Whether China is or is yet to be, or if it even wants or wants not to be a superpower are not the important questions to me. One way or the other, the answer is or will be yes. An important question for me is, how will China manage its increasingly powerful role in the world while also managing the consumption requirements of its increasingly demanding and aggressive population.
Of course, controlling the flow of information — internet censorship, for example — within and without of the country, will be key to its strategy of ascent to the highest heights of global power. But even censorship and governmental intimidation and societal manipulation will serve little purpose when the country’s water wells run dry from its hyper-industrialization and the ongoing desertification of large swaths of the country. When this happens we can certainly expect an explosive rise in the price of global food commodities. And as we’ve seen in our very recent past, when food prices rise beyond the reach of the least affluent, tempers rise right along with them.
And when tempers rise…
Governments fall.
Resource Wars are inevitable, and I foresee China opening up the first major front in the assault.
Exactly when this will all happen?
Now, that is the question.
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Look it up, folks. It’s all out there.
Scary stuff, for sure.
But scary as it is, it’s all delectable fodder for the imagination
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I read a novel, in paperback (all I can recall is the cover was, surprise, red) around 15 years ago, and it was set in the future when China ruled the world. I’ve been trying to figure out what that book was for several years, with no luck. You’re right, the rise of China has a lot of implications for fiction writers. It has a lot of implications, period. It seems they are determined to make all the same mistakes the Western world did around 1880 onwards, only bigger and “better.” (Like ecological messes, for one.)
Yeah, it’s train wreck waiting to happen. There are some good blogs out there that are really close to all that’s going on in China and, in all honesty…scare me.
If you ever remember the name of the book, please share it with us.
Thanks, Laura.
Likewise if anyone has a clue to what book that would be, I’d be forever grateful!