Slow Boat Back To China

Mr Steyn, thank you for your week-long tour de force describing everything that is wrong with the modern West and America in particular. I largely agree, but may I comment on one item where I think you slightly err?

In “It Starts With The Money”, you replayed your usual line that China will get old before it gets rich because of the age and gender imbalance caused by the abortion-enforced One Child Policy. You also noted that Chinese collapse poses dangers of its own.

While I don't disagree with either your standard China line or its implied corollary, I don't think the latter automatically follows from the former, and even if it did, lack of wealth and social unrest are both rather beside the point. Yes, if the Chinese intention is to create a secular hedonist social-welfare paradise, then of course having "millions of surplus young men whom the One Child Policy has deprived of female companionship is a recipe for profound social convulsions".
But suppose China's government does not share the West's default assumption that the aim of the nation is hedonist social welfare? Suppose instead that the Chinese Communist Party has more traditional (ironic, no?) objectives for the Chinese nation, like say, forcibly annexing lost provinces to the east, or invading sparsely-populated but resource-rich regions to the north, or crushing restive ethnic minorities in the west, or procuring feminine populations to the south.

In that case, having all those companionless surplus young men no longer looks like a recipe for social convulsions, it looks more like a recipe for… um, what's that word again? We hardly ever hear it in the West anymore… Oh, yeah: victory.

Indeed, given that Chinese demography and the dodgy Chinese banking system mean that domestic tranquility cannot be in China's future, but hegemonic conquest can be, and given that these facts have certainly not escaped the notice of the Chinese Communist Party, then the question would seem to be not how will the Chinese manage inevitable decline, but when will they assert inevitable hegemony?

To do this, China need not become the "first gay superpower since Sparta". It can choose to become the umpteenth casualty-tolerant superpower since… well, early China, come to think of it.

History's clock is ticking. China has about a generation's time to decide between bourgeois failure into decline versus militarist expansion into hegemony. The Chinese Communist Party gets to make the choice. Which one do you think they will pick?