SUPER-CHAOS IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST DESERT

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger relates a conversation he had with the 20^th century's most murderous monster, Mao Tse-Tung.  The topic was the extent to which a country can experience chaos, social breakdown and upheaval.

The bigger the country, the greater its capacity for chaos, said Mao.  A small country can become chaotic on a limited basis, but only a giant such as China has the capacity for what Mao called "super-chaos."

It was this capacity for such "super-chaos" that required, according to Mao, a ruthless and unchallenged Communist dictatorship to keep it in check.  It was a clever term for the same tired rationale used by all tyrants to justify their oppression.

Yet anyone familiar with the long history of China is well aware of its periodic episodes of anarchic collapse, and the deep-set fear most Chinese have of them.  But no matter how much the Chinese try to prevent them, they come anyway and it sure looks like one is headed their way now.

What's coming is a tsunami of pollution washing over China that is about to leave in its wake what World Bank analysts say will be "the world's biggest desert."

Imagine what would happen if you dumped several hundred million people in the Sahara, currently the world's biggest desert.  That's China's future, folks.  Only worse.

It's not just that all of northern China is running out of water fast – where wells could be dug with shovels they now go down a thousand feet or more – but that what water remains is poisoned.

Farmers and factories dump so much sewage, chemicals, and pollutants into rivers and lakes that China's own government monitors rate one-third of all river, and much of its lake, water as Grade V, as bad as it gets, "unfit for industrial or agricultural use."

Then there's air pollution, the worst in the history of the world.  560 million people live in China's cities, and according to a World Bank study, only 1% breathe air considered safe by European standards.

For example, those standards consider 40 micrograms of particulates (soot and smog) per cubic meter unsafe.  Beijing averages above 140 and many Chinese cities are far worse.

The World Bank concludes that outdoor air pollution is now causing between 350,000 to 400,000 premature deaths a year in China, and indoor pollution (e.g., smoke from coal or wood stoves) another 300,000.  At least as many, if not more, die from water pollution, however as from air, outdoor and indoor.

That's using the Chicom government's own stats.  Privately, the World Bank analysts say the real death numbers are far larger.  And as big as they are, they are going to get much bigger.

One word for the reason:  coal.  China's GDP runs on it, can't do without it, needing more and more of it to sustain the GDP growth rate.  This year, China will burn almost 3 billion tons of coal, close to 80% of what its energy planners thought it would use by 2020.

The US uses a lot of coal as well (coal-fired power plants produce over half of US electricity), but far more efficiently and with clean-burning technology.  China abhors such costly hi-tech and is amazingly less efficient.

It takes 20% more energy to make steel, 45% more to make cement, 70% more to make ethylene in China than the rest of the world on average.

The examples go on and on.  Car ownership is exploding along with prosperity, but Chinese cars are gas guzzlers and Chinese refineries are so inefficient they make low-grade-gasoline, resulting in lots of smog and lousy mileage. 

So how can Chinese drivers afford $80+ oil? 

You can see the bottom line: the Chinese GDP Bubble cannot be sustained for much longer.  Actually, the GDP figures the Chicoms claim are already disintegrating.  In 2004, a "Green GDP" team of experts appointed by Premier Hu Jintao determined that the "pollution-adjusted" GDP for that year was 7% instead of the announced 10%.

The Green GDP Team was disbanded and never issued another report.

For this year's second quarter, the Chicoms reported a GDP of 11.9% — and that it is burning 20% more coal than 2005.  Pollution-adjust that.  Way down.

When super-chaos does come to China, there's no way of telling what will happen, for one defining characteristic of a chaotic situation is unpredictable outcomes. 

The one thing you want to avoid above all is for the chaos to explode outward into the world.  You want it at the least to implode inward and be contained within China.  Thus we see the prescient hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney in coordinating what is becoming known as the Quadrilateral Initiative.

"The Quad," as its members call it, is a brand-new "strategic partnership" between the militaries (primarily the navies) of the US, Australia, Japan, and India.  The stated purpose is to "enhance regional security" and create "an Asian arc of freedom and democracy" from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans.

The real purpose, as Beijing clearly sees, is to contain China militarily.  Which is why the Chicoms are bitterly complaining about the massive war game exercises coordinated between all four Quad navies, dubbed "Malabar 07-02," in the Bay of Bengal earlier this month.

China's neighbors in Asia are becoming increasingly nervous about the coming Chicom chaos.  With very good reason.  "What you sow, so shall you reap," advised the Apostle Paul to the Christian community of Gallatia in present-day central Turkey.

Paul was recalling the prophet Hosea's warning to those who sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.  The Chicoms should recall the warning as well, for the whirlwind they are about to reap will be of Biblical super-chaos proportions.