When China was awarded the 2008 Olympics it was considered a landmark in that nation’s extraordinary economic development. That it put on a well organised showpiece Olympics and swept the medals table in the process merely emphasised the growing economic status of the country. In sporting terms China will continue to surge ahead on all fronts simple because sport is state sponsored and sporting success is considered, as it is for all countries but to even a greater extent, a badge of honour and a statement of national virility. In recent weeks Chinese sports stars have excelled in both snooker and tennis, two sports that have traditionally been beyond their sphere of operations.

Now there must be considered no sports beyond China’s reach and with their almost militaristic sporting culture and state funded infrastructure, expect China to dominate the London Olympics next year and for many Olympics to come.

All this sporting prowess is not new to those from the international table tennis community. We have had to live with Chinese domination in this sport for decades. We have first hand knowledge as to the massive resources and state dedication that go into creating this dominance and we know the near impossibility of matching it. If we train for six hour a day, they will train for twelve. If we have twenty promising youngsters in the national squad, they will have twenty thousand. In table tennis, it is simply not a level playing field. Other sports will soon learn this reality.
Behind this sporting resurgence lies the Chinese economic juggernaut. Recently fated in Washington by the Obama administration, who were desperate for economic and political cooperation on all fronts, China is now a world player of the first magnitude. It is already ranked the number two economy in the world and is expected to surpass even the mighty US economy in a decade or two. It is not for nothing that they are called the new workshop of the world, but don’t expect the Chinese to be content with manufacturing low budget bits of plastic. Through their own scientific expertise, with a little bit of industrial espionage thrown in, China will soon be matching the US, Japan and Europe in every field of high technology production. Micro-chip technology, robotics, genetic and biological engineering you name it and China will soon be at the forefront.

With China’s staggering growth rates have come an equally staggering accumulation of foreign assets; foreign currencies, real estate, commodities and arable land. As one journalist astutely noticed, it is no longer simply Made in China but now more accurately, Bought by China. So dramatic has its economic clout become that it is single-handedly rescuing the European Union from bankruptcy, buying up packages of Spanish, Portuguese and Greek debt and striking trade deals with Europe that have literally prevented some of the Euro-zones more desperate economies from going under. Even the German powerhouse the economic motor of Europe, has remained solvent largely through its high value exports to China. Australia avoided the worst ravages of the recent global meltdown via its booming commodity trade with China.
America has relied on China to drag the world economy out of recession. Whichever way you look, China is at the centre of global economic activity.

How should we respond to China’s dramatic and apparently irresistible rise to superpower status? Judging by the reams of commentary in the Western press most journalists display a mixture of awe and dread. (See Madeleine Bunting’s article in The Guardian 24/1/11) But their true feelings and those of the wider population I suspect is one of fear – fear that Europe is irrevocably declining, fear that the Anglo Saxon world will no longer be top dog, fear that Asians will out-perform Europeans educationally, industrially and commercially. All these fears are well founded but only if you view the world from a Eurocentric or a purely Anglo-Saxon perspective. Seen from an internationalist perspective the resurgence of Asia, free at last from its colonial shackles, is a great step forward for humanity.

Christopher Hitchens and his ilk might disagree, arguing perhaps that China’s economic might does nothing to further the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is a seductive argument at first glance but it doesn’t hold up particularly well to closer scrutiny. Hitchens, in his noble crusade to uphold and extend the humanism of the European Enlightenment all too easily sidesteps the butchery and barbarism that was committed in the name of those ideals. Slavery, colonial oppression, racism, and neo colonial wars have all been executed under the umbrella of the Enlightenment.

We might find it useful to remind ourselves that more bombs were dropped on Vietnam and Cambodia during their respective wars for national liberation than in the entire savagery of the Second World War and all by the bastion of democracy that Hitchens holds so dear – the United States of America. Remember too that during that neo-colonial act of barbarity, the US still denied its own black citizens their basic civil rights. Indeed, in the year of my birth, the lynching of black Americans was still in full flow with barely a murmur of dissent from the good enlightened citizens of middle America. Remember too, that while plucky democratic Britain was fighting the devilish Nazis for the democratic soul of Europe, the British government still denied India and its other colonies their right to self determination. Whatever failings China may have on the democratic front, we in the enlightened West are hardly in a position to take the moral high ground.

And while on the subject of Europe’s supposed moral superiority over the Asiatic hordes, let us not forget the despicable actions of British colonialism in China itself. Consider the question of opium just to put things in their true historical perspective. Chris Harman, writing in his excellent, A People’s History of the World puts the matter most succinctly;

The wealth of China had excited the greed of western merchants from the time of Marco Polo in the 13th century. But they faced a problem. While china produced many things Europeans wanted, Europe did not produce much the Chinese wanted. The British East India Company set out to rectify this by turning wide areas of the newly conquered lands of India over to the cultivation of a product that creates its own demand opium. By 1810 it was selling 325,000 kilos of the drug a year through Canton, and soon turned China’s centuries old trade surplus into a deficit. When Chinese officials tried to halt the flow of opium, Britain went to war in 1839 for the right to create addiction.P359

After a series of wars the Chinese authorities were finally subdued British naval technology and superior fire power being the deciding factors. Faced with the humiliation of defeat at the hands of a European power, the Chinese peasants began their own rebellions against their corrupt and backward leaders. Under the catch-all heading of the Tai ping rebellion there was a concerted effort to bring in a more modern and egalitarian system of government to China. It should be no surprise to those that know their history which side the British took. Harman explains,
A reorganised imperial army financed by Chinese merchants, provided with modern weapons by Britain and France and assisted by foreign troops under a Major Gordon began to push its way up the Yangtze. Nanking finally fell, with 100,000 dead in 1864. Western capitalist states had helped stabilise the old pre-capitalist order in China, allowing it to survive another 50 years. By doing so, they helped ensure that, while Western Europe and North America advanced economically, China went backwards. P361

Little wonder that when western governments and political commentators lecture modern day China about human rights, the Chinese officials bristle with indignation. Just underneath the cleverly concocted democracy story that we love to tell ourselves lies a very different reality, one of a rapacious, totally unaccountable military-industrial complex that still thrives on foreign wars and armament sales to any and every dictator that has the ability to pay. Just below the surface of our oh-so-civilised democracy lies a web of criminal mafia style activity involving the multi billion pound illegal drug market, the ever expanding pornography industry and the closely associated people smuggling trade, all of which seems to exit with very little official sanction. Lying just beneath the surface of the Western democracy that Hitchens holds so dear are the very undemocratic tax havens where trillions of dollars of public money are regularly spirited away from the eyes of the government tax collectors. And just below our much heralded Western veneer of democracy lies a network of unelected media barons who are able to mould public opinion and bully and intimidate nationally elected governments.

All of this we would be well to remember before lecturing the Chinese on their human rights record, limited and flawed as it may be. No, for genuine internationalists the central dynamic to keep at the fore of our thinking is just how quickly this strange hybrid of Chinese socialism and state directed capitalism is dragging tens of millions of citizens out of rural poverty and into the modern world. As for China, so for India. This is not a cause for doom and gloom, nor for a dread of what the future might bring. This surely is a cause for celebration that, after centuries of European colonial despotic rule, the peoples of Asia are finally in a position to shape their own destiny. Two fifths of human-kind is awakening. Africa and South America are also stirring. The task of internationalists is to ensure that the next Enlightenment is not only at a much higher level, but that it embraces all of humanity and not just the Anglo-Saxon world. As for China, it will rightfully insist on being at the negotiating table when the next tentative step towards world governance can no longer be postponed. What is equally certain is that no one nation, however powerful, can resolve the problems piling up on the global agenda.