The real issue of the war will be that while certain coastal cities have become very prosperous, the rest of China has a per capita income of $200 a year. The coast wants to have nothing to do with the interior; it wants to work with Tokyo and New York. This is an old story in China. It is why Mao succeeded in 1927. He wanted [coastal] Shanghai to throw the foreigners out, but Shanghai was doing too well financially [to expel foreigners]. So Mao went to the interior and raised a peasant army. He came back to Shanghai and sealed off the country.
We're at exactly this position right now. I think that Hong Kong is going to be the trigger.
PT: How will this war be fought?
FRIEDMAN: Eventually the United States will be involved. I hope we won't, but the Chinese central government will slowly and steadily lose authority while regional armies [gain power]. The Western powers are going to take sides to protect their investments--they have put billions of dollars into Shanghai. Their fear is that [these investments] are going to be expropriated by a warlord from the interior who will sweep down on Shanghai. They will try to form alliances with warlords to protect their concessions, and there will be a huge flow of weapons into China. The warlords in the interior will find their own patrons, or they might try to amass a peasant army against a technological army.
PT: If this were to happen, how many casualties would there be?
FRIEDMAN: Horrendous. A hundred million? I'm pulling that out of a hat. And it'll take place outside of the sight of Western media. One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].
LANIER: I want to talk about deterrents. About a decade ago I was on a panel at a NATO conference. All the other people on the panel were NATO generals, and then there was me. There was a question about whether computer simulations of war and its likely outcomes could serve as a deterrent in the future, and some generals thought it was viable.
Now there's a story that's been widely circulated that at the Wright Patterson Air Force base [in Dayton, Ohio], where some of the negotiations took place between the former Yugoslav parties, the Serbians were shown simulations of various battles [whose outcomes] were not very appealing to them. This was said to have influenced them. Is the story true? Is there potential in that direction?
FRIEDMAN: At Wright Patterson there are in fact various simulations taking place. It has a facility for rapid map generation; they need to be able to draw new maps very quickly and see what the consequences would be. The reason [the Serbians] wanted to be there was so they could say: "Well, what if I give you this village?"
[The Air Force] was able to show the Serbians that the United States could, in fact, defeat them and to convince them that the U.S. was prepared to defeat them. So there's an element of truth to this story.
LANIER: We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.
So I made a list of various hypotheses about what the ultimate origin of war is. I don't really have opinions about any of these. I'm just trying to get them all out on the table.
First, there's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.
Another one has to do with adolescent ritual and war. To what degree do people, when they go through adolescence, require a war-like experience?
A third has to do with the relationship between war and ethnic identity. All over the world today people have a very strong desire to find a sense of identity, and at the same time that's coupled with the rise of absolutely absurd wars that relate to ethnic identity. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in people that relates to a sense of belonging, and without that, identity doesn't seem as real as it should.
PT: Bosnia...
LANIER: Yeah, Bosnia is unusual because in the past you could use economic factors as a fairly good predictor of war. Things would get worse, people would rebel. Yet in Bosnia, an educated place where everybody knew exactly what was going on, people voluntarily worsened their circumstances knowingly for the sake of this ethnic ideal.
Another possibility is the systems approach. Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.
A related topic is to what degree the competition within cultures is a cryptic form of war. What is extraordinary is that in the United States the current culture desires feelings of machismo and power, but at the same time has absolutely no taste whatsoever for even the slightest loss or bloodshed or ickiness. That's a fascinating combination.
PT: The bloodlust coupled with the inability to absorb...
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