Many consider China to be the leader in responding to global warming because of its shift in energy production from coal to solar. It sells more solar panels in the U.S. than American companies do. It appears to be seriously responding to the devastating smog levels in Beijing and taking other measures to curtail carbon emissions from the fastest growing giant economy in the world. Nevertheless, China continues its relentless project of industrialization.
As a result, a new class of middle class, wealthy executives, and a super-rich entrepreneurial class has emerged in China, not unlike those in the U.S. China is clearly on a path to becoming a major world economic power. Economic dominance usually leads to the growth of military institutions. If the history of European colonialism and that of U.S. imperialism are any measure, the next step is military aggression to secure newly won economic dominance. It would seem that China is well on the way to emulating imperial strategies of the recent past.
Economic Imperialism Then and Now
Amanda Erikson has reported in the Washington Post a striking example of growing Chinese economic expansion in Asia. A Chinese real estate development company is developing “Forest City,” a huge complex of “residential skyscrapers, malls, parks, and a Jack Nicklaus designed golf course.” The aging Mahathir Mohamad, leader of the current Malaysian government, has vowed to review the project, fearing excessive Chinese influence in his nation as well as potential huge debt. Sound familiar?
The U.S. has engaged in some extremely aggressive clandestine strategies to achieve economic dominance of not-so-industrialized nations, reducing them to political dependents. Do you remember John Perkins’ 2004 book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man? It was a personal memoir of his career as an economic hit man for the U.S. government and corporate interests. His goal was to rope leaders of nations such as Philippines, Columbia, etc., into huge development projects that provided U.S. corporations with great profits while indebting the “client nation” to the U.S. That strategy enabled the U.S. to subordinate those governments through debt and virtually dictate their foreign policy. If the subject nation’s leader refused such deals, he was likely to die in a mysterious plane crash or other “mishap” at the hands of men Perkins described as the “Jackals.”
Economic Injustice Causes Climate Chaos
Well, I know of no Chinese “Jackals,” but the rest of the Chinese economic expansionism seems much the same as twentieth-century U.S. imperial strategy. What is most disturbing to me in all this is that the Chinese, like every other industrial nation today, is behaving as if there were no climate crisis, as if there were no threat to the entire Earth system on which we all depend for sustenance and survival.
Whatever the specifics of the relations between nation-states and corporate economic expansionism – such as the U.S. corporate state or the Chinese state-capitalism, or any other variant of institutionalized compulsive economic growth – the outcome is the same. Greater concentration of wealth and more investment in capital-intensive economic development projects serve the interests of the wealthy and exploit the labor of the poor and working populations. In the process, they accelerate climate chaos and ecological devastation.
Growing practices and policies of economic injustice by cooperating corporate and government institutions directly causes the growing destruction of local and regional living Earth systems. That, in turn, subjects the entire Earth system to further destabilization as it enters the new geologic era, the Anthropocene. Worldwide, the most powerful institutions, both public and private, equivocate, deny, and sustain utopian illusions of never-ending economic growth and political power. This cannot end well.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 