China’s ascent signifies the rise of the ‘big brother watching you’ security state
By Zafar Anjum
27 Oct 2009
There is a think tank called Project for the New American Century. One of its fundamental postulates is that American leadership is good for the world.
That may be the case, though a large part of the world would disagree with this position, especially those who see America as the global policeman, the security state that uses its force to implement the corporate agenda on behalf of the global elite.
China, as the project views it, is no doubt a growing world power. But despite its economic muscle, China is not favoured to assume a role of global leadership (even though China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council). The reason for denying China this role is the country's political system. Lacking a Western style democracy, China is supposed to be in a state of ‘trapped transition’. One of the arguments favouring this view is that China’s political set up will limit its growth, ensuing from the argument that there are limits to developmental autocracy.
This view might sound sexy but it defies logic. I am saying this from a historical point of view.
In every stage of historical development, different forms of government have prevailed. Soon after the Industrial Revolution, Britain, and other European nations, made themselves rich through imperialism—trading companies with armies setting up colonies to siphon off the colonies’ wealth to their mother countries.
After the French Revolution, the stage was set for the idea of nation states and democracies--kings and queens with the divine right to rule were replaced by parliaments and constitutions. Between the two world wars, this finally led to the rise of America—as a liberal democracy at home and as an neo-imperialistic global power gradually dominating the world through the MNCs, led by its military industrial complex. It became the hotbed of innovations—both cultural and material—and used the MNCs to spread globalisation after vanquishing its rival Socialism as an alternative system.
The IT revolution that started nearly three decades ago has given rise to the all-seeing, all knowing security state. What about democracy itself after the end of the cold war? Many, including legendary novelist and essayist Gore Vidal in the US and novelist and activist Arundhati Roy in India, see democracy as it is practised in their respective countries today as a system that arrogates people’s right to push through the corporate world’s agenda (facilitated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund [IMF] and World Trade Organisation [WTO]). In the process, all checks and balances of the executive and judiciary and also of the media have been compromised. The corporate has co-opted all branches of the democracy.
China’s time has come
China’s meteoric rise as the manufacturing hub of the world and as the third largest economy of the world (it will be the second largest in the next three years) has placed it in a unique position to dominate the world in the age of ‘Orwellian security state’. And to dominate in this ‘environmentally challenged’ new world, China does not need to wage wars like America. The country is building up its sphere of influence through selective investments all over the world--right from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Iran, Russia and Africa.
This is happening at a time when America is involved in a bleeding war on terror, and is hugely in debt, especially after the financial crisis of 2008-09. The American middle class has been hollowed out (downward mobility is now a mass phenomenon), thanks to outsourcing, increased immigration of foreign workers and policies of globalisation (closing factories in America to open them in cheaper locations such as China).
In the next part of this blog, we will see how China is using IT to build itself as the next America.
Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia dot com. These are his personal views.
