by William Powers

The China Canard

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China's taking over the world! But you know that already. How could you not? The news is screaming at us every day, and the screamers include every major American news outlet.

The Chinese economic boom isn't just another passing media sensation, either. It's the hippest, most happening beat on the planet, especially for all of those would-be-Tocquevilles who are always on the lookout for the Next Big Place, a dateline from which to score scoops, TV gigs, book contracts, and perhaps, if they're lucky, a Tocquevillian kind of immortality.

Those people have been working the China beat for some time, and you've heard and read them in profusion. The 20th century was famously "The American Century." A couple of months ago, Newsweek gave the next 95 years over to China, with a cover headline that dubbed this "China's Century."

In the American media right now, if you aren't brushing up on your Mandarin, you're out of it. China is the place to be, the beating heart of media buzz.

But can you trust this buzz? Is China's brilliant globe-altering future as certain as so many American journalists would have you believe? These are the kinds of questions every skeptical media consumer should be asking right now. History teaches that when a bunch of journalists tell you that some country "is the future," they're pretty reliably wrong.

For a lot of besotted foreign correspondents of the early 20th century, for instance, revolutionary Russia was the future. In less than 100 years, it was kaput.

In the 1980s, it was Japan that was redefining life on Earth. Journalists are very good at following the money, though not always in the Watergate sense. At any given moment in history, you can find us fluttering around whoever's got big dough, believing their hype and confidently reporting that the future belongs to them. We do this with rich individuals and rich countries alike—money is money.

Thus, when Japan was very rich, a lot of journalists got seriously into sushi, and along the way swallowed a very "Japan Inc." vision of the future. That craze hit its zenith in 1989, when a Japanese company bought Rockefeller Center in New York City. "Who owns America?" asked a tremulous ABC News report that week. Enter Diane Sawyer with some helpful hints: "The Japanese ... have just bought Rockefeller Center—its famous ice-skating rink, the Rainbow Room, and even Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes. And that's just Japan's latest purchases in this country. You remember in September, Columbia Pictures and its film vault of American classics were bought by the Sony Corporation. In fact, when we look back, we may well see this decade as the decade when America started to go on sale."

Six years later, Japan was in deep recession, pulling out of Hollywood, selling Rockefeller Center, and basically making all of those media predictions look extremely silly.

But that was then, and this is now, and it's a totally Chinese now. Funny, though, it has a certain Japanese-y feeling. The Chinese are out to buy precious American assets, but instead of a famous Manhattan landmark, it's Unocal. And as in the '80s, the media coverage swings between they're-taking-us-over alarmism and culturally flattering feature stories about how they just want to be more like us: shopping in malls, living in suburbs, driving expensive German cars. The CBS Evening News recently aired a whimsical feature about how the Chinese are getting into cosmetic surgery.

Most important, like the Japanese of yore, the Chinese are simply gangbusters to beat us at the global economic game, and they're a strong bet to do it, too, if you believe leading journalists.

In April, in a New York Times Magazine excerpt from his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas L. Friedman wrote: "What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be 'made in China' but also be 'designed in China.' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years, we will have gone from 'sold in China' to 'made in China' to 'designed in China' to 'dreamed up in China'—or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything."

Everything.

And just in case anyone still remembers past media goofs on this front, rest assured, this time it's real. "China Inc. Looks Set to Outdo Old Japan Inc.," headlined The Wall Street Journal last week.

China is different from Japan, of course. It's a much larger country, and it doesn't have some of the problems that felled the Japanese economy. But it does have its own endemic issues. While Japan operates a relatively modern Western-style democracy, China is run by a bunch of Communist oligarchs. And those oligarchs control a huge chunk of China's industrial might.

As the Chinese people get an intoxicating taste of Western-style freedom and high living, what happens if they decide that it's time for the oligarchs to go? It could be another revolution. And it could happen relatively quickly with an extra push from the Internet. It could be quite messy, and bring the Chinese global takeover to a dead stop.

If anything like that happens, rest assured, the media's exuberant China hands will be on the first flight out. Next stop, India!

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