Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

So what about China? As in the case of the United States, Chinese global hegemony will reflect the country’s particular characteristics, both historical and contemporary. The task here is to identify those characteristics and how they might leave their imprint on the future. It should also be borne in mind that forms of hegemony are constantly shifting and mutating in response to wider cultural, technological, military, political and economic changes. In the era of European supremacy, for example, the characteristic form of political domination was colonialism and the key expression of force-projection was the navy, but after 1945 colonialism, for a variety of reasons, became unsustainable. The American era, in contrast, is associated with air power, a global network of military bases, huge military superiority, an informal empire, dominance of the international economic system, and a global media. It is impossible, beyond a point, to anticipate the new forms of modernity with which a future Chinese hegemony might be associated.

Global history has hitherto been essentially a Western history. With the rise of China, however, that will no longer be the case. Chinese history will become familiar not just to the Chinese, or even East Asians, but to the entire world. Just as many around the globe are conversant with major events in American history (the same also being true of decisive episodes in European history — such as the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance — as a consequence of Europe ’s earlier supremacy), so key landmarks in Chinese history will similarly become global property. This process is already under way, as the huge interest that surrounded the Terracotta Army exhibition at the British Museum in 2007-8 illustrated. [1232] [1232] Maev Kennedy, ‘On the March: Terracotta Army Aims for Ticket Office Triumph’, Guardian , 8 February 2007. Of course, the grandeur and richness of Chinese history means that aspects of it, such as the Great Wall, are already quite well known. But this is minor compared with what lies in the future. As an indication, already in 2005 the Great Wall, one of the defining symbols of the Middle Kingdom, attracted more foreign tourists than Florence, the epicentre of Europe ’s Renaissance. [1233] [1233] ‘Great Wall Overtakes Florence for Tourists’, 20 May 2005, posted on http://news.ft.com.

Apart from its extraordinary longevity and bursts of efflorescent invention, the most striking feature of Chinese history is the fact that while Europe, following the fall of the Roman Empire, fragmented into many parts, and ultimately into many nations, China was already moving in exactly the opposite direction and starting to coalesce. It is this unity that has ensured the continuity of its civilization and also provided the size which remains so fundamental to China ’s character and impact. Unity is one of the most fundamental propositions concerning Chinese history, if not the most fundamental. If Europe provided the narrative and concepts that have informed not just Western but world history over the past two centuries, so China may do rather similarly for the next century or so, and thereby furnish the world with an entirely different story and set of concepts: namely the idea of unity rather than fragmentation, that of the civilization-state rather than the nation-state, that of the tributary system rather than the Westphalian system, a distinctive Chinese notion of race, and an organizing political dynamic of centralization/decentralization rather than modernization/conservatism. Given the nodal importance of Chinese unity, the year 211 BC — marking the victory of the Qin, the end of the Warring States period (403–221 BC), and the beginning of modern China — will become as familiar to the world as 1776 or 1789. Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor, who not only bequeathed the Terracotta Army but founded a dynastic system which was to survive until 1911, will become as widely known as Thomas Jefferson or Napoleon Bonaparte, if not much more so.

There are many other aspects of Chinese history which will reconfigure the global discourse: the fact, for example, that China has been responsible for so many of the inventions that were subsequently adopted elsewhere, not least in the West, will help to dispel the contemporary myth that the West is history’s most inventive culture. For our purposes here, the voyages of Zheng He, which predated those of Europe ’s great maritime explorers like Christopher Columbus, can serve as an example for this process of reconfiguration. It is widely accepted that, in ships that dwarfed those of Europe at the time, Zheng He embarked on a series of seven voyages that took him to what we now know as Indonesia, the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century. The voyages of the great European explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus marked the beginning of Europe ’s long-running colonial era. For the Chinese, on the other hand, Zheng’s voyages had no such consequence. There was no institution in Ming China that resembled a Navy Department and therefore, as the historian Edward Dreyer suggests, ‘there was no vested interest to argue the case for sea power or for a blue water strategy, nor did China exercise what later naval theorists would call “control of the seas” even during the period of Zheng He’s voyages.’ [1234] [1234] Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405 - 1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 170. Zheng’s voyages never had a sequel: they proved to be the final curtain in the Ming dynasty’s maritime expeditions as China once again slowly turned inwards. Zheng’s missions were neither colonial nor exploratory in intent: if they had been, they would surely have been repeated. They were influence-maximizing missions designed to carry out the very traditional aim of spreading China ’s authority and prestige in what was its known world. The Chinese had no interest in exploring unknown places, but in making peoples in its known world aware of the presence and greatness of the Chinese empire. Zheng He’s expedition lay firmly within the idiom of the tributary state system, though his journeys took him much further afield than had previously been the case. [1235] [1235] My thanks to Zhang Feng for these observations. See also ‘Columbus or Zheng He? Debate Rages On’, China Daily , 19 July 2007, especially the views of Ge Jianxiong.

History is always subject to interpretation and reinterpretation, constantly reworked in the light of a contemporary context. Given their extraordinary nature, and bearing in mind subsequent European exploits, it is not surprising that both the purpose and reach of Zheng’s expeditions has been the subject of much conjecture. As China again seeks a closer relationship with South-East Asia, the fact that China has recently sponsored several commemorative exhibitions of Zheng He’s expeditions in various ASEAN countries is predictable: [1236] [1236] ‘Chinese Maritime Hero Commemorated’, China Daily , 30 August 2005. as it turns outwards once more, it remembers and reminds the world of the last such great occasion. The British historian Gavin Menzies has taken the process several steps further by arguing that the Chinese were the first to discover the Americas in 1421 and also discovered Australia. [1237] [1237] Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered The World (London: Bantam Books, 2003). While there has been much interest in, though little support for, the idea that the Chinese discovered America, when President Hu Jintao visited Australia in 2003 he gave implicit endorsement to the idea that China discovered Australia when, in an address to a joint meeting of the Australian parliament, he declared: ‘Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming dynasty reached Australian shores.’ [1238] [1238] Geoff Wade, ‘Don’t Be Deceived: Our History Really is Under Serious Attack’, Canberra Times , 27 April 2006. These kinds of claims are likely to increase as Western-written history is contested by the growth in Chinese-written history and as China seeks to burnish its contemporary image not only by promoting its own past but also, no doubt, aggrandizing and embellishing it. The Chinese ambassador to South Africa suggested to Africans in 2007 that: