It should be clear, even to a blind man, that we’re building towards something with China. China’s demand for resources appears to be growing at a geometric rate. The date at which its economy is anticipated to be larger than that of the United States is forever inching forward. And, if one thing is certain, it is this: there will be war.

I don’t know if it will be the nukes-flying, carriers-sinking sort of war that many of us fear in the dead of the night. But I know there will be war. More than that, I think we’re already in one.

We’re fighting the Chinese for the control of the world as the endgame of a process which goes back a hundred generations. China was a great power (perhaps the greatest power) before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. Due to economic, technological, and political difficulties China fell behind in recent centuries, but now it’s catching up and it is the West that is indisputably in decline.

This is a war which will decide the fate of humanity itself, for these are the generations in which man will first leave the Earth and in which the secrets of space and time will be revealed. This is the time, more than any other in all of human history, when one civilization will have the chance to truly and totally dominate the other.

Competition, especially between civilizations and great powers, is typically a zero-sum game. For someone to win, someone else to lose. Every bit of economic influence gained by China is a defeat for the West. Every word of Chinese spoken upon this Earth, every advance of Chinese culture, however small, is a defeat for the West. Every Chinese baby born to grow up to be a productive subject of China is a defeat for the West. When they win, we lose.

Here is an inalterable fact: the world can support the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, consuming a quarter of the world’s resources. It is physically impossible for China, with a population accounting for more than 20% of humanity, to do the same. We can find more resources, of course. But not that many more. The world’s resources are capable of supporting the American people and the rest of the people of the West in their present standard of living: they are not capable of supporting the people of the West and the people of China at the same standard.

This fact, fearful and inalterable, sows the seeds of future conflict. The two nations, together with the other rising nations of the Earth, cannot possibly enjoy the standard of living that each wishes at the same time.

We cannot yield out standard of living to them. We have no reason to. China has always been an inferior nation and deserves to be. We ought not surrender, we ought not compromise. There is no rational reason for us to consider sharing with the Chinese so long as any other option remains open to us. I, for one, am not willing to surrender the least part of my standard of living to help a billion and a quarter Chinese get what they want.

In these terms, we live in a zero-sum world. For someone to win, someone else must lose. I am inalterably determined that we should lose nothing and gain everything.

Of course, it seems doubtful if nuclear war would improve our material condition, so we must consider other options. Thankfully, several flaws in China’s development provide us with ample opportunity to do so.

To begin: China’s political stability is not everything we believe it to be. A closer examination of modern China shows that it is a nation of two hundred million relatively well-off people and a billion who remain in terrible poverty. They are still a very primitive nation in some ways, where the use of toilet paper is considered a mark of sophistication. This can be used to our advantage.

China is terribly combustible. From time to time it’s overtaken by some movement of rampaging lunatics, like the Red Guards, or the Boxers, of the rebels during the Taiping Rebellion. Some great madness sweeps across the land, consuming everything in its path. To put it mildly, the arrival of this contagion would be welcomed by myself at the present.

Of course, if it doesn’t wish to come naturally, we can always help it along. For example, the Falun Gong movement could potentially be infiltrated and, with enough Western effort and money, turned violent. China also suffers from problems with its own Moslems, some effort in this area might be profitably expended as well.

Of course the most obvious thing would be to fund the covert spread of fanatical Maoism and other, similar, doctrines. The degree to which China has become a classically exploitative capitalist state cannot possible be lost on all of those Peasants and, as Mao himself pointed out, Peasants do, truly, make the best of guerillas.

Of course, this alone won’t be enough. We’ve also got to consider the long-term future and expanding the battlefield. First: it means that, sooner or later, we’re going to have to get serious about exploring for resources in places other than the Earth. Second, it means that we’re going to have to begin to consider settling people on places other than the Earth.

But, most of all, we must be aware.

I’m from Vancouver, British Columbia. In case you don’t know, that means that I’m more than a little familiar with what the future could look like. I’ve seen it, and it scares me.

The Chinese are industrious, hard-working, and determined. They can, if they wish to do so, pull this thing off.