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.Instead, growth is increasingly fueled by foreigndebt, a system of readily available consumer debt, and a gradualfrittering away of assets.All other differences between the two countries aside, there isone important similarity between growth in the United States andin China: it is not sustainable in either country.This lack of sus-tainability is so explosive because the two economies have unknow-ingly entered into a diabolic pact with each other.The one borrowsagainst its own environmental capital.The other lives on borrowedcapital being pumped into it by an environmental polluter.Thelunacy of the current situation is that each of these two giantnations depends on the madness of the other.China needs Amer-ica s greedy consumption, while America needs China s obsessivegrowth.Greed and obsession are the two motors of today s globaleconomy.If one of them fails abruptly, one of the longest periodsof prosperity in human history will come to an end.If this were to happen, Beijing s once-impressive growth rateswould snap as quickly as trees in a hurricane.The standard of liv-ing of millions of people on all continents would plunge.Whilesome people would seek to compare this process with the worldeconomic crisis in the late 1920s, the difference is that this timethe crisis would affect the entire world, not just the WesternHemisphere.226 GABOR STEINGARTAs a result of economic collapse, the political system in author-itarian China would face serious challenges.No one knows if, andin what condition, the leadership would weather the storm.Nowa-days, Chinese leadership is made up primarily of technocrats withno experience in crisis management, a deficiency that makes themthe flower children of the country s economic wonder.In China s system, an economic disturbance would quickly andadversely affect a society that is now being held together only bythe hope of further growth.Political demands, which are stilltrumped by the desire to succeed economically, would come tothe fore.The word that so terrifies the Chinese elites today couldspread like wildfire in the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and HongKong: democracy! Away with the one-party state! This, in turn,would set the country s military and security machine into motion,which would quickly respond with tanks and machine guns.The dictatorship would hold up its ugly face to the cameras ofCNN.Many people in the West would be horrified.But those inthe know would have no trouble seeing traces of Mao in the facesof China s leaders.In the worst case, China would go from beingthe commercial state it is today to a warrior state.America would not come away unharmed in this scenario.Thecountry would have nothing to fear militarily, but its global influ-ence would suffer and it would be facing a new problem: domes-tic strife.Current U.S.society, which consists essentially of threeclasses an affluent upper class, a middle class that is fightingdecline, and a growing underclass could be shaken to its veryfoundations by a severe economic crisis.The inequality that hasgrown in recent years and is already a hot topic of conversationtoday would suddenly be visible to all.Poverty would turn intosqualor and frustration into fury, with grave consequences for thecohesiveness of American society.The superpower would face a painful process of self-assurance,in which business, academic, and political leaders would be forcedto account for their actions in the early years of the new age ofglobalization.Wasn t what Hillary Clinton called the happy talkand former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan the rosyTHE WAR FOR WEALTH 227assumptions of the Bush years nothing but self-deception? A newgeneration would be asking old questions, but this time the tonewould be angry and perhaps even irreconcilable:Did you really believe that you could live, in the long term, onborrowed money?Who actually claimed that such a large nation doesn t need anindustrial base?Where are the men and women who made us believe that a neg-ative balance of trade is a sign of strength?Why did no one on Wall Street sound the alarm bell when theU.S
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