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Professor Edward Luttwak
is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy,
geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.
In a sinister reversion to the very worst days of Mao’s rule,
Communist Party officials across China are blindly obeying orders to
rapidly increase the supply of arable land by any means possible. As
with the “Great Leap Forward” that starved tens of millions to death in a
futile attempt to produce more steel to industrialise overnight, the
official aim is straightforward: to grow more “grain”.
In reality, however, China produces more than enough rice, wheat and
maize to feed its human population. So why the sudden rush? Xi Jinping,
it seems, is preparing for war.
At present, China relies on colossal imports of soya beans, maize,
wheat and other cereals to feed its pigs, cattle, chickens and ducks —
more than 120 million metric tons last year. These are supplied by the
daily arrival of bulk carriers into Chinese ports from Argentina,
Brazil, Canada and the United States. If war were to break out, these
imports would quickly dry up.
In China, there is no spare land for crops, leaving Beijing little
choice but to uproot the trees recently planted by its costly and much-admired reforestation efforts
— even though China’s forests are mostly on slopes, and new crop
plantings are often swept away by the first serious rain. Local party
officials executing Beijing’s orders know this perfectly well, but
disobeying means instant demotion at best.
After the colossal Yangtze River floods of 1998 destroyed 13 million
homes, drowned thousands and swept away highways and rail lines, the CCP
recognised that the floods had been made worse by uncontrolled
deforestation. Orders were issued all across China to stop logging and
to plant trees instead, with vast funding allocated to add up to roughly
90 billion trees over the next decade. Thousands of tree nurseries were
established, and an army of tree-planters set to work on the bare
deforested slopes, with local farmers hired to nurture the new trees. As
a result, China became visibly greener in satellite images, as forest
cover increased from 12% in 1998 to 24% in 2020 to then increase further
— until last year. No figures have been published, but what has
happened since greatly exceeds the rate of the Amazon’s deforestation,
even though the West’s environmentalists have so far remained entirely
silent.
There are no further forests to uproot; all that is left are the very
small fruit orchards cultivated by individual farmers. And so, to the
horror of the elderly peasants who planted each tree by hand, a local
Party official will arrive one day with the People’s Armed Police in
camouflage uniforms, and cut them down. Sometimes, this is not enough:
many farmers raise ducks in their backyards to supplement their income,
which the police then club to death, issuing orders to plant cereals
instead. Even room-sized pigsties are destroyed to free up the few
square yards of soil underneath.
Local officials know that it is madness to destroy so many
livelihoods to produce a few truckloads of cheap cereals, but they have
no way of changing Xi’s policies — especially when each official has
juniors ready to denounce him in the hope of taking his place. It was
this dynamic that produced the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward.
Peasants were ordered to melt down their pots and pans to make steel in
backyard furnaces, with the promise they would instead eat in the dining
rooms of the promised new “communes”; they were also told to melt down
their animal ploughs because new tractors were arriving. In a mere four
years from 1958 to 1962, at least 30 million died of hunger — some to be
eaten by those who survived — and hardly any usable steel was produced.
Now, there is no question that China has very little arable land,
having lost some 4 million acres to urbanisation and industry between
1957 and 1996 — an average loss of 100,000 acres per year, which jumped
to more than 1.5 million acres per year from 1997, with China’s
explosive economic growth that followed the opening of the US and world
markets. As a result, China now has less arable land per inhabitant than India.
But why should this matter? As a very successful exporter of
increasingly advanced and costly manufactures, China can certainly pay
for all its food and animal feed imports easily enough. And this is how
we arrive at something much worse than the destruction of China’s new
forests and the human tragedy of its destroying orchards and ducks: the
reason for it all.
The crescendo of Xi Jinping’s “rice bowl” speeches came on 21 June,
when he claimed it was imperative to prepare for “extreme
circumstances”, having previously warned on 6 May that China must be
prepared “for worst-case and extreme scenarios” to survive “high winds,
choppy waters and even dangerous storms” — all transparent codewords for
“the danger of war”. He returned to the topic on 6 July when, on a
visit to the Eastern Theater Command, whose jurisdiction includes the
Strait of Taiwan, he called for increased “training under real combat
conditions to raise the capability to fight and win”.
Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually
doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its
navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is
greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet
engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and
inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and
intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests
motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could
have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with
demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive
to the Taiwanese.
Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history
is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders
— the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribespeople, and then the
Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As
with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike
people into warriors.
So far, China’s future war might appear to be all talk, but
preparations are well underway. Already, catastrophic deforestation is
harming all humanity while the destruction of orchards and the mass
killings of ducks are impoverishing tens of millions. That is not just
talk.