In the twentieth century, China suffered several other signal catastrophes—two internal, and one from its neighbor—each of which, alone, would have derailed any normal nation’s progress. First was Japan’s 1937 attack against a China riven by civil strife. The subsequent eight years’ war was marked by extreme Japanese brutality, including the infamous Rape of Nanking that killed some 300,000 people in six weeks, and the use of outlawed chemical and bacteriological weapons. Estimates place China’s casualties at 35 million, with 20 million dead and 15 million wounded. Even in a country with over 500 million people, the toll astonishes.
The second and third mega-events both came to China courtesy of one man: the self-styled “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, who marched into Beijing on October 1, 1949, bringing doctrinaire Marxist economics with him. In 1958 he began the grand agricultural collectivization experiment called the “Great Leap Forward.” It lasted just shy of three years and claimed—through famine, oppression, and suicide—as many as 40 million lives. In a country with about 650 million in 1960, the Great Leap thus killed one of every 16 Chinese. For America today the equivalent figure would be over 20 million deaths. Compared to this stupefying mass murder due to ideological fervor, the 2 to 2.5 million toll from two Chinese civil wars (1928–1937 and 1946–1950) is almost lost in the shuffle.
Add the four percent death toll of the Sino-Japanese War to the six percent death toll of the Great Leap Forward, and China lost roughly ten percent of its population in the two catastrophes. Now throw in the third mega-catastrophe, Mao’s 1966–1969 Cultural Revolution. In an effort to impose socialist norms, Mao purged academics, sent urban populations en masse to remote rural areas, and interred dissidents in “reeducation” camps. The result was an estimated 1 to 20 million dead.
Over 120 years, the loss of some 150 million lives through the serial carnages of the nineteenth-century conflicts, Sino-Japanese War, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution—coupled with China’s half millennium retreat from world trade—surely had a vastly greater impact on China’s geopolitical fortunes than the much-trumpeted Western imperial humiliations of the self-weakened country.
Today China has about 1.3 billion people. Its GDP in purchasing power parity (GDP adjusted for relative currency value) is roughly two-thirds that for the U.S., but spread over more than four times as many people. This means that once China’s GDP is adjusted both for purchasing power parity and per capita, it is perhaps one-sixth of America’s. One question lingers: Where would China rank today had it not suffered the series of catastrophes that began in 1434?
China’s Resurgence
CHINA’S FALL began with a retreat from the world, and its resurgence began when it opened to the United States in 1971, ending the American government’s refusal to recognize Mao’s regime. Later that year, the Communist mainland replaced Nationalist China as permanent member of the UN Security Council—and as sole internationally recognized representative of the Chinese people. President Nixon went to China early in 1972.
Mao’s China appallingly underperformed economically and wreaked havoc socially and politically. But Deng Xiaoping succeeded him after his death in 1976, and in 1979 opened China’s trade to the world. Thus ended 545 years of first isolation and then reluctant limited participation in global commerce.
China’s economic power can be overstated—it is well shy of the power of the U.S. economy, despite the latter’s recent severe trials. Yet its sheer size makes it a force to be contended with. China is America’s second-largest trading partner, holding a one-sixth share of American international trade. It holds trillions in U.S. securities and dollar-denominated reserves. It is not for nothing that in 2011 Chinese president Hu Jintao questioned the dollar’s status as global reserve currency.
China is in the midst of a huge push to upgrade its military. It is building modern nuclear submarines and even an aircraft carrier—a warship only the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, and France have ever constructed. Its anti-ship missiles include models that can carry nuclear warheads a thousand miles. American air power based on carriers (or on Taiwan, often called by strategists America’s largest aircraft carrier) is a major part of America’s ability to project power across the Pacific. Neutralize these assets, and China’s ability to dominate the western Pacific becomes a strategic reality. (Neither South Korea nor Japan would be likely to allow its territory or equipment to be used in a U.S.-China conflict, lest China target it directly.)
Most impressive of all is China’s 2010 rollout of a stealth combat aircraft prototype, the J-20. Its configuration and size suggest a medium-range fighter-bomber that can target Taiwan or American naval ships (rather than an interceptor, which would shoot down bombers, or a pure air superiority fighter, designed to shoot down other fighters). The J-20 will be markedly inferior to the American F-22, the world’s only operational fifth-generation combat aircraft. But that is cold comfort to allied strategic planners, since America ended its F-22 production run at one-quarter the number originally planned. The Pentagon’s assessment was that China would not have a stealth fighter before the 2020s. The 2011 test flight of the J-20 suggests China is on a faster track. This comes as America’s F-35, the future stealth fighter of choice for the U.S., continues to encounter technical problems that have pushed back its likely operational status into the mid-teens. Were China to deploy a sufficient number of J-20s, it could prevail over superior American quality in a major regional conflict.
Underpinning China’s growing military machine is its nuclear arsenal. After American nuclear threats during the Korean War, the August 1954 first crisis over offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, and then the American mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in December of 1954, Mao gave the go-ahead on January 15, 1955, to start China’s nuclear program. Although secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project may have played a role in China’s program, China early on developed a formidable in-country team of nuclear scientists. Russia also transferred technology and know-how, from 1954 through 1958 (the year of the second crisis over Quemoy and Matsu, when the United States threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in a fight with China over its shelling of the islands). Henry Kissinger writes that a key motive behind Khrushchev’s decision to transfer nuclear technology to China was so that Moscow would not feel obligated to back China in event of another major confrontation with the United States.
But in 1959 Khrushchev decided to halt Russian assistance, unnerved, Kissinger writes, by Mao Zedong’s nuclear brinkmanship over Quemoy and Matsu. Weapons designers Thomas C. Reed and Danny Stillman write in The Nuclear Express that the Russians, upon deciding to slow China’s march to nuclear weapon status, even supplied the Chinese with deliberately false data in order to sabotage their progress. But many of China’s top scientists studied in other countries, including the United States, and then brought their knowledge back to China.