Steve Skojec

I’ve been banging this gong for years - China is coming. What that specifically means is harder to guess, but they are more than a perceived threat. They are, in fact, an arguably greater threat than the rag-tag band of cavemen with AK47s we lovingly know as the warriors of Jihad.

The Daily Mail published a story this weekend with a catchy headline: Why China is the REAL Master of the Universe. In it, the growing Chinese leviathan is profiled:

To many Victorians, unquestioning of the ideology that underpinned much imperialism, British supremacy was a simple matter of racial supremacy - Europeans, and the English in particular, were fated to be the masters.

The truth is that we are masters of the world no more.

The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.

The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated.

Last month, an Indian company, Tata, bought up what was once the cream of British manufacturing - Jaguar and Land Rover.

A couple of years ago, Nanjing Automotive, a Chinese company, snapped up MG Rover.

Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.

But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared to what is happening now.

That handover was, of course, the most significant power shift in modern history. If the young American nation had had truly imperialistic designs, it would perhaps have been the most significant transfer of power in the history of the world.

Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: “When China awakes, she will shake the world.”

After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people - twice the population of the U.S. and EU combined - is awaking almost overnight.

And not just China. The world’s second most populous country, India, is industrialising at a historically unprecedented pace.

Their economies are growing on a long-term basis about four times the speed of the UK’s and that of the United States. Goldman Sachs, the bank, recently predicted that by 2050, China and India would have overtaken the U.S. to be the world’s first and second biggest economies.

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There are even reports that manholes in Britain have been disappearing to feed the monstrous appetite for scrap steel in the other side of the world.

China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.

As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.

What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it - this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.

When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.

The Chinese seem to have a keen business sense built into their genes. Hard working, intelligent, and tough negotiators, Chinese families have set up shop in every corner of the world. Now, the country itself is following suit with a penchant for economic imperialism that can only be fueled by intoxicating growth. Beneath the polite exterior of Chinese businessmen, however, is the ruthlessness of the Red Dragon - the Chinese Communist government in all of its atheistic savagery:

And Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing. Most worryingly, as China’s brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human rights.

From Darfur to Myanmar, China is cuddling up to murderous dictators.

At home, it holds mass executions of criminals with bullets in the back of the head while transplant surgeons stand by to harvest their still pulsating organs.

Yet Western governments have been in such awe of China’s looming power that their response has not been to challenge its abuses, but to try to silence their own protesters at home.

From the UN to the IMF to the World Bank, the international institutions that attempt to govern the planet were made in the image of the victors of World War II. Now power is shifting from West to East, the whole liberal democratic world order will face its first serious challenge in decades.

Many fear that things could get ugly.

There is only one thing worse than an unchallenged superpower - it is a superpower with a victim mentality, which feels the world owes it a favour.

And the bitter truth is that, after centuries of humiliation in foreign affairs, there is a nationalist mood in China that the country’s time has come again, that it can again claim its rightful place as the world’s most powerful country.

What I found most surprising in the article was the following insight, which makes quick work of the foolishness of our secular liberal culture:

Western culture, like the dollar, will soon find its heyday behind it.

But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness, will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and their supremacy slipping away.

Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a dictatorship.

There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply because it will no longer be affordable at present levels.

Western attitudes of superiority to China and the rest of the East will also subside, as Westerners realise they are no longer the masters of the world.

What comes at the end of this chapter of history is anyone’s guess. Regardless of how things play out, what’s clear is that we absolutely must undergo a period of serious reform in America if we want to remain relevant in this drastically changed world.