“The Secret of Pansak”
from Heartland 3/2005
It has yet to begin and already it mustn’t be. Throughout the world the media has determined that this will be the “Asian century”. By the beginning of the new millennium it became fashionable to evoke the China of miracles, now joined by India. The slogan-makers coined a new term: Chindia, the Sino-Indian centaur of nearly two and a half billion people predestined for global hegemony.
Some with alarm, some with hope, some just to follow the current; economists, journalists and politicians routinely rattle off the standard predictions for Asia’s supplanting the West. By mid-century, the economy of Chindia could equal that of the rest of the planet, with a lock on the development of leading technologies—instrument of control.
According to the American futurologists at the National Intelligence Council, the annus horribilis will be 2040, when the Chinese PIL surpasses America’s while India will reach third place in 2030, overtaking Japan and Germany. Recent CIA analyses already put the Chinese PIL at second place, at least in terms of purchasing power parity. Thus the anticipated date would actually be 2015.
Nor is it just the economy. At play is global power. Sooner or later, America will no longer be the only one in command, assuming that’s how it stands today. The competition is open to determine who will join, and perhaps succeed, it as “hyperpower”.Candidate number one is China, especially if it manages to draw India and a good part of Asia into its orbit. If the Middle Kingdom is the anti-America, the Indian giant is the marginal quantity, the swing power that will assign victory to Beijing or Washington.
So says mainstream opinion, distilled in intelligence laboratories. A cocktail of economics, philosophy of history and strategic thought, plus a drop of prognostication, to be served hot (as the media is wont to do). The stimulating effect is guaranteed by the diffused American and European ignorance of that which China and India—two civilizations before they were states—meant for the world economy until less than two centuries ago: in 1830 still, more than half of global production came from the two Asian colossi. The CIA scenario for 2040 would hence be a return to past glories, in a totally new context.