Aug. 17, 2008
Coming Soon: A Post-American World
With The Rise Of China And Other Economies, The "Golden Age" Of American Influence May Be Coming To An End
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(CBS)
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Interactive Focus On China Explore the history, people and economy of China, the world’s most populous nation.
Consider the Olympic Games a giant exclamation point … a fanfare announcing a message from the Chinese.
They're putting the world on notice, that they are players playing to win, and not just Olympic gold. They want you to know that China is a power to be reckoned with, and proud of it, that it's bearing down on the United States … fast.
"The implications are that China will be the commercial leader of the world," Albert Keidel, an expert on China's economy, told Teichner. "It will also deserve and demand leadership in global institutions."
Keidel is the author of a startling new study for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "China's Economic Rise: Fact And Fiction."
"We can model the economy and show that by 2035, it will be as big, if not bigger than the United States' economy will be at that time, and by the middle of the century it will be twice the size of the U.S. economy at that time," Keidel said.
"That's staggering," Teichner said.
"That's conservative," Keidel said.
In cased you missed that - within the next 50 years China's economy will double the size of the United States' economy.
So where will that leave the United States? Are we slipping? Are we reaching some inevitable tipping point that will change the world as we know it? Is the golden age of America coming to an end?
Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, said, "What's happening right now is, the world is moving beyond America. The future is, in many ways, being shaped in distant places by foreign people."
Zakaria is author of "The Post-American World," which is a bestseller.
"That's a big shift from a world in which America was at the center economically, financially, culturally, militarily, politically, to a world in which there are more centers and many forces, from India to China to Brazil to South Africa that have to be taken into account," Zakaria said.
The meltdown in the U.S. economy at the moment isn't helping: The price of gas, the mortgage crisis, the weak dollar, the cost (both monetary and political) of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the shift, according to Zakaria, is more fundamental.
"This is not happening because America is failing or declining," Zakaria said. "It's happening because the rest are rising, and it's happening because the natives have gotten good at capitalism."
And it's happening right under our noses. America's beverage, Budweiser beer, is now owned by Belgians.
The government of Abu Dhabi last month bought a 90% stake in New York City's iconic Chrysler Building.
And isn't the United States supposed to be the place with the biggest and best of everything?
The tallest building in the world isn't in New York or Chicago anymore. It's in Taipei.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, once the world's largest, isn't even in the top ten now. The biggest one's in - surprise, surprise - China.
Alan Wolff, an international trade lawyer and former U.S. trade negotiator who specializes in china, said we're not used to foreign competition.
Coming out of World War II, we had a lot of breathing space; the rest of the world's economies were devastated, "but they're catching up," Wolff said.
"Worldwide, 179 countries are growing faster than we are. As our manufacturing jobs have moved offshore, the United States has counted on innovation to keep its edge, but how much longer will that be possible?"
Take the iPhone. The idea, the genius, was American. But the phones themselves are made in China, where the government is determined that the next generation of geniuses will be Chinese.
"Actually, that's a stated national policy," Wolff said. "They have a medium- and long-term science and technology policy, 2006-2020, and in that policy one of the statements, one of the parts is to establish global brands, with indigenous technology, with Chinese technology behind those brands."
Think Japanese cars. When they arrived here in a big way in the 1970s, Detroit didn't see what was coming. Today Toyota, not GM, is the number one-selling car company in the U.S. And find an American community that wouldn't like a Toyota plant putting people to work.
China wants to be next.
Michael Jemal is president and CEO of Haier America, told Teicher that innovation and having its own patents is the "life blood" for Haier. "Haier applies for two patents every single day, every day of the year. In fact, it's more than that."
Never heard of Haier America? Just wait. Right now, Chinese-owned Haier is trying to buy GE's appliance division
When it entered the U.S. market nine years ago, the company sold three products. Now it sells 3,000. You name it, Haier makes it, everything from little dorm refrigerators to air conditioners, washing machines to flat screen TVs.
"Haier is the number one brand in China," Jemal said. "In asia, we're in the top ten. The objective here in the U.S. is also to build a market share, to be in the top three in the U.S."
Haier is a pioneer, the first big Chinese manufacturer to build a plant in the United States, a $40 million dollar refrigerator factory outside Camden, South Carolina.
There the Chinese flag hangs alongside the Stars and Stripes.
"This is an American plant," said Joe Sexton, president of Haier America Refrigerators.
"It's run by Americans, and it is staffed by Americans. It is owned by the Chinese."
They employ 125 hourly employees, and 30 salaried employees at Camden. Half these people used to work in the textile industry. They lost their old jobs to lower-paid workers in Asia. In other words, this is globalization in reverse.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford said, "We've been, I mean, really whacked in textile job loss. We lost about 95,000 direct textile jobs in that process."
Sanford said that thanks to foreign investment, the state has made up those losses and then some. The 600-plus foreign companies operating in South Carolina account for 1 out of 5 manufacturing jobs. They employ nearly two hundred thousand workers.
"Capital goes to where it's loved, and we try to be very inviting on that front, and not just in terms of tax policy and regulatory policy and other things, but also in terms of direct relationship," Sanford said.
"That's happening at the local level in the United States," Wolff said, "but the federal government is oblivious to it."
Wolff said the president and Congress must face the new reality of global competition.
"We need to change our tax policies, change our immigration policy. We made the U.S. a magnet, an attractive place for the best and the brightest in the world, and we frustrate that by saying, 'You get a Ph.D. here and that doesn't matter. Right now, we're throwing you out.' That's very self-destructive behavior."
"We save too little, we consume too much, we borrow too much from the rest of the world, we use energy in a profligate and wasteful fashion," said Zakaria. He says the U.S. must change its ways, and soon, if we want to hang on to the wealth and influence we have.
"I think that our window for policy change is very short," he said. "I think if we don't, in the next few years, four, five years, make the necessary adjustments, what you'll see is something that looks a little like the trajectory of the British empire in the 20th century. It's not that Britain collapsed, it's that it just slowly faded away in significance, in power and wealth."
Halfway through the Olympics, the enormity of China's ambition is a wonder for all to see - and for Americans, a sobering wake-up call.
"At one level a post-American world is a sign of American failure, and at another it's a sign of glorious success," said Zakaria. "Why is this happening? Because countries around the world are doing what we've been telling them to do for the last 60 years: open yourself up to capitalism, to free trade, to technology."
But Zakaria worries that one day historians will write about how the United States globalized the world, but forgot to globalize itself.
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 321 CommentsWhy hasn''t the "Coming Soon..." video been added.
I emailed asking this question, of course CBS has the caveat added that I may not get a reply to my question.
Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
Our three most recent enemies were supported by Republicans and Dems are the problem.
Only in your bizarro world idiot.
With friends like Republicans America will always have enemies.
Bin Laden 2
Super powers 0
China has been the obvious model for the last couple decades. However, Russia is now emerging as the second Authoritarian Capitalist State. Russia gets extra "threat points" for being a xenophobic and paranoid country with a streak of irrationality.
This is a powerful and frightening model against which American style Democratic Capitalism is at a disadvantage (from a strictly economic view). If this kind of political/business model takes hold, America will be facing even greater odds in the coming decades.
Until we revert to a country of industry, where we make the goods we use, we will continue the decline to a "has been" economy. Great economies are not built on "McJobs" in the service industry. They are built on the manufacture of durable goods, consumer products, and tools.
More importantly, a great economy is not built by a populace that spends more time watching TV than working. It is not built by a populace that is constantly told "everything is great" by propaganda outlets like Fox News or eviscerated news organizations like CBS. It is as though Americans are living in a fantasy world where work is an inconvenience to be minimized and they are entitled to anything they want simply because they are Americans. Wake up America.
It''s sad. America is at a crossroads. We could turn ourselves around and give the rest of the world a run for their money, but we have become fat, lazy, and greedy. We are a declining empire. It happens to every great society eventually.
We borrow TENS of BILLIONS of dollars every MONTH from China and Japan to prop up a standard of living we no longer can support with our own industry. We refuse to believe China is becoming the dominant economic power. And LAUGHINGLY, morons on this board talk of "nuking them" or using our military- forgetting that the FOUNDATION of military power is economic power (as evidenced by our rise since WW2).
I suppose it is inevitable, but it is sad to me to see how blind my fellow Americans are to the beginning of our decline. We will watch TV instead of working 12 hours a day 6 days a week to revive our country. And so we will pass into history...
''Leverage'' defined by a labor union is a fair day''s pay for no work. No merit-based pay standards. They kept pushing until the ''evil'' businesses that employed them went over a cliff.
The only issue we have to decide is whether we can help steer our relationship into a mutually beneficial situation for us and the globe.
Within the next 10 years, China''s economy will overheat- just like the Japanese economy did in the 1990s. Watch-out when it does.
Pure and simple: America''s culture sells. China''s really doesn''t, no matter if they host the Olympics or not.
The world has its hopes for a better future in America. It always will.
America was a backwater mudhole before WWI/WWI made the US rise to great prominence. Other countries will rise too, but due to their cultures, won''t be looked-upon as equal/fraternal/opportunity as America is and will always be.
When is China going to have a non-Chinese president? When is France going to have a black prime minister? Only in America can anyone have the chance to to do anything they want to...
;)
The same is true for energy. We stopped nuclear energy and off shore drilling. We failed completely in long term planning. We stopped being competitive.
so thats what happened!!!
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