StrategyUnit

Rosa Parks helped spark the flame that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

The Washington Post looks - in memoriam

Back at San Francisco State University, I wrote and published a paper titled “In the Midst of the Swarm: Reconceptualizing the (Mislabeled) Global War on Terrorism” (April 2005), where I stated:

“For all of Moore’s cheering of a grand social movement of social justice from those from the liberal end of the spectrum, it is the Islamist global guerillas that have gained the spotlight in the creation of a global social movement.”

Moore is the guy who wrote “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”, championing anti-globalization crowd as being the Second Superpower.

Stopping by VodkaPundit today, I came across this mention of Mark Steyn’s article at the Telegraph:

Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.

What’s the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map - that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world’s pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.

Good to see this idea picking up more speed.

In any grand strategy discussion for the United States, EU, Russia - or any country for that matter - China is seen as the raising power (welcomed or not). Quarter after quarter comes news about its explosive GDP growth and the new buildings sprouting over coastal China, especially Shanghai, have been a testament to this.

But despite all this - people forget that China is not infallible. And while growing, we cant assume its stated spectacular growth is always on the mark - just because the officials say so. Just like most do not take for granted what China says about its defense spending, we should always been suspect about taking China’s self-reported GDP numbers for granted. There is of course real growth occurring, but the Chinese Government has an image to maintain to the world and its people and feels it can’t afford to show even a normal cyclical downturn.

From Simon World

Over at Econbrowser, James Hamilton points out to some interesting data bringing some interestingly scrutiny to that data:

Consider Simon’s graphs at the right. The first shows the levels of various Chinese GDP components, which might look reasonable at first blush. But when you subtract investment, net exports, and government spending from GDP, you arrive at what should be the sum of consumption spending plus inventory investment, represented by the magenta curve (which Simon helps the color-vocabulary-challenged to identify as “the line in the ugly colour”). Trouble is, this ugly magenta line clearly trends down, and that can’t remotely be explained by inventories. The implausible behavior is even more clear when plotted as growth rates as the red line in the second graph.

Read the entire post at Econbrowser…

Conclusion
Many on the “China as the new USSR” should take note that just like the threat and might of the USSR was sometimes overplayed (remember Kennedy during the election?), so is China sometimes played the same way. The point of the matter is simply this: the changes in China are far more complicated than can be placed in simple headlines proclaiming “The Raising Dragon” and the like.