Whither Goes China?

Everywhere on the Globe, for good and for ill. More ill than good, it increasingly appears. Just a cursory glance at China's selection of friends and acquaintances speaks volumes: Iran, Sudan, Burma, North Korea for starters. China is focused on its mission and its vision, to remain the world's greatest producer of goods as the world's largest exporter of goods. In this it has succeeded, perhaps less than admirably; in the process destroying production elsewhere throughout the world.

Producing cheap goods of all kinds that a consuming world welcomes with open arms, since no other country is capable of matching China's ability to call on its vast skilled human resources to produce at lesser costs than elsewhere, even including the cost of shipping abroad. Needless to say a lot of corners are cut, and that would include inferior materials and workmanship occasionally resulting in mass warnings of safety and health issues. But the allure of 'cheap' to the global consuming public dominates.

China has moved internationally to ensure it can provide for itself. Into Africa - where huge segments of the population living in unstable, autocratic-dominated nations face starvation and tribal warfare - where it signs long-term land-usage leases with the ruling tyrants. Encouraging its own farmers to set up huge agricultural enterprises with Chinese state assistance, it then imports the fruits of their labours back home. This augments in small part China's search for investment in mineral and petro-fuel extraction.

Its affiliation with murkily-reputed regimes is directly proportional to those countries' endowments with the energy resources China desperately needs to continue growing its burgeoning economy. China loses 7 of its miners each and every day to coal mining mishaps, and is continually opening new mines, while world news constantly hears of one mining disaster after another, taking ever more Chinese lives in the process of coal extraction to help meet the country's energy needs.

The resulting damage to the environment, both in China and elsewhere, where prevailing winds blow is incalculable. And China's impact on world wildlife through the cultural imperatives of a society that values the extraction of animal parts for traditional healing practises, and rare elements like elephant ivory for treasured trinket carving, threatens the very survival of rare leopards, tigers, elephants, birds and all manner of other threatened species whose numbers are declining due to poaching - illegal activities mounted to service China's rapacious appetite.

The growing middle-class urban Chinese demographic - in stark contrast to the provincial, marginally-employed rural demographic with immense numbers of migrants trying to eke out a bare existence - is swiftly becoming accustomed to consuming. China will soon become the largest automobile market in the world, rivalling the United States for consumption, in the near future. Its incessant metal and energy needs now set the energy, mineral and commodity prices world-wide.

America's egotistical, over-reaching interference in the sovereign decision-making of other countries has served to impoverish a once-wealthy economy, and to place it, through its mountainous debts, deficits and financial distortions at the mercy of China which presents now as the U.S.'s chief creditor, financing American debt. The dualism of triumphing economically over the world's sole super-power, yet remaining needful of its purchasing power of Chinese goods, has created an uneasy alliance.

While Western powers, particularly coastal countries edging the Arctic are feverishly attempting to establish boundaries of ownership for the vast mineral and fossil-fuel resources on the ocean floor and the continental shelves, China has announced that the Arctic and its resources represent the "common heritage of mankind". Owning the world's largest non-nuclear powered icebreaker, with the slow melting of the Arctic passage, the five coastal powers worry about China's intentions beyond shipping.

Diplomatically, as an important member of the United Nations Security Council, China has effectively put up a series of roadblocks with respect to UN sanctions against rogue regimes whose intentions threaten the safety and security of their regions and whose possible repercussions go well beyond those regions into the wider world. Its unabashed friendships with pariah regimes in its unceasing search for raw materials and energy resources make it a tricky and prickly partner.

Its own record on human rights with its war against members of Falun Gong, their incarceration in factory-prisons, the rumours of organ harvesting that may be more than rumours, along with the subjugation of Tibet and other, vast regions of China with restive populations and religious zealots challenging China's supremacy does it little credit but does explain its position as an exponent of non-interference in other countries' affairs.

The country's current and increasing weight on international affairs will see it perhaps increasingly confronting the political, social and moral leadership of the United States on the world stage. What that may bode for the future where an imperialistic theistic Islamist country like the Islamic Republic of Iran threatens world security and North Korea's demented little tyrant threatens to export nuclear know-how to Syria and other terrorist-supporting countries is anyone's guess.