May God help us, and our Asian allies too, if we
don’t right now step back from our own self-immolating socialist precipice
Paul Pekarek, Major, USAF (Ret.)
Canada Free Press
October 2, 2010

Recent publications (such as the attachment
http://www.canadafreepress.com/images/uploads/SecDef_rpt2Congress_wrt_China_2010.pdf)
have highlighted China’s dramatic improvements in
naval power. It’s not just China’s navy. The army
& air force, as well as rocket force, have
dramatically improved their capabilities in the
last decade. And modernization is only starting,
now with a powerful coal-fired economic engine to
generate it.  “It” may well end up being far more
than just a military of just a China that we
recognize on maps today. "It" may be a far
different looking and behaving China than what we
have seen in nearly two centuries.

China’s designs could end up like a world-changing meteor crash.

This should not be a surprise; China has
traditionally not been the starving-children
poor-nation basket case we have grown up
accustomed to seeing.  China, for two thousand
years the "Center Of All Under Heaven," has
periodically been overrun by temporarily
militarily superior “barbarians”.  The 1840s
Opium War was no exception.  Gunpowder changed
the equation, but then, so did Mongol horsemen
against Chinese infantry in the 1200s.  A century
after the Opium Wars ripped apart China’s
national integrity, China re-secured its own
territorial integrity when Mao won the
century-long, multipolar Asian war. Today,
another half-century later, socialist philosophy
(and current apparent success) only reinforces
the traditional Chinese versions of xenophobia
and Zionism; today, China can again see itself as
having everything desirable and as deserving of
tribute from all the world’s other states,
kow-towing as the barbarians we apparently always
have merely been … in Chinese eyes.

And we will wonder, in the next few decades, just
as we did in the 1930s with another Asian power:
will China go north to Siberian resources, south
to India or South China Sea resources, and/or
west to the ‘baby stans’ for those wind-swept resources?

As it moves we will wonder ‘how’. Will it be
outright expansion & annexation (like Tibet --
historically not part of China until Mao took
it)?  Or, will it be more traditional Chinese
nation-to-nation extortion, in the particularly
Chinese style: the Tribute System? Means &
vectors, those will profoundly occupy our time & fears in the next few decades.

North, South, West -- oh, yes -- East. Will China
strike east to resource-poor and energy-poor
Asian peninsular & island nations?  Those nearby
and highly populated countries will be more
readily accessible -- acquirable, and pressurable
– with a modern navy & air force.  Those nations
to China’s east … hmmm … may offer female
companionship especially attractive to a nation
of 1.3 billion – a nation that already has more
than 100,000,000 Chinese men who cannot find
Chinese women. The wives they should have had,
recall, were killed (abortion and post-birth
infanticide) under China’s one-child-per-family
policy. This policy, like all others that
militate against natural law, eventually run
quite afoul of the Law Of Unintended
Consequences.  A ‘good’ war would free up lots of
women for the taking, and reduce the number of
men (in multiple countries) doing the wanting.

And now China’s self-centeredness is reinforced
by socialist ‘leading edge of human evolution’
thinking, and enabled by emerging military parity
(regional superiority). Increasingly, China can
find alternative means to survive a
self-inflicted lack of women – and perhaps some
version of ‘lebensraum’ to disperse China’s
self-declared ‘population problem’. And, ‘being
innocent of the crime’ will not save neighboring
countries from paying the price, in our world
historically much ruled by the dictates of ‘might makes right’.

Indeed, to a powerful, resurgent ‘All Under
Heaven’ central kingdom, the world map may look
considerably different, as if a meteor crashed
from the heavens and humanity re-worked all its
networks to cope. Some nations may become
impoverished as China effects oceanic resource
rights it now merely asserts. Some nations may
become tributaries in resource or human
extraction terms.  Others, more far flung (like
the USA, Canada, Poland, UK, etc), could end up
as impoverished kow-towing financial tributary powers.

China’s sea power wasn’t the first warning sign,
but it is the most easily visible warning sign.
We could have noticed the signs outlined above.
We might also have noticed who is financing the
USA’s massive federal debts, ever since President
Clinton pronounced China is the USA’s "strategic
partner" and "Made In China" began to supplant
all else in the USA’s department stores,
automotive supplies, and hardware aisles -- and computer components.

The 1,400-year against Jihad isn’t the only
threat we face, SecDef Gates’ myopia
notwithstanding. How is Chinese potential, in
context of recent international
experience?  Hitler was quite terrible, but he
was only like a meteor.  Bolshevik USSR was
bigger, managing a global cold war and space race
while sponsoring revolutions around the globe.
But the Kremlin was still just one phase of
socialism’s meteor shower. China is another phase
-- not markedly less determined than when Beijing
was feuding with Moscow over which socialist path
was the true & proper development of human society.

The hope -- and there is one -- is that there
will somewhere be a USA strong enough and free
enough -- and willing enough -- to save its own
skin by restoring trust among recently
backstabbed allies, and then staring down and
outpacing (economically & militarily) one more
state-controlled socialist market economy.  Maybe
we need to learn more about relevant recent true
history (like in Korea and East Europe), and less
about distracting fictions (like anthropologic
global warming). May God help us, and our Asian
allies too, if we don’t right now step back from
our own self-immolating socialist precipice.

* Paul Pekarek is a retired U.S. Air Force
officer who has also spent 35 years studying
science, geography, politics, economics,
religions, military affairs, security, adult
education, spaceflight, and history. His
professional career has included intercontinental
ballistic missiles, mapmaking, adult education,
foreign military sales, satellites, remote
sensing, nuclear warfare, leadership, and
technical intelligence.  He is currently a
Freelance Writer and Independent Consultant
living with his family in Minnesota.