[Analytics] Why the world’s hopes for order and prosperity could rest on China in an emerging age of calamity

China is uniquely positioned to help mitigate climate change and provide humanitarian relief during the coming anarchy. Richard Heydarian specially for the South China Morning Post.

The greatest cost of the ongoing Sino-American cold war – better described as a “frozen conflict” – is a shortsighted distraction from the coming anarchy.

With the twin meta-challenges of climate change and hyper-disruptive technology lurking on the horizon, China remains immeasurably central to the preservation of global order.

This is especially true in the Indo-Pacific, where much of humanity’s population, economic activity, conflicts and natural disasters are tenuously concentrated.

The region’s future will be less about struggle for mastery than managing one cataclysmic calamity after the other, as individual states find themselves inundated by myriad evolving disasters.

The magnitude of non-traditional security challenges facing humanity far surpasses the management capacity of a single power, whether that is the US or China. Thus, cooperation among great powers will increasingly become the only game in town, the default geopolitical option in decades to come.

In Roland Emmerich’s epic 2012, the science fiction movie that drove countless people to the edge of apocalyptic despair, China emerges as the unlikely savior. After all, it’s the Asian powerhouse that builds the 21st century Noah’s Ark, carrying in its steely bosom humanity’s best, brightest and billionaires as the world drowns in a biblical storm.

The year 2012 didn’t mark apocalypse, as topnotch physicists reassured us with tenacity, but the movie correctly highlighted the vicissitudes of nature as well as the emerging geopolitics of our times with the arrival of a new agent of history.

It underscored as much the fragility of human civilisation as the centrality of modern China to humanity’s future. China, along with the West, has become a major source of as well as a possible solution to the rapid emaciation of nature and the intensifying climate change conundrum.

According to a major report by the World Wide Fund for Nature drafted by nearly 60 of the world’s leading scientists, the past half-century saw the extinction of 60 per cent of all global fauna and of a dizzying variety of birds, mammals, fishes and reptiles that had been around for millions of years.

We are facing what scientists call the “sixth extinction”, a mass annihilation that would be driven by human activities rather than geological disasters such as those that wiped out the dinosaurs, for instance. Another major study showed that humans, constituting 0.01 per cent of life on earth, have been responsible for the extinction of 83 per cent of all wild mammals and up to half of all plants.

The rapid, widespread destruction of non-human life on earth was accelerated with the Industrial Revolution in the West, and exacerbated by the rapid industrialisation of the East in recent decades. China’s appetite for exotic animals and its increasingly meaty diet has been a major contributor.

To put things into perspective, the US, China, India, Russia and Japan are the world’s top five sources of greenhouse emissions, the primary precursor of climate change.

Rising global temperature and extreme weather conditions brought about by climate change will only exacerbate the ongoing natural cataclysm, placing tens of millions of people at risk.

Of the top 10 countries most vulnerable to the adverse impact of climate change, according to an HSBC study, seven are from the Indo-Pacific region – namely India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Oman and Kenya.

Worryingly, most of these countries rate poorly on the Fragile State Index and other measurements of state capacity to mitigate and adapt to disasters, both manmade and natural.

While untrammeled economic expansion is supposed to be the defining story of the Indo-Pacific, the region is also highly susceptible to uneven development with potentially devastating socio-political consequences.

Asia is home to almost a billion workers with “vulnerable” jobs bereft of proper compensation, benefits and security of tenure, according to the International Labour Organisation. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and advancement in Artificial Intelligence directly threaten lower-skilled as well as white-collar jobs in the future.

AI gurus such as Kai Ful Lee expect the impact on jobs to be felt within less than two decades. The labour organisation estimates that in the Southeastern Asian countries of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, up to 137 million jobs (56 per cent) are at risk of being lost to automation.

While new waves of innovation will likely create new employment opportunities, what is certain is the prospect of employment insecurity, which, in turn, can deepen societal fissures and grievances over rising inequality, fuel radicalisation and extremist ideologies, and push a growing number of people into the underground economy.

Thus, what the Indo-Pacific could face is a dangerous cocktail of profound economic anxieties, extreme weather conditions and the emaciation of natural resources, which will imperil our civilisation like never before.

And this is precisely where Sino-American tensions are a dangerous distraction, since China’s buy-in is crucial. China is not only a source of the problem; it is also a source of solutions.

With its strides in green technology, tightening environmental regulations, large reserve of capital and technology, infrastructure development capacity, and growing naval capability, the Asian powerhouse is uniquely positioned to help mitigate climate change, provide humanitarian and disaster relief operations, and help other countries cope with the coming anarchy.

In short, China can immensely contribute to the Noah’s Ark of regional cooperation that will increasingly become indispensable to preserving a semblance of order and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.

Richard Heydarian is a Manila-based academic and author

Tags: China