The Implosion Of China

The rebels and Taiwanese secure South China
and cross the Yangtze.

Our little study group recently considered the question of the implosion of China as a state. This may sound a bit odd at first, but it does have some foundation and is a potential future that is worth thinking about. China, as a national entity, has been around for thousands of years. During this time, it has waxed and waned, it has grown and it has shrunk. It has been subjugated and it has conquered all before it. China, as we currently understand the political entity to be, has been in existence only since 1949. It would be wrong to assume that the current boundaries are entirely stable, given the perspective of thousands of years.

We have written before about the boundaries of China expanding. It is now time to think about the possibility of the boundaries of China contracting. There is a certain method to this way of thinking. It was a nineteenth century Chinese historian, Wei Yuan, who first identified a series of cycles which Chinese politics appears to follow. Starting arbitrarily in the cycle at a period of 'chaos and humiliation' (the quru), this is followed by a period of 'rejuvenation' (fuxiang), and then followed by a period of 'wealth and power' (fuqiang), before returning to a period of quru again. The narrative is that the nineteenth century represents a period of quru, the Communist revolution and the post-Mao reforms represent a period of fuxiang, leading to the current situation of fuqiang. If any of this is true, then the future of China will be one of continued fuqiang, followed by a period of quru. It is this boundary between fuqiang and quru that interests us.

The question of how to tackle this came into focus when we came across the magazine 'Modern War 19'. It contains a nice article on the subject, but more importantly, a game by Ty Bomba to frame the scenarios. As always, we started by playing the vanilla game to see how things might work out. In the run through, the Rebels took the opportunity to place their capital in Hong Kong and to work outwards from there. I thought this to be a nice touch because of all the places where a revolt might originate, South China has to be at the top of my list. In the run through, the rebel forces enlisted the support of Taiwan and drove most of the government forces back north of the Yangtze River.

It was an interesting game, but really does need some modifications. To start with, the forces of Taiwan are over-estimated. I think that we may clip their wings in future run throughs. I wasn't at all comfortable with a scenario set that just had two sides. I think that future games ought to be set at the level of the Military Region, with the politics set to invite the players to set themselves up as modern day warlords and fragmenting China on a regional basis. They could have a degree of autonomy within their regions and compete over the distribution of resources, a political mechanism that has to be added to the game. We could almost pose the game as one of regionalism against nationalism. We also need to work on a mechanism which induces the various regions to rebel against Beijing. The bond market might be a likely place to spark a sequence of events leading to civil disorder. It is certainly a point at which the prosperous coastal regions might baulk at subsidising the less prosperous inland regions.

The game still has a lot to offer in an area which is not widely considered. It is on our agenda to develop a series of scenarios around the disintegration of China in the coming months.

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

© The European Futures Observatory 2017