Soon after the fall of Baghdad or maybe it was around the time President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the banner “Mission Accomplished” looming over the flight deck, I listened to a BBC World Service progamme on the state of the World after the Second Gulf War. Although the commentators were divided between the usual camps of pro- and anti-American, all were agreed that the United States was unchallenged in every sphere that matters–economically, financially, and even culturally.More than two years on, with the insurgency in Iraq claiming gut-wrenching numbers of U.S. military deaths, America’s position at the top of the pile now longer seems so secure. Militarily pressed, and in hock to Asian creditors, commentators are more likely to reach for historian Paul Kennedy’s concept of imperial overstretch than for lofty notions of “Pax Americana.”With the United States’ dominance looking a bit wobbly, the flavour of the moment is, of course, China. This is supposedly China’s century, and according to the strapline of this Economist article, “Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere.”But given China’s vastness, what are the real conditions in the hinterland, behind the shiny skyscrapers sprouting in the booming coastal cities? There’s a disturbing article in Newsweek (August 8 edition–can’t find it online as yet) that is part of growing stream of news about rural unrest, rising crime, and environmental degradation in the interior. The Newsweek piece treats the issues of peasants being driven off the land by encroaching development and ending up in the new slums, on the periphery of the new golden cities:”According to China’s State Statistics Bureau, the nation lost 8.6 million hectares of farmland between 1986 and 2003…In 2003, the latest period with available figures, China’s cropland shrank by 2 percent…Wang Chungguang, a Chinese government sociologist, estimates that 50 million farmers have lost their land to development in the past decade, a number he expects to rise to more than 100 million in the next decade.”What will be the fate of these landless peasants, funneling into China’s “166 cities with populations above 1 million?”It might not be pretty. According to scholars it could lead to “Latin Americanization”: “A semi-permanent have-not class might engage in constant and economically costly low-level war with the entitled minority.”Meanwhile, the sand dunes 70 kilometers from the Chinese capital are encroaching by about 20 kilometers a year (read about it here).Don’t call it “The Chinese Century” just yet.