China: you can’t teach an old dog, new tricks

Despite its glossy, glitzy exterior, modern China’s interior remains the same (certainly at government level).

This much can be seen from the fact that Obama’s inauguration speech was partially censored (for the full story see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7841580.stm ).

When people talk of global threats, the top three are usually:

—international Islamic extremism;

—Iran; and

—Russia.

These are all potent and real threats, but so is China.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that they are a nuclear state, have shipped arms to rogues states such as Zimbabwe in the past and continue to align themselves with North Korea.

They are also the manufacturing heart of the world. We often get anxious (and rightly so) about energy insecurity from countries such as Russia and the OPEC nations but we should also be aware of the economic insecurity China could cause if they stopped manufacturing exports tomorrow. Arguably it would harm them as much as other countries around the world as their economy is export-dependent (calculated to be 20.8% of the total economy in 2007).

But the symbolism would be immense. It would show how powerless the Anglosised world was and could lead to discontent across the globe.

For this reason the Chinese dragon must be tamed.