It has become very clear over the past few years that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” hypothesis was eerily prescient, and that China will indeed become one of the primary belligerents in a roughly five-way global conflict.

The Chinese, in particular, believe that while the 20th Century belonged to America, the 21st will belong to China. And, as far as they are concerned, this is the natural and correct order of things.

To understand why, you need to look a little more closely at their historical accomplishments – and few of those accomplishments, the list of which is immense, are quite as astonishing as the seven voyages of the legendary eunuch Admiral Zheng He:

It is only when you see things like that video, that you realise exactly why it is that the Chinese have such a huge chip on their shoulders about what they believe to be the coming “Age of China”. As far as they are concerned, the world always belonged to China. They were always the world’s greatest civilisation and proved it repeatedly.

The Chinese were the first to invent, discover, or use: wood mulch-based paper; silk; magnetism; gunpowder; woodblock printing; cast iron; dominoes; and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other things. They did so at a time when the Europeans were still stuck in backwardness and squalor, and they knew it.

The fact is that the Chinese had been trading with the European kingdoms and empires for centuries via the Silk Road – historical records of Roman interactions with the Chinese date all the way back to the 1st Century BC. And the Chinese saw over the centuries that the Roman empire was in severe decline. They saw the rise of the Visigothic kingdoms and the Eastern Roman Empire. They saw the rise of Christianity across the continent. And they watched as the Persians and Arabs brought Islam to the Levant, eastern and southern Europe, and Spain with fire and sword – thereby cutting off the trade in goods from China that helped maintain the arts, culture, and finery of those very same Visigothic and Eastern Roman civilisations mentioned above.

Throughout it all, the Chinese continued to push their culture forward and upward.

But, at some point within the past 500 years or so, the Chinese went all kinds of wrong.

Their retreat into isolationism, Confucianism, and blind racial supremacism blinded them to the realities of a changing world around them. Their greatest inventions were either discovered or “borrowed” (read: stolen) from them over time. And once the Europeans discovered gunpowder and paper, they put both to extremely good use.

Guided by a totally different philosophical and religious approach to life, which said that the mystery and majesty of the Lord’s Creation follows rational laws that Man can and should attempt to discover, because this brings him back to the Lord who created him, the Europeans leapfrogged well past the Chinese, to the point where, when the European trading empires made contact with China again in the 18th Century, they no longer did so from a position of inferiority but of outright technological and industrial supremacy.

The Chinese have never forgotten the humiliations that they endured at the hands of the European powers, especially the British. They have never forgiven them. And as they watch the Western world fall into cultural irrelevance and secular decline, from an outsider’s perspective, they do appear to be possessed of a certain well-hidden schadenfreude.

(Actually, these days, they hardly bother to hide it at all. If you go looking at Chinese state-run media, you will quickly find that they Believe, as an article of faith, that the Western world is irredeemably corrupt and will destroy itself within the next few decades, and that China will then retake its rightful place and position of authority as master of the world.)

The Chinese have not hidden their modern imperial ambitions. They learned very well indeed from their European betters and have taken the exact same mercantilist tactics and ideas that the British taught them, combined them with the predatory lending practices of “economic hit men” from the IMF and World Bank in the 1960s and 70s, and blended them together with traditional Chinese statecraft to basically create their own overseas maritime bases and trading ports wherever they can find them.

So, does this mean that China’s ascendancy is assured?

Well, no.

The reality is that China has its own, very severe, problems. The Chinese Communist Party is quite well aware of these and has tried – mostly without success – to address them.

The Chinese know full well that they have a rapidly ageing population and a total fertility rate that spells serious trouble down the road for them. They are well aware that they have some serious economic weaknesses with respect to bad debts throughout their economy, rampant corruption and cronyism at all levels, and real vulnerabilities with respect to trade.

Their much-vaunted competitive edge with respect to manufacturing was always mostly artificial. They were able to be competitive as a manufacturing base through using pretty much the next best thing to slave labour, abominable working conditions, zero consideration for environmental damage, and near-total contempt for standards, safety, and due process.

Furthermore, their reputation as the world’s cheapest place to make “stuff” is slipping away, fast.

Manufacturing of most basic products can be done in Thailand for a lot less than in China. In terms of textiles and clothing, both India and Vietnam are serious competitors on both price and quality. For higher-end electronics manufacturing, yes, the Chinese appear to have the competitive edge there, but that is due in very large part to the fact that they try very hard to tilt the playing field in their favour; once you remove all of the protectionist barriers that they have erected around their manufacturing sector, you are going to find that they really aren’t any better than Western or Japanese industrial workers.

Indeed, if you just want something done fast and cheap, go to China – but if you want it to last, go to a Western manufacturer. The Chinese shit will fall apart within months, weeks, or even just days.

The Chinese government, I repeat, knows all of this. And that is why the current trade war with the USA has them so badly rattled.

Make no mistake: the Chinese claims of being able to outlast the USA in a trading war are unfounded. They have only two serious weapons – their vast store of US Treasury debt, and their possession of rights over the bulk of the world’s rare-earth element stores.

Suppose the Chinese do decide to sell off their entire current stock of US Treasury debt. This will certainly cause massive economic damage in the USA, because it would cause bond prices to plunge and bond yields to spike very fast, thereby greatly increasing the cost to the USA of servicing its own debt.

The US would have few options in such a scenario beyond printing vast amounts of money in order to inflate away the value of that debt. The alternative – raising taxes and cutting spending – would be politically impossible. That really is a nuclear option which the Chinese definitely could use.

But I doubt that they will.

A lot of pundits focus breathlessly on the idea that the Chinese could simply dump all of its holdings of American debt without any consequences. This is simply not true.

By getting rid of all of those bonds, the Chinese also eliminate in one fell swoop much of their own ability to manipulate their own currency’s artificially pegged value. They remove their access to the most liquid and stable debt market in the world, bar none.

And that very liquidity and depth is precisely what would cushion the USA.

You see, the reality is that US Treasury bonds are in massive demand around the world, because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and is likely to stay that way for years yet to come. It takes a lot to destroy a currency’s reserve status; we still don’t really have a full handle on what it would take to do it, beyond extreme hyperinflation – and “reserve currency” status appears to be one of the strongest brakes against that very problem.

So, yes, the Chinese could detonate that nuke – but they would realise pretty quickly that the resulting mushroom cloud would most likely be found over Shanghai, not Washington, DC, or New York.

And that is all before we get to the tremendous damage that China has done to its own country and nation.

Longtime reader buscaraons has repeatedly made the point in China-related posts that the Chinese don’t actually have a 5,000-year-old culture anymore. They destroyed their own culture during the Cultural Revolution. While I do not quite go that far, I do think he has a good point there. The reality is that the Chinese people of today are fundamentally different in outlook and nature than the ones from a century ago. The secular materialism and strident atheism that has infected China for the past 70 years has been nothing short of a disaster for the Chinese nation as a whole.

The younger generation of Chinese may not be quite as mad about democracy as the useful idiots of the Western (((media))) might like to believe. But they are not terribly enamoured of the practices and ways of the ChiComs either. And they can see very clearly that the command-and-control system of the Communist Party, with its social credit score and its clearly expressed desire to control the thoughts and beliefs of the entire population of the country, are inimical to their own values.

That does not mean that we will see a revolution anytime soon. It simply means that a rapidly ageing, middle-aged population led by men in their 70s, is going to face some serious structural problems down the road.

We shall see what the coming years bring from China. But it is clear that the trade war started by His Most August and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus, has them seriously rattled. They don’t know what the Hell hit them.

And they appear to be realising, with a sickening sense of foreboding, that the glorious past exploits of their greatest heroes, such as Zheng He, are precisely that – in the glorious past.