Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: "China's Big Push To Stoke Economy Rattles Rural Tibet: Meatpacking Modernization Threatens Beloved Yaks; New Train Brings Suspicion," by James T. Areddy, Wall Street Journal, 24 August 2006, p. A1.

I know, I know. I seem to be harping on a theme here. And it's certainly easy to paint the Chinese as the white man and the Tibetans and other inland peoples as the Indians, but you're always left with this weird argument that says it's better to leave populations largely disconnected and largely undeveloped in order to preserve the "purity" of their culture, which to me is a sort of strange, reverse racism--even a proto-fascist sentiment. For after all, once you give me the purity of the race, the sacredness of the land, and the dangers of interbreeding outsiders, you find yourself oddly in bed with certain aspects of Nazi ideology.

That's certainly not to paint anyone concerned with Tibetan culture as a Nazi, which would be absurd. I'm just pointing out that the labels people casually toss from history usually work against them, as Ignatius pointed out in his recent column. Most of the -isms of the 20th century were rather over-the-top ideologies strongly rooted in culture and violently opposed to the integrating effects of economic connectivity.

Not surprisingly, when the European variant of globalization predominated (what I and the World Bank call Globalization I, from roughly 1870 to 1914 and extending into the Interwar period), it generated a lot of -isms (communism, socialism, fascism), and it's subsequent collapse in the Postwar period also generated a wave of Third World -isms (nationalism being the strongest, but pan-Arabism too).

Today, the globalization we enjoy/fear is of the American sourcecode. It comprised just the West during the Cold War (Globalization II from 1945-1980), then expanded mightily to absorb eventually all of the former East and key pillars from the South (Globalization III, from 1980 to 2001--in my counting scheme that thereupon deviates from the World Bank).

As I describe Globalization IV (2001 and counting), the main task is to shrink the Gap, wherever it is found--both internally in the Core and throughout the equatorially-centered regions I identify in the Pentagon's New Map.

China clearly has its own internal Gap, of which Tibet is clearly part. Because Tibet has long been a contested entity within China's orbit, it's "shrinkage," so to speak, is controversial. But clearly it's going to happen. Tibet's going to join the world as globalization spreads, and the logical connection point will be through booming China.

China looks at this process as absolutely essential to its larger scheme of shrinking its internal Gap by connecting the inland provinces, and all those hundreds of millions of rural poor, to the booming coastal provinces.

Frankly, America wants that process to proceed. We want China focused on internal development, not external aggression. We want all those people connected and liberated from poverty.

Of course, we want China to do that in such a way as to not obliterate local culture, just like we don't want America too homogenized, but things will definitely change.

What this article speaks to, largely, are the changes that will come first to agriculture, because the disconnected land is the land of substinence agriculture, and the connected land becomes both more productive and more destructive, because the advances sought tend to drive people off the land and into cities. Sad for the Willie Nelson crowd, but throughout history it's called progress that lowers population growth, raises standards of living, and reduces energy use per capita (people packed in cities can have their energy needs addressed more efficiently--counterintuitive to some, but proven by history).

And those are all things that need to be accomplished if you want to shrink the Gap and add all those people to the benefits of development and connectivity while not bankrupting the planet.

I know, I know. It's an impossible dream to the environmental doom-and-gloomers. I just don't think you can keep those 2-3 billion in the Gap and the Core's mini-Gaps off grid from the better life forever, and I have an undying faith in the ingenuity of mankind (Forgive me Father, for I am an optimist).

Plus, I look at the history of economic development and I see that the cleanest states (Yale's environmental sustainability index, for example) are Core states, while the next dirtiest are the Gap, and the most pollution-creating tend to be those transitioning from Gap to Core (as always--the transition states experience the most change). That tells me that if you want a cleaner planet, you want states to move from Gap to Core. That's the best way to get a handle on local pollution problems (which decline, historically, everywhere with development) and the best way to force global responses to global pollution issues (which tend to increase with development).