 millones de hablantes repartidos en 37 países. La dispersión geográfica, aunque letal para las lenguas débiles, garantiza la vitalidad de las más habladas. El inglés sigue dominando el terreno de los intercambios internacionales, el mercado editorial, la publicidad, los media, la edición y las publicaciones científicas, al igual que su distribución. A esto cabe sumar, su predominio en la era de internet: si en el 2009 el número de usuarios rondaba los 1.600 millones, 464 millones de internautas lo hacían en inglés, 321 millones eran chinos y 131 millones españoles. Si hacemos pensable la posibilidad de que el chino usurpe al inglés el poder que aún posee es porque esto podría llegar a suceder.

Para predecir cuál será la deriva del chino hay que tener en cuenta que es una lengua tonal como todas las siníticas –hay entre seis y doce modalidades, la que tiene mayor peso demográfico es el chino mandarín con 850 millones de hablantes, el wu con 77 millones, el min con 70 millones y el cantonés con 55 millones– y una estructura gramatical altamente analítica. El chino estándar es el mandarín basado en el dialecto de Pekín, idioma oficial en la República Popular de China y Taiwán, una de las cuatro oficiales de Singapur y una de las seis lenguas oficiales de la ONU. La dificultad del aprendizaje aumenta con la escritura que destaca por el uso de los sinogramas que reemplaza el alfabeto latino por un sistema logosilábico, en el que cada carácter es un concepto, cuya combinación permite formar palabras y oraciones.

This is a historic moment for the eurozone. The sovereign debt crisis has put European monetary union in jeopardy and called into question the sustainability of the European project. Given the economic and political weight of the eurozone, the crisis has the potential to match the damage wrought by the 2008 US financial crisis on the global economy. So China should welcome last week’s agreement in Brussels and, in advance of the G20′s meeting this week in Cannes, consider using its wherewithal to lend a supporting hand.

Europe is China’s largest trading partner and China is Europe’s second largest trading partner. Their bilateral dealings were valued at €363bn last year. In 2009, the onset of global recession cut China’s exports to the EU by 15.6%, resulting in a sizable surge in unemployment and factory closure in southern China. A deep financial crisis in the eurozone and the resulting reduction in spending would be felt particularly strongly in export-oriented provinces in southern China. To the extent that a supporting hand from China can contribute to a creditable resolution of the sovereign debt crisis and limit its negative impact on economic growth in the eurozone, there is little reason for China to stand on the sidelines.

Maintaining the euro as a reserve currency is in China’s interest. China currently lacks the necessary institutions that would permit the country to adopt a floating exchange rate regime with free capital flows. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, isn’t run as an independent monetary authority. And even its monopoly control over monetary policies can sometimes seem questionable. Under the prevailing institutional environment, China’s only viable option is to maintain its currency peg, but add some upward flexibility on the exchange rate.

A stable euro, underpinned by sound monetary policies of the European Central Bank, would offer China more options in managing its monetary policies. It would give Chinese policymakers time to diversify its foreign exchange reserves and to correct the imbalance in its economic structure, while creating a relatively stable economic environment that is conducive to longterm economic development.

A prosperous Europe also offers the best chance of creating a multipolar global economic system. As the US enters another election year, it is again open season on China. With Republican candidates and the Democrat-controlled US Senate clamouring to label China a currency manipulator, trade and investment frictions are bound to increase. China will need to rely on the independence and impartiality of the WTO in adjudicating any future trade disputes with the US, and only a multipolar global economic system can guarantee this.

Even as China agrees in principle that it will contribute to the European rescue plan, details of the support will need to be negotiated. For Chinese participation to receive broad political support both at home and in Europe, the rescue plan must provide sufficient safety margins for success. China cannot be expected to lose money in this venture, although it should not have the right to dictate economic policies in the eurozone.

While uncertainties can never be completely ruled out, last Thursday’s agreement represents a solid step toward resolving the crisis. China’s participation could bring a sizable amount of capital to bear and should materially improve the chance of success.

How can China help? It could contribute to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) directly or by providing it with a back-stop on request. EFSF, which is owned by eurozone governments, looks like a safe bet so long as measures can be taken to mitigate the exchange rate risks that China faces. For example, part of the contribution can be denominated in Chinese yuan. China could also contribute to a European rescue fund within the IMF.

And what would China ask in return? It could ask for the EU to recognise its market economy status. This would be a symbolic victory for China, since the EU has acted largely responsibly over trade with China in the past. And since it is symbolic, the EU could equally refuse to do so. Either way, both sides win, or at least don’t lose, on the political scoreboard.

China could use this opportunity to raise its share of voting rights in the IMF by taking over additional voting shares from European countries. This would increase China’s influence in this multilateral institution commensurate with its economic weight in the global economy. By participating in the rescue plan, China announces to the world that it is a willing and responsible stakeholder.

Europe is drowning and needs a lifeline. A series of marathon meetings this week yielded a new set of proposals, but what they depend on is cash — and lots of it, perhaps trillions of dollars — to save Greece and the European banking system and to prevent financial contagion from spreading to Spain, Italy and even France, which would destroy the euro zone as we know it. Where to turn for help? The answer is obvious: China.

Indeed, the call by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France this week to President Hu Jintao of China, seeking support for the European Financial Stability Facility, could represent a major change in the global landscape: the consolidation of China’s economic dominance at the expense of the status quo powers — the United States and Europe.

Despite the agreement among Europe’s leaders on Thursday to recapitalize banks on the Continent, the reality is that Europe cannot muster this cash on its own. In part, this is because most countries are fiscally stretched and even Germany, with a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio above 80 percent, is reaching the limits of its check-writing ability. But it is also because Germany seems reluctant to transfer resources, either directly through fiscal means or indirectly through the European Central Bank.

And with a United States essentially sidelined because of its own economic and fiscal weakness, it is even less of a surprise that the S O S is going out to China. Only China, with its $3 trillion in reserves, is now able to provide the magnitudes of relief that Europe desperately needs.

What should China do? So far, it has opted not to be an active financier of the European countries threatened by crisis. But that is increasingly becoming a less tenable position. China is the world’s major exporter, and averting economic collapse in the indebted importing countries of Europe will be very much in China’s interest.

But China has a choice. It can help Europe bilaterally by back-stopping the stability facility, as Europe has requested, or by guaranteeing to buy Italian and Spanish bonds at a rate that would keep these countries’ finances sustainable (much as the European Central Bank ought to be doing). Or it can help by providing the International Monetary Fund with additional money to, in turn, lend to Europe.

From China’s perspective, the possible advantage would be to exert power to obtain direct and concrete benefits. For example, it could ask for market economy status in Europe, which would reduce the scope for protectionist action against Chinese goods entering the European market. It could also seek to buy companies in distressed countries on advantageous terms.

The risks in this bilateral approach are considerable. It would expose China to the charge of becoming enmeshed in European politics. Domestically, it would expose the government to the charge of privileging foreign investment at the expense of investing in what is still a poor country with great development needs and challenges.

Helping Europe by strengthening the I.M.F. and increasing its lending would avoid some of these political costs, especially since China would not be directly involved in European politics and problems. But China would have to receive something considerable in return for the extra resources that it would be providing.

China should demand nothing less than a wholesale revamping of the governance of the I.M.F. to reflect the current economic realities. Governance reform can no longer be just about the nationality of the I.M.F.’s managing director but should fundamentally be about who will have the greatest voice and exercise the most power in the new world.

Today, the United States and Europe each have effective veto power in the I.M.F. because important decisions require an 85 percent share of the vote. If China were to become the I.M.F.’s major financier it should have veto power on terms equivalent to those of the United States. Europe’s power should be reduced commensurate with its transition from creditor to potential borrower status. Supplicants, China should insist, cannot have veto power in a financial institution.

The Chinese government could then trumpet a nationalist achievement — equal status as the United States, and a greater status than that of Europe, in running the world’s premier financial institution — as the return for investing its cash abroad.

These demands would be legitimate and indeed be welcome for the world because they would tether China more firmly to, and create a stake for it in, the multilateral system. Those in the United States and Europe who would resist these changes should remember that the alternatives are worse. A China that uses its might bilaterally to gain narrow political advantages would be a worrying portent for the future when China becomes economically bigger and stronger. And a China that refuses to take the phone call at all could well push Europe off the cliff. Europeans are running out of options; debtors cannot be choosers.

Eleven years ago, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 106-286, granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China. I was among the vocal opponents of this legislation, citing concerns about China’s egregious human rights record and the risks to U.S. businesses when trading with a country that plays by its own rules instead of abiding by the rule of law.

As chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan body established to monitor and address the human rights concerns raised during the debates on PNTR, I know these concerns remain as relevant today as ever. However, in the years since the granting of PNTR, China has continued to abuse the fundamental human rights of its citizens while failing to establish a fair and transparent legal system. Indeed, as I wrote these words, Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo was languishing in a Chinese prison for promoting peaceful democratic reforms, but he is just one of 1.3 billion Chinese who live under the Chinese state’s repression.

On Oct. 11, our commission issued its 10th annual report on China’s progress in human rights and rule of law. A decade since our inaugural report documented China’s failings and stagnancy in these areas, China’s human rights record remains grim and has regressed in many respects.

The 2011 report notes that China’s leaders have tightened their grip on Chinese society and grown more aggressive in disregarding the very laws and international standards that they claim to uphold. The government’s campaign to “disappear” numerous lawyers and activists following pro-democracy protests elsewhere in the world – one of China’s harshest crackdowns in recent memory – is but one example.

The commission’s 2011 report also documents ongoing abuses in the areas of religious freedom. Protestant house church members, “underground” Catholics and Falun Gong members continue to risk detention and abuse for attempting to worship freely. Tibetans and Uighurs face harsh curbs on their cultures and languages in addition to religious repression.

China’s implementation of the one-child-per-couple policy remains one of the most brutal and barbaric attacks against women and children ever. Through coercion, financial penalties and the use of forced abortion and sterilization, the Chinese government continues its population control program and limits the number of children women may bear. It is no coincidence that according to the World Bank and the World Health Organization, approximately 500 women committed suicide a day in China in 2009. The Nuremberg Nazi war crimes tribunal properly construed forced abortion as a crime against humanity, but nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China’s 30-year assault on women and children.

Women bear the major brunt of the one-child policy not only when they become mothers. Because of the male preference in China’s society and the limitation of the family size to one child, the policy has directly contributed to what is accurately described as gendercide, the deliberate extermination of a girl – born or unborn – simply because she happens to be female.

It has been noted that the three most dangerous words in China today are “It’s a girl.”

China’s workers lack freedom of association and the right to form independent unions, while poor working conditions and low wages remain rampant. The report also documents incidences of forced and child labor. And 10 years since China joined the World Trade Organization, China’s disregard for the rule of law and unfair trade practices also brings harm to U.S. companies. Tragic cases of political imprisonment abound in the report. “Disappeared” lawyer Gao Zhisheng, Catholic bishop Su Zhimin, and Mongol activist Hada are but a few of the prisoners mentioned.

The report draws on the work of the commission’s political prisoner database, a publicly available resource that documents more than 6,600 cases of political imprisonment in China. Given China’s controls over the free flow of information and lack of transparency, the true number of political prisoners in China is certain to be much higher. But our database is not simply about numbers. Each record tells the story of a person targeted by authorities for daring to exercise his rights – including lawyers, activists, religious leaders, farmers, parents, teachers and factory workers.

The Chinese government has long claimed that our report amounts to anti-China rhetoric and interference in its internal affairs. We are not, however, holding China to a unique measure but simply monitoring its compliance with the same universal human rights standards that apply to all countries. As China adopts a rhetorical strategy of claiming it abides by international law, we also hold China to its stated acceptance of international norms.

Moreover, the point of our report is not simply to single out problems, but to extend a hand to the Chinese people in their efforts to seek reform and defend their rights. To that end, each report includes recommendations for advancing the rule of law and human rights in China. They include support for legal cooperation, training for advocates to promote religious freedom, and dialogue on advancing commercial rule of law. In addition, where we see areas of potential progress, including recent reforms in the areas of criminal law and legal aid, our report notes them.

In the end, however, the good news is far outweighed by the bad, reminding us of the importance of sustained monitoring of China’s human rights record. As a nation committed to freedom, democracy and the rule of law, the United States must redouble its efforts, work harder to hold China accountable for its actions and ensure that any push for enhanced economic ties with China does not come at the expense of our own economy, national security and our commitment to help the Chinese people secure human rights protections from their own government.

Traffic around Tiananmen Square was even worse than usual last week as President Vladimir Putin rolled through town to cement the supposedly flowering Chinese-Russian relationship. A series of high-level deals were signed between Chinese and Russian state-owned enterprises and China announced a substantial infusion into the new Russian Direct Investment Fund.

While cordial, an unspoken undertone to the meetings was Russian concern about growing Chinese influence in the former Soviet Union and particularly Central Asia.

Just before his visit to Beijing, Putin had announced a desire to form a new Eurasian Union that would tie a number of former Soviet states back into the Russian orbit. Hands immediately starting wringing in Brussels. At this time of E.U. weakness, the Eurasian Union was seen to be aimed at counterbalancing Western institutions.

These concerns are largely ill-founded. While the new organization is clearly an effort by Russia to reassert authority over its old dominions, it is in fact aimed East rather than West. Russia is far more concerned by growing Chinese influence in its backyard than anything the West is throwing its way.

The core of Russia’s concerns is the slow but steady progress of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, originally set up in the post-Cold War period to define borders between its five members — China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan ( later joined by Uzbekistan).

But in the last 10 years the S.C.O. has evolved into the most interesting, and perhaps consequential, example of Chinese diplomacy. As a Chinese scholar put it to us the other day in Beijing, the organization went from being focused on regional security to honing in on regional development — a trajectory that accords tidily both with China’s and the Central Asians’ interests.

While nominally an equal partner to all members, Russia has felt like a junior partner in the S.C.O. Once one of the two poles in the world, Russia is now considered among the ranks of new rising powers — not a bad group to be in, but clearly a step down from its previous position in global affairs.

Moscow has sought to counter this by retaining links and authority among former Soviet republics. Those in Europe have now been absorbed into the European Union, but the Eurasian states have remained within the Kremlin’s sphere of influence, bound by a latticework of organizations like the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Eurasian Economic Community.

The S.C.O. was initially ignored by Russia when it was set up a decade ago, but it has steadily developed into an increasingly important actor that has become a vehicle for China’s push to develop Central Asia.

China has focused on trying to turn the S.C.O. from a security-focused organization into an economic bloc, a policy predicated on the knock-on effect that a stable and prosperous Central Asia would have on China’s underdeveloped Xinjiang Province.

Using its deep pockets to pour money into the poor and isolated Central Asian states, China has secured energy contracts, worked on hydroelectric plants and helped develop infrastructure from roads to telephone systems.

But China has gone beyond hard-nosed economics, developing a holistic strategy that attempts to bring Chinese soft power to bear on the region. China has established Confucius Institutes to teach Chinese in all the Central Asian states but Turkmenistan, and has also helped develop an S.C.O. University that brings together some 50-plus universities across China and Eurasia.

As part of a push to develop the S.C.O. as a cultural entity, as well as one focused on security and economics, these are admittedly baby steps, but there is some evidence of success. Growing numbers of Central Asian students can be found at Chinese Universities and reports from Confucius Institutes in the region point to the children of affluent families trying to learn Mandarin.

This is perhaps the greatest threat to Russia’s powerful legacy in the region. Moscow has no money to spend, so it has been happy to allow China’s investment in Central Asia, as long as Russia retains cultural predominance. That is starting to slip. Putin’s efforts at a Eurasian Union thus appear to be a rearguard action to stem the tide of increasing Chinese omnipotence in Russia’s backyard.

La discusión internacional sobre el ascenso de China se ha centrado en su creciente poderío comercial, sus ambiciones marítimas en expansión y su capacidad cada vez mayor para proyectar poder militar. Sin embargo, hay una cuestión crítica que normalmente escapa a la atención: el ascenso de China como una potencia hidrohegemónica sin antecedentes históricos modernos.

Ningún otro país alguna vez llegó a asumir semejante preeminencia ribereña en un continente mediante el control de las aguas de múltiples ríos internacionales y la manipulación de sus flujos transfronterizos. China, el constructor de represas más importante del mundo -con poco más de la mitad de las aproximadamente 50.000 represas grandes del planeta- está acumulando rápidamente influencia frente a sus vecinos al emprender proyectos masivos de ingeniería hidroeléctrica en ríos transnacionales.

El mapa acuático de Asia cambió sustancialmente después de la victoria comunista de 1949 en China. La mayoría de los ríos internacionales importantes de Asia se originan en territorios que fueron anexados por la fuerza a la República Popular de China. La Meseta Tibetana, por ejemplo, es el depósito de agua dulce más grande del mundo y el origen de los ríos más grandes de Asia, incluyendo aquellos que son el elemento vital para la China territorial y el sur y sudeste de Asia. Otros territorios chinos de estas características contienen las aguas de ríos como el Irtysh, el Illy y el Amur, que fluyen hacia Rusia y Asia central.

Esto convierte a China en la fuente de flujos de agua transfronterizos a la mayor cantidad de países del mundo. Sin embargo, China rechaza la idea misma de compartir el agua o de una cooperación institucionalizada con los países que se encuentran en el cauce de los ríos.

Si bien los vecinos ribereños en el sudeste y sur de Asia están obligados a cumplir pactos vinculantes en materia de aguas que negociaron entre sí, China no tiene un solo tratado de aguas con algún país co-ribereño. De hecho, con su postura de no ceder nada, China es socio para el diálogo pero no miembro de la Comisión del Río Mekong, lo que subraya su intención de no regirse por las reglas de la comunidad de la cuenca del Mekong o asumir alguna obligación legal.

Peor aún, al mismo tiempo que promueve el multilateralismo en la escena mundial, China le ha dado la espalda a la cooperación multilateral entre estados de la cuenca del río. Los países que están en la zona inferior del Mekong, por ejemplo, ven la estrategia de China como un intento por “dividir y conquistar”.

Si bien China favorece públicamente las iniciativas bilaterales por sobre las instituciones multilaterales en lo que se refiere a las cuestiones del agua, no ha mostrado ningún entusiasmo real por una acción bilateral trascendente. En consecuencia, el agua se ha convertido, cada vez más, en una nueva división política en las relaciones del país con vecinos como India, Rusia, Kazajstán y Nepal.

China desvía la atención de su reticencia a compartir el agua, o a aceptar una cooperación institucionalizada para controlar los ríos comunes de manera sustentable, haciendo alarde de los acuerdos que ha firmado para compartir estadísticas de flujo con los vecinos ribereños. No se trata de acuerdos para cooperar en materia de recursos compartidos, sino más bien de pactos comerciales para vender datos hidrológicos que otros países río arriba ofrecen gratis a estados río abajo.

De hecho, al trasladar la construcción desenfrenada de represas de ríos internos a ríos internacionales, China ahora se encuentra atrapada en disputas relacionadas al agua con casi todos los estados co-ribereños. Esas disputas seguramente empeorarán, dado el nuevo interés de China de construir mega-represas -un interés que está muy bien simbolizado por su última incorporación en el Mekong: la Represa de Xiaowan de 4.200 megavatios, que eclipsa a la Torre Eiffel de París en altura, y una represa de 38.000 megavatios planeada en el Brahmaputra en Metog, cerca de la frontera en disputa con India-. La Represa de Metog será dos veces más grande que la Represa de las Tres Gargantas de 18.300 megavatios, actualmente la más grande del mundo, cuya construcción generó el desarraigo de por lo menos a 1,7 millones de chinos.

Asimismo, China ha identificado otro sitio para una mega-represa en el Brahmaputra en Daduqia que, al igual que Metog, es para aprovechar la fuerza de una caída de casi 3.000 metros en la altura del río cuando da un giro abrupto en dirección sur desde la cadena del Himalaya en India, formando el cañón más largo y más escarpado del mundo. El Cañón del Brahmaputra -dos veces más profundo que el Gran Cañón en Estados Unidos- tiene las reservas de agua sin explotar más importantes de Asia.

Los países que probablemente sufran la peor parte de un desvío tan masivo de aguas son aquellos que están ubicados más lejos río abajo, en ríos como el Brahmaputra y el Mekong -Bangladesh, cuyo futuro en sí está amenazado por el clima y el cambio ambiental, y Vietnam, un bol de arroz de Asia-. Las apropiaciones de aguas por parte de China en el río Illy amenazan con convertir el Lago Balkhash de Kazajstán en otro Mar de Aral, que se ha reducido a menos de la mitad de su tamaño original.

Por otra parte, China ha planeado la “Gran Ruta Occidental”, la tercera pata propuesta del Gran Proyecto de Desvío de Aguas Sur-Norte -el programa de transferencia  entre ríos y entre cuencas más ambicioso que alguna vez se haya concebido-, cuyas dos primeras patas, que involucran ríos internos en la zona central de la etnia Han de China, supuestamente estarán terminadas, según lo proyectado, de aquí a tres años. La Gran Ruta Occidental, centrada en la Meseta Tibetana, está destinada a desviar aguas, inclusive de ríos internacionales, al Río Amarillo, el principal río de la zona norte de China -que se encuentra bajo estrés hídrico- que también se origina en el Tíbet.

En un momento en que su industria hoy domina el mercado global de equipamiento de energía hidroeléctrica, China también ha surgido como el mayor constructor de represas en el extranjero. Desde la zona de Cachemira en manos de Pakistán hasta los estados en disputa de Kachin y Shan de Birmania, China ha ampliado su construcción de represas a zonas en disputa o desgarradas por la insurgencia, a pesar de las reacciones violentas locales.

Por ejemplo, unidades del Ejército Popular de Liberación participan en la construcción de represas y otros proyectos estratégicos en la región agitada de mayoría chiíta de Gilgit-Baltistan en la zona de Cachemira controlada por Pakistán. Y la construcción de represas por parte de China en el interior de Birmania para generar energía para exportar a provincias chinas ha contribuido recientemente a renovados combates sangrientos, poniendo fin a un alto el fuego de 17 años entre el Ejército para la Independencia de Kachin y el gobierno.

Como sucede con sus disputas territoriales y marítimas con India, Vietnam, Japón y otros, China intenta alterar el status quo en los flujos de ríos internacionales. Por ende, persuadir a China de frenar cualquier apropiación unilateral futura de aguas compartidas se ha vuelto esencial para la paz y la estabilidad en Asia. De lo contrario, China probablemente se erija en el dueño de los grifos de Asia, adquiriendo así una tremenda influencia sobre el comportamiento de sus vecinos.

Lord Ye, it is said, loved dragons so much that he had them carved on his wine vessels and personal accessories and even made them the theme of his interior decoration. One day a real dragon came down to check things out, pressing its nose up against Lord Ye’s window while its tail swished about outside. Lord Ye, scared out of his wits, turned around and fled.

I am reminded of the story as I observe the centennial of China’s 1911 revolution, the series of uprisings that brought down the Qing dynasty and established a democratic republic. The government loves the hoopla, which culminates Monday, as long as it can invent it and control it. But when the real thing shows any sign of approaching, it panics.

In the end, the celebration has revealed less about 1911 than about Beijing’s fear of change. Sanctioned commemorative displays tend to be showy distractions that avoid any reference to the transformative effects of the revolution.

One example is the return of the Zhongshan jacket — better known in the West as a “Mao jacket” but introduced by Sun Yat-sen, the hero of 1911. Only this one is 14-feet tall with buttons 5-inches wide. The jacket was designed for display all around the country in the centennial year and will be submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records. Another example is the 80-foot-high stone sculpture of Sun Yat-sen’s wife, Soong Ching-ling, in Zhengzhou. Its base, which covers an area of 8,000 square feet, is intended to serve as a conference hall that can accommodate 600 people.

Then there’s the photo exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in New York titled “China in Development 1911-2011.” The show claims to reflect the course of China’s development over the last 100 years — but there is no Great Leap Forward, no Cultural Revolution, no Tiananmen protests.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Chinese history has never opened its door to democracy. As 1911 demonstrated, democracy enters China only by smashing down the door. The years of intellectual ferment that followed, from 1912 to 1927, marked perhaps the period of greatest freedom in 20th-century China. In that era of social activism and freedom of speech, an immense variety of political parties and organizations played a role in society. Today, the eight so-called “democratic” parties are just helpmates to the Communist Party.

The freedoms of the early Republican period did not last. They were strangled in the cradle, and the guiding principles and separation of powers that Sun Yat-sen espoused perished with his passing. China removed its imperial autocrat’s hat in 1911, but after civil war and war with Japan, it donned the new costume of state dictatorship in 1949.

As the centennial approached, many Chinese people wondered out loud how things might be today if that infant democracy had been allowed to grow up. Thinking back to the corruption at the end of the Qing dynasty and the heightened tensions on the eve of the 1911 revolution, they saw a mirror image of the realities of China today, with its corruption and inequity.

Some went so far as to post such blunt statements on the Internet: “On the 100th anniversary, we await a revolution that will overturn the status quo.”

Realizing the danger, and rattled by a string of social conflicts in recent years, the Beijing government has clamped down on any discussion of democracy or revolution, whether it be references to the liberalizing wave sweeping the Middle East or comments about China itself. When the National People’s Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference met in Beijing this spring, police surveillance was elevated, with round-the-clock patrols at intersections and on major shopping streets. At great expense, three-quarters of a million people were mobilized in community-watch activities.

Liang Qichao, a key reform figure in the late-19th century, once said that the measures taken by the Qing government to guard against popular unrest were infinitely more elaborate than those of advanced countries. Over a hundred years later, China remains the leader in efforts to forestall popular protest.

So it is with only superficial gestures that our officials commemorate 1911. They claim to be celebrating 1911, but in fact they are hailing 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.

In Wuhan, the birthplace of the 1911 uprising, police were directed to reinforce their patrols between Aug. 27 and Oct. 10. Apart from the several thousand officers conducting patrols each day, 100 paramilitary police and 200 special police armed with submachine guns have been assigned to street duty. A quarter of a million surveillance cameras watch every corner 24 hours a day — all in the name of “creating a peaceful environment for the centennial.”

I have no doubt that Lord Ye loved dragons — so long as they were purely ornamental. Nor do I doubt that our government wants to commemorate the 1911 revolution — so long as the tributes are confined to decorative knickknacks, or to flights of fancy in interior design.