Lebusa Mabolloane’s Reviews > Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics > Status Update

USA:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don’t buy, they don’t make. And if they don’t make there will be mass unemployment. If there is mass and long term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be - like everything else in modern China - on a scale hitherto unseen.

The Chinese loom at society very differently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual.

China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrializing as it modernizes and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production [as arable land is taken up by urbanization and new industries]. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest.