With China’s rapidly expanding economy and growing power at sea and in the air, some commentators have taken the view that it’s not a question of whether but how soon China will replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower.
This is nonsense. So long as America retains its freedom and thus its unique powers of innovation, it will continue to lead. Besides, China’s elite is too scared to follow in the path of freedom because to do so would risk unity, threatening disintegration and a return to the terrible days of warlords and civil war, as in the 1920s.
Moreover, China has secret weaknesses. Its most serious: gambling and drug addiction. China’s new prosperity is already producing a rapid expansion of the country’s international gambling class, not to mention an appreciable increase in the number of drug addicts.
Though India was known as the “Mother of Opium” and during the 18th century produced large quantities of it, nearly all of India’s opium was exported to foreign markets rather than consumed at home. The Chinese love of opium seems to have originated on a large scale with its 18th-century population explosion, when China grew from about 150 million in 1700 to 450 million in 1850. By that time China had become the world’s largest consumer of opium.
This was highly convenient for the West. Although the West bought large quantities of silk and tea from China, the Chinese spurned Western goods, regarding foreign imports as immoral. As the authorities did everything in their power to restrict imports, China ran huge trade surpluses with the West. But then Western governments and trading firms discovered the Chinese appetite for opium and began to export it in large quantities through Canton. By the 1830s China’s export surplus had turned into a growing deficit.
Alarmed by the loss of silver and the spread of addiction, especially among the ruling class, the imperial court in Peking sought to ban opium and prevent Western ships from bringing it in. The West–in the name of free trade–responded with naval force. Thus began the Opium Wars, which were fought mainly by Britain, to keep China’s ports open.
Some experts believe that general prosperity in a society is always and inevitably accompanied by a comparable increase in drug-taking and cite the U.S. as an example. Certainly, since China entered the world market and its living standards began to rise swiftly, its consumption of addictive drugs has risen alarmingly. Australian researcher Susan Trevaskes, who has just published a book on Chinese crime prevention, Policing Serious Crime in China (Routledge, $125), estimates that 40% of the heroin produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a similar percentage of the drugs coming from Laos and Burma now go to China. Trevaskes also reveals that China itself manufactures “precursor chemicals” for ecstasy and other substances, for export and domestic use.
Drug use on a large scale attracts organized crime and corruption. Under opium’s economic impact government corruption in China became more oppressive, which eventually led to peasant revolts, followed by the government’s savage attempts at suppressing them by burning villages. The catchphrase describing this policy: “strengthening the walls and clearing the countryside.” The imperial authorities then created “strategic villages” and forced peasants to live in them.
Since the 1980s the Chinese government has conducted similar campaigns, dubbed “Strike Hard,” to put down organized crime and corruption. During the last quarter of the 20th century an enormous number of “criminals” were executed. Trevaskes puts the figure at between 2,500 and 15,000 a year and calculates that the total number may have been as high as 250,000.
Such ferocious campaigns to put down crime ended in failure and were abandoned, especially since it seems they often led to the spread of corruption–at all levels of officialdom.
If, as seems likely, the expansion of the Chinese economy and the rise in living standards lead to further increases in the use of heroin and other drugs, how will Chinese authorities deal with the concurrent rise in organized crime?
The Chinese are learning that prosperity comes at a price. The Communist authorities ruling China today have immensely more powerful and repressive machinery at their disposal than had the 19th-century imperialist bureaucracy. However, experience has shown that mere repression does not work.
Meanwhile, more and more Chinese have more and more disposable income–and a significant proportion of it is going to drugs.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, minister mentor of Singapore; Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations; and David Malpass, global economist, president of Encima Global LLC, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.