美、歐都把中國認為是未來的強權，美國憂心軍事力量，歐盟擔心其經濟實力成為競爭對手。ＭＩＴ一位教授最近針對中國宣稱每年的超過百分之十的經濟成長率提出質疑，認為，事實上應該只明百分之四點五到百分之六之間，這樣成長率的國家是不可能成為經濟強國的。更談不上，成為一個經濟強權、現代國家最重要的支撐，即一個腐敗的政府、不公正獨立的司法，這是不可能辦得到的。
China: The pretend superpower
By William Pfaff Tribune Media ServicesPublished: August 24, 2007
PARIS: Washington and the European capitals are all preoccupied with China’s economic growth and expanding international influence and activities, taken as evidence that in the not too distant future China will become a "superpower."
Washington thinks about China’s becoming a military as well as economic superpower. The Europeans think about trade and economic competition. Both underestimate what it takes to become a modern industrial superpower. It requires a very high level of autonomous technological capacity, to begin with, as well as sophisticated and innovative industry to make use of it, both of which China today lacks.
The country is urgently educating the generation of scientists and technicians essential to its future development, but they come back from studies abroad to an industrial base too limited to put them to proper use. China is a manufacturer of unsophisticated goods designed abroad. Its technology is derivative. Will this continue to be so? Possibly (see below).
Lester Thurow of MIT has recently published an analysis of official Chinese claims to 10 percent or higher annual industrial growth rates, finding these incompatible with the objective evidence of such indices as electricity consumption as well as with the historical evidence of development elsewhere. He estimates that the real growth rate is between 4.5 and 6 percent, neither of which will give China a superpower economy in the present century.
And this is to take no account of the ecological devastation being produced in China by uncontrolled and corrupt industrialization and development. Corruption tends to be the engine of development in China, and essential to it.
Such growth forecasts also tend to ignore the massive, backward, impoverished and politically restless Chinese agricultural population, and the likelihood - I myself would say the certainty - of a major and possibly revolutionary political crisis in China in the foreseeable future. This would derive from the inadequacies, corruption and political illegitimacy of a self-perpetuating ruling class, whose only claim to authority is its bureaucratic descent from the catastrophic Communist regime of Mao Zedong.
On the other hand, the Chinese government is seeking economic influence wherever it can find it, whether through foreign investments in advanced countries, financed from the overflowing funds furnished China by the trade indebtedness of the United States, or by its massive purchases of raw materials in resource-rich countries, preferably in places underdeveloped and generally unregulated.
This creates influence but also dependence and resentment, and eventual backlash - as is apparent already in some African countries, exploited and then abandoned by the Chinese, where local industry has also been destroyed by the cheap Chinese imports that were part of the Chinese economic embrace and program of resource exploitation.
What does this globalization reveal about China itself? A remarkable series of articles by a correspondent of Le Figaro in Paris, François Hauter, attempts to answer that question (among others). He writes about the two Chinas that coexist, the modern China displayed to foreigners and the hidden China where, he writes: "Nothing has changed in a quarter century."
This is true of air travel "(they have changed the planes but not the service), trains, domestic banks, and the hotels belonging to the Chinese themselves, where one finds arrogant or indifferent staff, gray sheets, infected food." No one is responsible for anything. "Where it lacks foreign partners, China seems fossilized. It remains Mao’s China."
He argues that this "aggressive passivity" is a poor augury. Where, he asks, "is the China that gave mankind paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder?" How can China dream of rivaling the West without its lost creativity? "Is China’s genius now imprisoned in its current role of copyist for the West? Or is that the role we have forced upon it? This clearly is the important question about its future."
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