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Andrew Pickford[1]
As China moves towards a blue water navy – including aircraft carrier capabilities – writing a book on China’s glorious naval past was always going to gain attention. Accordingly, Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World – published originally in 2002 – paints a picture of an earlier time when, based on its highly advanced maritime capabilities, China was poised to become a global power. And, as interesting as the book is, the reader is left with questions as to China’s current trajectory. These questions are perhaps more relevant today than when the book was originally published.
Menzies’ career with the Royal Navy gives him solid grounding on the practicalities of long sea-voyages, which can prove extremely useful when researching clues over half a millennium old. Piecing together these clues has been made difficult by the ability of Chinese rulers to clear the slate of the past. Yet, while history reveals a great deal about China’s earlier naval capabilities, it importantly illustrates that China can be a centre of technological innovation while simultaneously being able to organise itself to support vast expansion and exploration.
In 2005, China is attempting to transform itself into a global power. In reaching for this goal, its success – epitomised by the growing chorus of ‘rising China’ prophets – is feared more than its potential failure. However, failure would have enormous global implications. Furthermore, it could severely impact upon Australia’s economy and regional outlook. Menzies’ history of Chinese maritime capabilities can offer a window into earlier periods of China’s expansion and contraction.
Today, as it has in the past, China has accomplished significant technological success. As in earlier times, it is also confronting considerable internal challenges. Ultimately, the dual demands of implementing, and integrating, technological advances while maintaining societal cohesion will determine China’s success or failure. It will also impact the ongoing relationship China has with states on its periphery, such as Australia. While these relationships are mainly economic at present, they may evolve as the century progresses.
Ever since Deng Xiaoping shed the restrictions of communism, China has enjoyed high-levels of economic growth. This did not truly register as an important issue until the North American summer of 2005. With high-energy prices and US concerns over Chinese military build-up, a Chinese company – Chinese National Offshore Oil Company – placed a bid for the US energy firm Unocal. The resulting political storm in Washington DC moved China’s economic expansion from the business pages to the front pages. Though not necessarily well understood, China’s global expansion became a topic of much discussion.
Menzies’ cataloguing of China’s forgotten maritime expeditions in the 1400s are evidence of an earlier period of global reach and strategic power. These voyages are important to China, not only for their historical value, but also for their psychological impact and contemporary use as a tool of statecraft. What is most relevant is how the story of these expeditions has the potential to shift the paradigm of China’s traditional sphere of influence.
On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals [including Zheng He]. Their mission was ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas’ and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.[2]
Menzies meticulously retraces the voyages of this fleet. Yet, after examining his careful documentation of medieval Chinese naval superiority, a number of questions emerge. Will China’s naval forces ever again venture as far as those in the 1400s? In the coming century, will China emerge as a superpower? Can economic growth absorb millions of Chinese peasants displaced from their land?
Answers to these questions largely lie in how the Chinese leadership deals with internal challenges over the next decade.
China is in the process of reorganising itself to interact and engage with the outside world.[3] An emerging, ambitious space program is evidence of the scope of its planned reach. Yet, at the same time China builds these capabilities, it must consider internal issues which ultimately have the potential to undermine its planned space exploration and, importantly, the state itself.
A number of critical, albeit underreported, problems include:
• Water Shortages. China’s demand for water in the coming century could become even more pressing than that for energy. Rapid industrialisation has degraded the environment and placed competing demands on water resources. The Vice-Minister for Construction, Qui Baoxing, told a water conference on 1 November 2005: ‘China was facing a water crisis more severe and urgent than any other country in the world’. These comments are extremely revealing, as the construction ministry is responsible for supplying water to residents.
China’s per capita water availability is about a quarter of the world average. It is expected to get worse, partly due to falling groundwater tables. Several solutions are being pursued. Vice-Minister Qui noted: ‘The urban wastewater treatment rate will be raised from the current 45.6 per cent to 60 per cent in five years, with major cities reaching 70 per cent’. Furthermore, market mechanisms are to be introduced to the urban water industry. Vice-Minister Qiu said that the government welcomed foreign investment to bring in cutting-edge technologies and management methods into China.[4]
• Provincial Disparity. While China’s coastal provinces enjoy a large percentage of national economic growth, a number of its border provinces are experiencing problems which could quickly spread and become national crises. The North-West province of Xinjiang is one such province which may be prone to civil unrest. It has an arid climate, significant Muslim population and a number of valuable, and sought after, natural resources including oil. In this province, water is an ongoing issue; the growing demand from the extractive industries may make this worse. This could in turn influence population and migration patterns.
Xinjiang and other border provinces are set to become more influenced by China’s industrialisation. This ranges from growing demand for natural resources to the increasing reach, and influence, of Beijing. If border provinces do not share in greater prosperity, there is greater likelihood of civil unrest. This is especially true of regions with large minority groups that do not share Beijing’s vision for the future.
• Banking Stability. China has commenced the process of partially privatising some of its debt-laden, state-owned banks. Its banking sector has been criticised for increasing the amount of speculative capital flowing into overheating industries. It is believed that these banks respond to government policies to the detriment of prudent commercial practices. Accordingly, on 27 October 2005, the initial public offering of China Construction Bank attracted much attention and outside interest.
On 29 October 2005, The Economist categorised the plans to partly-privatise China’s banks as a calculated risk: ‘By rushing poorly reformed banks to market and sucking in a bit of money and know-how (not to mention greater scrutiny) from foreign investors, it [China] hopes to improve them sufficiently and sufficiently rapidly before the economy runs into a headwind. The size of that gamble should not be underestimated.’
• Energy and Infrastructure. Energy demand in China has attracted a great deal of media attention. For Australia, this has been partly responsible for feeding ongoing economic growth. In 2004, China installed around 50,000 megawatts of power generating capacity. This is the equivalent of 50 new plants of 1,000 megawatts each. In 2005, China planned to install a further 60 power plants, of which two were to be nuclear, the balance coal-fired.
Despite the low numbers of planned nuclear plants, it is clear that, in the long-term, China’s energy strategy will incorporate a much higher percentage of nuclear power. The speed at which it makes a shift to nuclear will have a number of implications for infrastructure usage. At present, around 40 per cent of China’s rail system is devoted to transporting coal to power stations and factories.[5] Should nuclear power be adopted on a widespread basis the role of the internal transportation system will change markedly. Transporting the inputs for a nuclear power station is much less than that for a comparable coal power station. Yet, before this transition takes place, infrastructure bottlenecks could severely limit China’s industrial capability.
• Population Movement. One of the key problems facing China is controlling the large flow of rural peasants into urban areas. The Chinese Communist Party has traditionally limited the unauthorised free movement of people. However, on 2 November 2005 it was announced that 11 Chinese provinces would blur the line between rural and urban residents. The reforms are expected to grant people from rural areas all the political, educational and social security benefits of their urban counterparts. Pilot provinces include Liaoning, in North-East China, Shandong and Fujian in East China, and Guangdong in South China.
It should be noted that, in November 2001, Zhengzhou, capital of Central China’s Henan Province, offered free permanent registration permits to people with relatives already living in the city. Increased pressure on transport, education and healthcare, as well as a rise in crime forced the city to cancel the measure three years later. The extent to which reforms are successfully implemented will determine if a mass movement of people will overwhelm urban centres.
While not receiving international attention, these factors have the potential to derail China’s broader strategic ambitions. At this point, it is insightful to return to the fate of China’s earlier expansion.
Despite the reach of medieval Chinese voyages, there was no possibility of consolidation and further global forays:
When they [global naval expeditions] returned [Emperor] Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans.[6]
Historians enjoy employing ‘what if’ scenarios. Menzies’ account of Chinese medieval maritime expeditions gives ample fodder for such questions to be asked. In the 1420s, if the Chinese Emperor Zhu Di maintained central power and established a global trading empire, a number of interesting scenarios could have unfolded. It is very possible, rather than Hong Kong being a British seaport, that a British coastal city such as Bristol could have become an overseas Chinese territory with local inhabitants speaking various Chinese dialects. Britain, rather than being the centre of the industrial revolution, would merely be an entry point into the European continent for China’s early industrial goods.
Alternative scenarios, which contemplate different paths of history, are interesting, however, they remain mere speculation. While Emperor Zhu Di’s reign launched impressive global exploration, utilising technology far more advanced than in Europe, it crumbled and was not able to galvanise its population, new discoveries and technologies into a framework to build, and consolidate, strategic power. Piece by piece, European powers successively dominated Asia, and even China itself. The transition of Hong Kong from British to Chinese power in 1997 is part of this legacy.
In 2005 a generation of Communist trained technocrats are taking up senior party roles and assuming important leadership positions within China. As in 1421 China is now embarking on a period of exploration and expansion. With a planned trip to the moon mooted for 2017, a key question is: will the triumphant astronauts return to a unified society or an imploding nation? Will these astronauts return to the Gobi desert to leave their spacecraft to rust as the once great ships rotted almost 500 years earlier? Australia, and indeed the world, has a lot invested in the answer.
[1] Andrew Pickford is the Research Manager of Future Directions International Pty Ltd, PO Box 912, Claremont, WA 6910 Australia, www.futuredirections.org.au.
[2] Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, Bantam Press, London, 2002.
[3] For a description of the industrial components of this reorganisation see: Weekly Global Report, 22 August 2005, Industrial Reorganisation Marks New Phase in PRC Expansion.
[4] On 8 June 2005, the People’s Daily Online reported that China was pressing ahead with reform of investment and financing structures of the water industry, and that it was to set up a multi-channelled and diversified investment mechanism involving both the government and market, encouraging social funds and foreign capital to participate in the construction and management of municipal public utilities in the forms of solely-funded entities, or in partnership.
[5] China’s railways account for only 6 per cent of the world’s total, however, they transport 25 per cent of the total global freight volume.
[6] Menzies, op .cit.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MarStudies/2005/31.html