Two centuries have passed since Lord Amherst made a pit-stop at St Helena on his way back from a failed trade mission to China, and was told by the exiled emperor of the French: “Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.”
Much water has flowed down the Yellow River and other streams since. Napoleon died shortly of suspected poisoning; Amherst became governor-general of India and expanded the British empire beyond the Brahmaputra on to the banks of the Irawaddy to make the famous remark, “The emperor of China and I govern half of the human race and yet we find time for breakfast.” The empire collapsed after a century and half of lording over a quarter or more of the world; the US rose from its ruins as the western superpower and held sway for half a century and in half the world; Soviet Russia challenged it, overstretched itself and collapsed; communists took over China and are now claiming to be making it a superpower militarily, scientifically, technologically and geostrategically.
Yet the wake-up and the shake-up that Bonaparte talked about hasn’t come about. Wake-up signs were detected early this century after China caught the global optics with an Olympics in Beijing, some bullying about in the South China Sea, a bit of sabre-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, and a little muscle-flexing against India on the Himalayan peaks. Geopolitical and strategic scholars have since been spending much of their waking hours analysing China’s every factor and action that could make it a superpower—its techno excellence, its fast-growing missile might, its ocean-going navy, its command over strategic minerals, its control of the global trade chains, its fast-growing economy, its ever-running factories, and its overall socio-economic resilience. All of these, we were told, would soon give the US a run for its greenbacks, industrial might, stealth bombers, space missiles, and its much-resented political will to command lesser lands into submission.
But the dragon is still sleeping like a giant Kumbhakarna or, at best, yawning. The problem of this somnolence is easily diagnosed. China may have all the attributes of a superpower—money, minerals, missiles, manufacturing plants, digital skills and even AI wizardry, but it lacks two things. One, the political will to command countries. Two, the soft skills that a superpower needs for making the rulers of submitting states feel comfy in its tent—a sort of Pax Sinica, much like Pax Britannica or Pax Americana.
Look at how Beijing is responding to the Connecticut Yankees’ war against the Achaemenian ayatollahs, who had been their friends. The self-styling superpower hasn’t been able to lift even a diplomatic finger, let alone a military one, to save Iran, or even to persuade the trigger-happy Don to stop shooting and try talks.
This despite China being hit directly by the blockade of the Hormuz Strait. Much of the oil that greases China’s much fabled industrial machine comes through the strait. Yet China has meekly accepted the fait accompli, and started looking towards its only strategic ally, Russia, for oil.
Indeed, Cold War history tells us that superpowers are loath to confront each other militarily, but fight only through proxies. So it might be with China. But where are China’s client states who would take up cudgels on its behalf?
China is yet to develop strategic stake in distant lands, and defend them against others. Till it does, it will remain a sleeping Rip Van Winkle with his trusty musket rusting away, and decades of eventful history passing him by.
prasannan@theweek.in