On Thursday, Portland State professor Ronald Tammen, director of the Hatfield School of Government, will be presenting a lecture titled “The Chinese Century?” The event, sponsored by the Retired Associates of Portland State University, is at 1 p.m. in the Smith Memorial Student Union’s Cascade Room 236.
Tammen’s upcoming presentation will focus on China and India’s rising power, which, according to Tammen, are significant world powers in gross domestic product.
Gross domestic product, or GDP, is one measurement used to assess a country’s economic health, and directly relates to the value of the goods a country produces. GDP per capita is considered to be a barometer of the country’s standards of living. “GDP is a precursor of global power,” Tammen wrote in an email interview. “That said, GDP per capita will continue to lag. So the average workers there will be significantly less affluent than workers in the US, Europe, Japan, for example, but the country itself will be an economic and military powerhouse,” he added.
He predicts that China and India will become the world’s leaders by 2015. “China, I predicted in the Power Transitions book in 2000, will equal the GDP of the US around 2015. India will follow by mid-century,” Tammen said. “The United States has had one century of global leadership. China is next in GDP. People need to understand that phenomenon.”
While China is the main focus of Tammen’s seminar, Tammen also says India will eventually become as dominant as China. Co-chair of the RAPSU program committee Betty Burke agrees with Tammen’s predictions. “The question is: Will China surpass the U.S. as the leading nation?” Burke said. “We’re getting more and more in their debt,” she added.
Before Tammen was the director of Hatfield School of Government, he was the associate dean and chair of the Department of National Strategy at the National War College, chief of staff to Senator William Proxmire and staff consultant to Senator Mark O. Hatfield. Tammen is the lead author of Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century and has published his own book focused on national security issues, MIRV and the Arms Race: Interpretation of Defence Strategy.
Tammen has spoken throughout the world, including China, Yemen, Chile and dozens of countries in Europe. Tammen’s studies of China go back to the Cold War, when he was studying in Russia. While everyone was focused on Russia, Tammen was focused on China. “I understood the long term focus was not Russia, but China,” Tammen said.
Burke, who has been a RAPSU member for 10 years, invited Tammen after taking U.S. National Security Strategy: Regional Perspectives in the winter term of 2010. Burke admired Tammen for his laid-back and independent approach. “With him, you had a feeling that, yes, there are a lot of problems in the world, but it was up to you to meet them,” Burke said.
The RAPSU is a dimension of PSU’s Institute on Aging’s Senior Adult Learning Center and has sponsored several guest speakers over the last 20 years. SALC administrates PSU’s tuition-free auditing program, currently consisting of about 5,000 classes, that is offered to Oregon seniors age 65 or older.
Though one must be 50 years or older to become an official member of RAPSU, Tammen’s lecture and future RAPSU lectures are free and open to the general public.
Future events held by the RAPSU include Gary Hartsorn’s “Will Tropical Forests Survive the 21st Century?” on May 3 and Professor Alex Zakabras’s “Too Much Self-Reliance?” on May 10.