Black Earth(139)

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One Asian country exhibits a unique combination of enormous need for food and a commensurate ability to pursue resources: the People’s Republic of China. China is a rising industrial and exporting power that cannot from its own territory ensure the basic supplies needed for the expanding prosperity that its population takes for granted. In some respects, China might be in a worse position now than Germany was in the 1930s. Its supply of arable soil per person is about forty percent of the world average, and is diminishing at a rate of about a million hectares per year. The Chinese people have experienced mass hunger. The Second World War and the succeeding civil war in China brought starvation to millions of people. A decade after the victory of the communists, the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962 killed tens of millions of people.

In twenty-first-century China, the gap between the two senses of the word Lebensraum—comfort and survival—appears to be small. There are tens of millions of prosperous Chinese today whose family members died of starvation in living memory. The Chinese populace will likely require more and more calories because prosperous Chinese, like prosperous people everywhere, demand greater food security as well as more and different kinds of food. The same Chinese communist party that starved its own people during its revolutionary phase still rules the country. Since it is responsible both for past famine and for future plenty, it is hugely sensitive to food supplies. This can be seen in the market-distorting purchases of agricultural commodities whenever global supply seems threatened. It is improbable that China, given its growing wealth, will actually run out of food. Much more likely are overreactions to momentary anxieties that punish peoples beyond China. Regardless of whether large numbers of Chinese are actually threatened with physical hunger, the politics of national prosperity will tend towards decisive international action when a sense of threat emerges.

Facing some future crisis, perhaps a series of annual droughts, leaders in Beijing might draw the conclusion in the 2030s that leaders in Berlin drew in the 1930s: that the globalization that serves a booming export sector must be complemented by durable control of living space that ensures food supplies. The Chinese leadership has described Africa as a source of needed resources, including food. Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In Sudan, drought drove Arabs southward into the lands of African pastoralists. The Sudanese government sided with the Arabs and designed a policy to eliminate the Zaghawa, Masseleit, and Fur peoples as such. This Sudanese government was armed by China and Russia.

China also faces a shortage that was unheard of in the 1930s: potable water. Climate change seems to intensify the water cycle, bringing more droughts as well as more floods. Places that are drenched are getting more water; places that are parched are getting less. Close to a billion people worldwide lack the half gallon a day needed for drinking, and more than two billion lack the five gallons a day needed for hygiene. In the twenty-first century, people have rioted for water not only in China but in Bolivia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan. China disposes of only about a third as much freshwater per person as the global average, and much of it comes from glaciers that are melting away in the warming air. Half of Chinese freshwater and about twenty percent of Chinese groundwater are already polluted beyond potability. By 2030, Chinese demand for water will likely be close to twice the current supply. It is quite possible, of course, that China, or at least its more prosperous citizens, will be able to afford desalination of seawater in the future as technology improves.

Less peaceful approaches to the problem of uncertain water and food supplies are also possible. China has a long border with a country that has considerable supplies of water: the Russian Federation. Chinese farmers are cultivating the land on their side of the Chinese-Russian border ever more intensively, Russian farmers ever less so. In the early twenty-first century, Beijing invested more capital in eastern Russia than did Moscow. As time passes, Beijing might look to Siberian water, just as it now looks to Siberian natural gas and oil. Beijing’s preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself. Russian leaders, like African ones, have been amenable to this form of submission. This Chinese approach to Moscow has worked with natural gas, and it might work with water.

Yet as climate change continues, and as unpredictable events accumulate, land in Africa and Russia might seem more precious to Africans and Russians themselves. Under pressure, the Chinese will perhaps find the ideas that seem to justify the impoverishment and death of Africans and Russians. Or perhaps Russians and Africans will find the ideas that justify putting an end to Chinese globalization and to the people who seem to be behind it.