Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

In their heyday the major European nations sought to impose their designs on the rest of the world. Expansion by means of colonialism was at the heart of the European project, wedded to an aggressive mentality that stemmed from Europe ’s own seemingly perpetual habit of intra-European wars. Not surprisingly, the United States inherited important parts of this legacy, though its very different geopolitical circumstances, ensconced as it was in its own continent, also bred a powerful insularity. The United States, which was founded on the missionary zeal of the Pilgrim Fathers and their contemporaries, and later articulated in a constitution that embodied an evangelizing and universalistic credo, was possessed of a belief in its manifest destiny and that its spiritual purpose was to enlighten the rest of the world. [1279] [1279] Eric Hobsbawm, ‘ America ’s Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail’, Guardian , 25 June 2005. This history of manifest destiny (an expansionist ideology that dates from the original settlers), the destruction of the Amerindians, and the restless desire to expand westwards, helps us to understand the behaviour of the United States as a global superpower. What, then, of China, whose origins and history could hardly be more different?

There are two factors that have to be considered. The first, associated with the so-called realist school of international relations, lays emphasis on the importance of interests and therefore stresses how great powers tend to behave in a similar fashion in the same circumstances. [1280] [1280] Alastair Ian Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 258- 9. ‘Rising powers,’ as Robert Kagan argues, ‘have in common an expanding sense of interests and entitlement.’ [1281] [1281] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600 - 1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 304. Accordingly China will, in this view, tend to behave like any other global superpower, including the United States. The second factor, in contrast, emphasizes how great powers are shaped by their own histories and circumstances and therefore behave in distinct ways. As in the case of the United States, these two different elements — the one convergent and the other divergent — will combine to shape China ’s behaviour as a superpower. The convergent pressure is obviously a familiar one, but the divergent tendency, a product of Chinese particularism, is less knowable and more elusive.

The historian William A. Callahan argues, in this context, that there are four different narratives present within Chinese civilization. [1282] [1282] Callahan, Contingent States , pp. 28–44. The first is what he describes as zhongguo , or China as a territorial state. The obvious metaphor for this is the Great Wall — the desire to keep barbarians out — linked to the nativist sentiment, a constantly recurring theme in Chinese history, as evident in the Boxer Rebellion and continuing resentment towards foreign influences, notably American and Japanese. This view appeals to a defensive and inward-looking sense of Chineseness. It might crudely be described as China ’s equivalent of American insularity. The second is da zhongguo , a metaphor of conquest. This has been intrinsic to the expansion ary dynamic of the Chinese empire, as we saw in Chapter 8. In the conquest narrative, Chinese civilization is constantly enlarging and annexing new territory, seeking to conquer, subdue and civilize the barbarians on its borders. In the contemporary context, the conquest narrative aims first at restoring the ‘lost territories’ and then seeking to reverse the ‘century of humiliation’. Yan Xuetong, a leading Chinese intellectual cited earlier, sees this in relatively benign terms: ‘the Chinese regard their rise as regaining China’s lost international status rather than obtaining something new… the Chinese consider the rise of China as a restoration of fairness rather than as gaining advantages over others.’ [1283] [1283] Yan Xuetong, ‘The Rise of China in Chinese Eyes’, Journal of Contemporary China , 10: 26 (2001), p. 34. However, the conquest narrative also clearly lends itself to a much less benign and more expansionist and imperialist interpretation. The third narrative is da zhonghua , or conversion. This strand is as fundamental as that of conquest: the belief in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization and the desire to convert others to its ways. To quote Mencius, the disciple of Confucius: ‘I have heard of the Chinese converting barbarians but not of their being converted by barbarians.’ [1284] [1284] Callahan, Contingent States , p. 34. The key issue here is neither conquest nor recovery but rather defining and spreading the characteristics of Chinese civilization. As we have seen, this is implicitly, sometimes explicitly, linked to race. Cultural China, as Callahan describes it, is an open and expansive concept, resembling the notion of soft power but not reducible to it. The fourth and final narrative is that of the Chinese diaspora, of the notion of Greater China as reflected in the continuing sense of Chinese identity embodied in the diaspora. Each of these narratives is present in, and serves as a continuing influence on, contemporary Chinese attitudes. Which of the first three — which are the relevant ones here — might predominate in the future, or at any one time, is a matter of conjecture.

It is important to bear in mind the difference historically between Western and Chinese patterns of behaviour. The former have long sought to project their power overseas to far-flung parts of the world, commencing with the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish; the Chinese, in contrast, have no tradition of expansion other than continental-based territorial incremental-ism. The Europeans, perhaps conditioned by the maritime experience of the Mediterranean, were, from the late fifteenth century, seeking to expand across the oceans. China, in contrast, has always seen itself as a land-based continental power and has never regarded itself or sought to become a maritime power with overseas ambitions. The very different purposes of the voyages of Zheng He on the one hand and the great European explorers on the other are an illustration of this. To this day, the Chinese have never sought to project themselves outside their own land mass. [1285] [1285] Robert Ross, ‘The Geography of Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-first Century’, in Michael Brown et al., eds, The Rise of China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 189-90, 193. Even now, the Chinese have failed to develop a blue-water navy. This does not mean that the Chinese will not seek in future to project their power into distant oceans and continents, but there is no tradition of this. It is reasonable to assume that China, as a superpower, will in due course acquire such a capability but, unlike the West, it has hitherto not been part of the Chinese way of thinking and behaving.

There is another factor that may reinforce this historical reserve. Although the ‘century of humiliation’ is often seen as a reason why China might seek to extract some kind of historical revenge — one might recall Germany and the Treaty of Versailles — it could also act as a constraining factor. The experience of invasion and partial colonization, the fact that China suffered for so long at the hands of the Western powers and Japan, is likely to counsel caution: the German example, in other words, is entirely inappropriate — including the timescales involved, which are of an entirely different order. China will be the first great power that was a product of colonization, the colonized rather than a colonizer. As a result, China may act with considerable restraint for long into the future, even when its own power suggests to the contrary. The evidence for this lies in the present. The Chinese have gone to great lengths to act with circumspection and to reassure the world that they do not have aggressive intentions, the only exception being their attitude towards Taiwan. It is true that over the last half-century China has been involved in wars with the Soviet Union, India and Vietnam, but the first two were border disputes. This relative restraint touches on another dimension of the Chinese mentality, namely a willingness to be patient, to operate according to timescales which are alien to the Western political mind. This is eloquently summed up by former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s reported response to Henry Kissinger’s question in 1972 about the consequences of the French Revolution: ‘It is too early to say.’ Such thinking is characteristic of a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. And it is clearly reflected in Figure 47.