I was reading Hugh Peyman’s latest book America as No. 3, Get Real About China, India and the Rest. Peyman writes glowingly about the works of two great thinkers/historians – John Glubb and Paul Kennedy.
Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is more recent; it was released in 1987. He is a well-known academic; many readers would have read it. It is more fact-based. He studied the causes and drew lessons. However, Glubb’s The Fate of Empires & Search for Survival is more observation-based. Glubb was born in 1897. He served throughout the first World War but in 1926 resigned his commission and accepted an administrative post under the Iraq Government. From 1939 to 1956 he commanded the famous Jordan Arab Legion.
Glubb observed that empires typically lasted about 250 years. He cited the following examples to support his observations.
I agree with some critics that Glubb was generalizing. It can hardly be described as a phenomenon. Be that as it may, there are many common denominators that do make an empire very vulnerable upon reaching a certain age, like what we humans tend to feel when we go into our 70s or 80s.
America declared independence on July 4, 1776. It is 247 years old. Peyman thinks that the American empire is also about to expire!
I love to believe Peyman, but we need to be more vigorous in making our wish!
Glubb had overlooked China to draw his conclusion. Let’s look at the timeline of China’s history.
Xia and Shang each lasted about 500 years, followed by Zhou’s 879 years, which included 275 years of the Warring States period. Han recorded 426 years. After that, China was plagued by many short dynastic reigns for about four hundred years. Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Han obviously did not sit well with Glubb’s pattern.
Then came Tang (289 years), Song (269 years), non-Han Yuan (89 years), Ming (275 years), and non-Han Qing (267 years). None lasted more than 300 years.
The People’s Republic of China is now 74 years old. Its health looks great and there is no reason for us to predict its demise now, save the nuts in the West and their sycophants in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines.
The causes of a dynasty or an empire’s demise are usually apparent to historians. To the Chinese, the emperor in question has lost the mandate of Heaven!
For America, the writing is indeed already on the wall. Society is fragmented – its great ethnic diversity is no longer a blessing. All Americans are equal before the law; but the reality is far from the truth. There is much racism and prejudice, and people are not quite tolerant of one another. The racial inequality and the huge gap between the rich and the poor, etc. turn many to lawlessness, gun violence and homelessness. The country spends much more than they produce and comes up with monetary policies that make other countries poor. The leaders are weak and devoid of visions and foresights, yet they think they are the best people to safeguard democracy in the world. The proxy war they are fighting in Ukraine is far from over, yet they want to help Israel finish off the Hamas. But the straw that will break the camel’s back is its unpreparedness to live peacefully with a rising and confident China. It thinks deprivation of technology to China is the answer to sustaining its hegemony position. The American leaders fail to recognise the fact that the strength of any empire is in its people. Much of American technology prowess is contributed by Chinese in America. This pool will certainly get smaller if the anti-China or anti-Chinese sentiments continue unabated.
America has helped awakened a strong sense of civilisational pride amongst Chinese all over the world. Yes, China still has many problems to solve, chief among which is the unbridled entrepreneurship that tends to get the whole country into a financial mess from time to time. There is still a gap between policies and execution. The former are usually good, and the latter, poor. Xi should encourage people to speak out in meetings and gatherings, rather than seeing top party officials and government leaders behaving like schoolboys feverishly taking note of what he says. Their petrification is very evident; it leads to mental seizure, as shown many a time in their inability to act in the most obvious way. (That’s anyway a very Chinese behaviour. Maybe there are strengths in it.) But one thing is for sure, China is less burdened by the unnecessary baggage that America loves to carry, and China is completely capable of reforming itself on a continuous basis.
Hi China, never mind what the world says of you. Just do things the Confucian way.
Let’s hope Peyman’s book can help englighten the Western world.
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