The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: growing thirst, precursor chemicals, counterfeit goods, United States, China Price, Latin America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this comprehensive, contemporary look at the awakening giant that is China, Peter Navarro describes an emerging power beleaguered by both internal and external threats-if the Japanese don't get them, AIDS and SARS will. This will reassure those readers who are increasingly convinced that the Chinese will eat us for lunch. However, as Navarro points out, China's human and natural resources make her a formidable global player-and her native, amoral ruthlessness suggests she will win. Still, as a nation undergoing its Industrial Revolution in the Information Age, China has her problems transitioning from Communism to capitalist imperialism, as seems to be her goal. True, government and industry have forged strong bonds (that allow them to exploit slave labor and ignore environmental and economic constraints that hamper other nations), but like any modern nation, China is paying the price of competing in a global economy: pollution; rapacious private medical care expenses; an aging, under-pensioned population; international tensions; and a large and disgruntled peasant working class. Navarro, whose inclination to breathless hyperbole makes even a chapter on dam construction exciting, tellingly devotes 10 chapters to China's problems and one to their solution-essentially tired policy prescriptions (wean the U.S. from oil dependence and cheap Chinese imports). This informative book will teach readers to understand the dragon, just not how to vanquish it.
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Review

“In this informative volume, Navarro explores China's impact on the world and the perils it creates. … This provocative and potentially controversial book will be of value to a wide audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended.  

        --CHOICE, April 2007

 

 

“…serves as an important touchstone for any prudent discussion regarding the implications to China's growth. For those unfamiliar with China's ecological disaster, natural-resource crisis or aging and soon to be inverted demographics, this book is a very good introduction.”  

           --Benjamin A Shobert, Asia Times

 

"In this comprehensive examination of China's mushrooming economy, Navarro masterfully illuminates the dark sides of China's great leaps into privatization and globalization."

             --Cecil Johnson, Boston Globe

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: FT Press; 1 edition (October 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132281287
• ISBN-13: 978-0132281287
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #504,190 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars China-Bashing at its worst, February 10, 2008

By	Francis Schortgen (Oxford, OH, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"[China] requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which could culminate in self-defeatingly creating the very crisis we fear" (Hutton 2006)

A line from the book? Hardly! Nevertheless, The Coming China Wars relates in an unmistakable to this quote, for it exemplifies in starkest terms the very enmity and suspicion that Will Hutton cautions against in The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face Her as an Enemy. If the choice of title for the book itself fails to communicate the line of thought that pervades the book, the reader need not go any further than the author's introduction, which he begins with a fictitious October 25, 2012, News Release, entitled "U.S.-China Chill Melts Down World Markets." It remains highly debatable whether or not, as the author claims, "China has put itself on a collision course with the rest of the world," or whether that purportedly inevitable course is not possibly the result of a larger combination of factors, including not least highly de-contextualized and emotional analysis for which the United States, in the eyes of the noted German journalist and author, Peter Scholl Latour, appears to have a near infallible inclination in recent years. The Coming China Wars merely helps to further cement this perception.

Navarro discusses eight major China Wars that, ironically enough considering his heavy-handed, one-sided analytical approach, he argues require "a better understanding of the complexities of the economic origins" so as to "lead to their peaceful resolution" (xix). These China Wars include what he describes as (1) the Not-So-Swashbuckling Piracy Wars, (2) The 21st Century Opium Wars, (3) The Air Pollution and Global Warming Wars, (4) The "Blood for Oil" Wars, (5) The New Imperialist Wars, (6) The Damnable Dam and Water Wars, (7) China's Wars from Within, and (8) China's Ticking Time Bombs.

It is not altogether clear why "any complete understanding of the coming China Wars" (p. 2) must begin with a discussion of the so-called `China Price', but that nevertheless is the starting point of the book. Navarro identified nine drivers that sustain what he calls the "weapon of mass production" - low-wage labor; lax health, safety, and environmental regulations; foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows; industrial network clustering; pervasive piracy and counterfeiting; undervalued currency; government subsidies; and protectionist tendencies. Without any truly contextual (e.g. attempting to understand the range of factors influencing the Chinese government's position on exchange rate system, or acknowledging the views of Nobel laureates in economics (Josephy Stiglitz and Robert Mundell) who cautioned against rapid re-valuation of the Chinese currency) or comparative (e.g. China's protectionist and purported neo-mercantilist tendencies pale in comparison to those of Japan in the 1980s and South Korea up to this day) frameworks, this first chapter holds little value except for the fact that Navarro relies on the implied causality of the China Price and export-led economic growth to pave the way for the arguments offered in the remainder of the book.
Perhaps the least controversial chapter in the book may be the one dealing with the issue of widespread piracy and counterfeiting, though the near two-page exposition of fictional scenarios seems intended more as page filler and sensational highlighting of the problems than objective, detached scholarly analysis (of which this book is largely devoid). The importance of this particular topic, however, is undeniable, as has been documented by recent headline-grabbing news surrounding pet food and toothpaste exports from China. The author aptly (although very briefly) discusses the problems related to enforcement of intellectual property rights in China in terms of the inherent economic logic that leads to a vast discrepancy between policy and lawmaking at the center and enforcement at the local level; highlights divergent forms of piracy and counterfeiting ("ghost -shift," reverse-engineering, and "start-up counterfeiter" scenarios); and argues that the legal system of pirate (in)justice will only be addressed in more coherent fashion following the emergence of Chinese businesses with their own intellectual property to safeguard.

Air pollution and general environmental problems are the subject of Chapter 3. The author puts emphasis on China's reliance on coal as a primary source of energy and the contributory effect thereof on rising levels of air pollution, the alarming and accelerating onset of desertification and dust storms - related to over-cultivation, overgrazing, and deforestation - and the resulting impact on China and the world. The problem of effectively combating environmental pollution in China appears also linked to a large extent to questions of economic logic. As Navarro notes, "local officials either collude with corrupt local businesses or believe that nothing must be allowed to slow economic growth" (p. 61). Curiously enough, the obvious challenge and importance of these issues notwithstanding, Navarro chooses to (conveniently?) ignore even a simple mention of the various steps the Chinese government has taken to begin to address these issues.

Chapters 4 and 5 address the issue of energy and raw materials sourcing. From the author's point of view, China's growing thirst for oil is based on an amoral foreign policy ("just business, no politics") characterized by a preference for bilateral contracting (p. 72) rather than coordination and cooperation at the international oil market level, holds the distinct possibility of an accelerated arms race (i.e. guns for oil), leads to a ready embrace of dictatorial regimes, and heightens territorial disputes in the South China Sea. How strange that in enumerating these concerns, it did not occur to the author to reflect on U.S. foreign policy. After all, the "Blood for Oil" part of the title for Chapter 3 seems rather more appropriate for the U.S. than the Chinese case. If, up to this point, the reader has failed to notice Navarro's distinct bias, it comes powerfully to the fore in his discussion of the so-called "new imperialist" wars and "parasitic African adventure" of Chapter 5. Critiquing China (rightly or wrongly) for "using its amoral foreign policy and diplomatic powers at the United Nations to protect African dictators and strongmen from all manners of international pressures and sanctions" (p. 96) certainly does not amount to claiming a moral high ground for other countries, including the United States, for even cursory overview of U.S. foreign economic and strategic policies will inevitably point out similar self-interested attitudes by the U.S. government.

The apex of hypocrisy and ludicrous argumentation, however, is undoubtedly reached in Chapter 6. The less than appropriate comparison with the Opium Wars of the 18th century to China's `role' in the narcotics game notwithstanding, the author implies, however irresponsibly, that the China of the 21st century aims to achieve what Britain managed to do through the Opium Wars - conquering markets for their product. The following quotes, more than any commentary, highlight Navarro's inherent analytical naïveté and bias: "Although China has conquered many an export market...the same cannot be said for hard drugs. At least in this particular "China War," the Middle Kingdom has lots of bad company" (p. 110); "Today, one of the most important roles that China plays in the global heroin trade is to provide criminal syndicates with the vast quantities of the precursor chemicals needed to turn opium paste into heroin" (p. 112); "China also clandestinely exports precursor ephedrine to Russia the `domestic production of methamphetamine in kitchen labs in quantities for personal use" (p. 121). For a moment, the author also seems to have switched profession, indulging the reader with a methamphetamine and ecstasy primer, stretching over a combined six and a half pages.

The remaining chapters, meanwhile, offer a welcome return to a more balanced analysis, following the extreme bias and implicit/explicit distortions of Chapter 6. A rather short Chapter 7 speaks to the environmental and ecological problems related to China's obsession with dam-building, while Chapter 8 covers the political economy of water pollution and water scarcity. In "China's Wars from Within" (Chapter 9), the authors puts forward the proposition that the distinct potential for "wars from within" is intricately linked to issues such as water pollution and scarcity, corruption, income disparity, rural dislocation, and issues further developed in this chapter. The high level of unemployment, for example, appears correlated with privatization (i.e. the smashing of the "Iron Rice Bowl") and urbanization.. In this context, challenges to the institutional structures of the CCP are increasingly beginning to manifest itself in open discontent and rising numbers of protests; oftentimes fueled by perceived excesses in corruption among party members and seemingly indiscriminate favoritism based on guanxi (a term which the author has managed to misspell throughout the book!). Though far less biased than previous chapters, the fact that the author tries to cover a wide range of issues in just 19 pages (from unemployment, rising popular discontent of the dispossessed, and indications of possible class wars to manifestations of corruption, ethnic strife and Muslim separatism) attests to the hasty compilation of this work, considering that it is all largely devoid of substantive contextualization (a critique which I shall return to shortly).
In Chapter 10, Navarro puts the finger on the problems and challenges posed by a rapidly ageing population, a largely under-funded pension system in China, a crisis-ridden... Read more ›

188 of 243 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A book that is meant to terrify you!, January 24, 2007

By	An expat based in Beijing (US and China) - See all my reviews

In The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (which I recommend to anybody who cares about global peace and prosperity), author Will Hutton says, "[China] requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which could culminate in self-defeatingly creating the very crisis we fear."

If you want to know such enmity and suspicion to the extreme, read The Coming Wars of China, which is simply a categorisation of the bad stories about China you can find over the internet. (Author's note: "Much of the research conducted for this book was done over the internet.") To give you an example, on page 137-138 the author uses the information on the Banqiao Dam found at Wikipedia - the Banqiao Dam was built in the early 1950s and crested and collapsed when Typhoon Nina hit in 1975 - to prove that it is not a good idea to build the Three Gorges Dam.

In fact, you know you are in for some catastrophic scenarios when you read the author's prediction in the form of a "News Release, October 25, 2012" on the first page of the Introduction:

- "Global stock exchanges were devastated this week by the worst collapse in history as a wave of panic selling followed...a Chinese government announcement that it would no longer finance the mounting budget and trade deficits of a 'profligate United States'."

- "It's been a tough year for Sino-US relations. In January, the US ambassador to the United Nations stormed out in protest over...[China's] veto to shield terrorist regimes such as Iran from diplomatic sanctions in exchange for oil. In March, China's president abruptly cancelled a state visit after the US Treasury Department branded China a 'currency manipulator.' During an unusually hot August that raised collateral fears of global warming, the US Pacific Fleet engaged in a tense, week-long standoff over Taiwan with China's [navy]."

- "Meanwhile, domestic unrest in China continues to escalate... A recent report released by the US Central Intelligence Agency has warned that should such domestic unrest reach a boiling point in China, the result may be 'sharper military conflicts with the United States, Taiwan, and possibly even Japan as Chinese leaders seek to unify the now increasingly fractured nation against a 'common enemy.'"

Of course, if you like betting, you can always buy the book now and check the validity of the author's prediction in the year 2012.

I would not, however, recommend that you do this. Instead, I recommend that you buy Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall, which is one of the first truly enlightening books on China because of the author's unbiased attitude and approach.

24 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good book to know China problems, Bad book to know China, April 21, 2007

By	Heron Cheer (Irvine, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Good points: this book overviews China problems.
Bad points: Bias. Not a book to know China.

Peter Navarro's standpoint is clear: China is an evil enemy, so we need to see the potential of the "China Wars".

I feel that it will be a much better book if he changed his standpoint as : China is a friend, US and China co-exist. We need to apprciate how hard that the Chinese government is targeting these problems. We need to help China to solve these problems even faster.

In all, problems always exist. I belive that there are so many wars in the world because there are a lot of people try to make enemys, not friends.