[mobbemeatiedy]

China will be in no position to become a world power in the near future due to the massive internal problems she is going to be going through. These fall into at least three categories:

1) Modernization problems -- China's current government, essentially a barely-updated version of the old Imperial Court with a powerful bureaucracy and harsh autocratic rule, is appropriate for an agrarian society of peasants. But China is in transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy and has a growing educated middle class. In the 1990s, the democracy movement in China was confined to university students, but in the future the educated Chinese, who are the ones likely to demand democratization, will constitute a larger and larger percentage of the population. Before long, it will become something that can't be crushed with tanks. At the same time, China faces a working-class revolt similar to what struck the U.S. over the late 19th and early 20th century.

2) Environmental/resource problems -- peak oil is problematical for everyone, but for China, whose economy is both developing and huge, it's especially acute. Where is China to find the energy resources needed to continue modernizing her economy? This question has answers, but finding and implementing an answer and also dealing with the environmental and public-health challenges of modernizing such an immense economy will not be easy.

3) Demographic problems -- the world faces a difficult transition as global birth rates seem to be falling instinctively in response to overpopulation. That's very good news, of course; far preferable to have that happen than face either Malthusian horror or draconian solutions! But for China the difficulties are far worse than for other countries because of draconian solutions already applied, i.e. the One Child policy. China's Millennial generation is unusually small compared to older generations and, even worse, lopsidedly male (because of traditional preferences for male children and reluctance to have one's only permitted child be female). That's going to make the aging of the Chinese population especially acute and create an internal demographic problem that is potentially crisis-level.

Far from being poised as the next world hegemon, China will be doing well to avoid internal collapse and civil war.

As far as World War III is concerned, I don't believe it's a possibility -- certainly not a significant probability -- because all of the world's great powers are armed with nuclear weapons. This makes war unacceptable as the "final resort" in international relations among great powers. No matter what sparks arise or what tensions exist, great powers will in this age always pull back from that brink, not daring to go to war for fear of nuclear annihilation. There may conceivably be a small-scale nuclear exchange between two minor nuclear powers, such as India and Pakistan or (down the road) Israel and Iran, but any such war will merely serve to underscore the horror of such weapons and make war of great powers even more unthinkable.

The change that this brings to the very nature of the sovereign nation-state is profound. A nation-state exists ultimately for the purpose of waging war. It has other functions, as governments always do, but it is defined in its borders and authority by its ability to make war. That's been the case ever since the nation-state first came into existence. The importance of a change in a fact of global politics this profound can hardly be overstated. What we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the nation-state as a fully sovereign entity.

We are come to a place in the map marked "here be dragons." This territory is uncharted.