The Yellow Peril
An idea that’s been recently bouncing around, apparently, is the imminence not only of hordes of slavering Arabiacs biting the heads off of our babies and raping our womenfolk, but also that of clone-like masses of yellow bodies swelling forth from Asia like a tide of army ants, conquering with their socialist sameness all that was ever good and right in this world.
It was mentioned that China is a mighty danger because they greedily take money from sadly hoodwinked western businesses, then invest it directly into their army, with which they will swarm the world (picture Cobra Commander’s forces in the GI Joe cartoon series). Their most likely immediate target is Japan rather than the world, but can California then be far behind? (An American view of geography goes a long way to making this more feasible.)
Naturally, the US has no choice but to step up its own military spending in order to keep pace with this faceless nation of over a billion workers enslaved by socialism — to stop them in the name of freedom, lest they spread their totalitarian ways over the planet. You heard correctly: it’s the US that is scaremongering that the Chinese might start taking over countries with their awesome, unholy and unstoppable military — once they’ve built it. That the U.S. already has the most awesome army the world has ever seen and has already used it to conquer two countries in the last 4 years doesn’t enter into it. We seem to indeed be living in the “post-irony” age. Or perhaps it just seems so because of the plurality of stupid people.
There’s no arguing that China is doing a lot of business lately. The Chinese Connection by Paul Krugman gives a succinct rundown of the macroeconomic relationship between China and the U.S. and the interrelationship between the Chinese Yuan and the U.S. Dollar.
“Money is pouring into China, both because of its rapidly rising trade surplus and because of investments by Western and Japanese companies. Normally, this inflow of funds would be self-correcting: both China’s trade surplus and the foreign investment pouring in would push up the value of the yuan, China’s currency, making China’s exports less competitive and shrinking its trade surplus.
“But the Chinese government, unwilling to let that happen, has kept the yuan down by shipping the incoming funds right back out again, buying huge quantities of dollar assets − about $200 billion worth in 2004, and possibly as much as $300 billion worth this year. This is economically perverse: China, a poor country where capital is still scarce by Western standards, is lending vast sums at low interest rates to the United States.”
China seems to be investing vast sums of its money in the U.S. dollar, in effect propping up a sagging U.S. economy and easing what should be a crippling deficit load. In fact, this same amount of investment is what keeps the interest rates low and is fueling the current housing boom in the States.
With China investing about 300 Billion into the US economy, they must be putting more than that into their military, right? Military Spending, US vs. the World FY01 (Center for Defense Information) shows that, in the year 2000, China was third in the world in military spending (with $42 Billion), behind Russia ($60 Billion) and the U.S. ($396 Billion). But third place is still only about 10% of what the U.S. spends. In fact, according to this page, the U.S. spends as much as the next 25 countries combined (up from 15 countries combined a few years ago). Japan, the country it is feared will be mowed down first, comes in fourth with almost the same spending as China at $40 Billion. Doesn’t sound like they have that much to worry about.
From the figures, China is pouring much more money into maintaining its trade surplus and incidentally feeding the U.S. addiction for cash than it is investing its army. About 750% more, in fact.
US vs. World military spendingThe trend does not seem to be improving in China’s favor as more recent figures in US defence budget will equal ROW combined “within 12 months” (Jane's) indicate that the US, with about $420 Billion spent in 2003, will outspend the entire rest of the world on its war machine. Of that spending, “[l]ess than two per cent of the US defence budget is spent outside its home market”, which means it’s an almost half a trillion dollar trough of free money for the defense industry pigs to slop up. Keep that in mind whenever you think that military (defense) spending is about protecting America. It’s not; it’s about corporate welfare — the biggest such scheme ever devised and built for that express purpose when Truman created the national security state after WWII.
If that’s not enough, The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think by Robert Higgs (The Independent Institute) tallies other expenditures that would count as military spending in a sane world. For example, that “[a] great deal of U.S. foreign aid, currently more than $4 billion annually, takes the form of ‘foreign military financing,’”.
That’s not counting the amounts spent by the NSA and the CIA, which have never had public, official budgets, but which must also mow through billions and billions of dollars per year. The CIA didn’t get to be the biggest media firm in the world without cash. On top of that are the chump change of “$87.5 billion supplemental spending … for support of U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq”. Finally, any fair analysis of spending will include the interest paid on the debt incurred by decades of out-of-control military spending which “is equal to 81.1 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public in 2002”. See the chart to the right for the breakdown offered by Higgs.
For more information and more charts, see High Military Expenditure in Some Places
China arms spending overstated? (International Herald Tribune), published just days ago, reports that, while “China’s military spending far exceeds what it officially acknowledges [it] is far less than many experts believe”. This is from a study by the RAND research group, not one known for its leftist, commie-loving leanings. In fact, China spends “between 2.3 percent and 2.8 percent” of its GDP compared to the U.S.‘s “3.9 percent” of its GDP. And that’s only for the official U.S. number of $430 Billion. When actually accounting for all expenditures related to the military (as above), the figure nearly doubles, to about 7.5% of GDP. An astronomical figure.
For context, China reports spending “$22.4 billion” on its military, though “actual spending would be 1.4 times to 1.7 times” that amount. That’s actually in keeping with the US policy of underreporting by about “88 percent” (2004 figures provided by Higgs above). Though China’s spending “has more than doubled over the past six years”, it will still take until 2025 before it spends more than any other U.S. ally. By this time, of course, the U.S. will have increased its own military to such a size that the earth will collapse into a neutron star under its weight.