Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Third, there is the distinctively Chinese attitude towards race and ethnicity. The Han Chinese conceive of themselves as a single race, even though this is clearly not the case. What sustains this view is the extraordinarily long history of Chinese civilization, which has enabled a lengthy process of melding and fusing of countless different races. The sacrosanct and inviolable nature of Chinese unity is underpinned by the idea that the Han Chinese are all of one race, with even the non-Han Chinese being described in terms of separate nationalities rather than races. There is, furthermore, a powerful body of opinion in China that believes in polygenism and holds that the origins of the Chinese are discrete and unconnected with that of other branches of humankind. In other words, the notion of China and Chinese civilization is bolstered by a widespread belief that the difference between the Chinese and other peoples is not simply cultural or historical but also biological. The non-negotiable nature of the Chinese state’s attitude towards race is eloquently illustrated by its approach towards the ‘lost territories’ and the belief that Hong Kong and Taiwan are inseparable from China because their populations are Chinese: any idea that there might be a distinct Taiwanese identity is summarily dismissed. The Chinese attitude towards race and what constitutes being Chinese, as we noted in Chapter 8, is diametrically opposed to that of other highly populous nations such as India, Indonesia, Brazil and the United States, which explicitly recognize their multiracial and multi-ethnic character and, in varying degrees, celebrate that fact.

It would be wrong to describe the Chinese attitude towards race as an ideological position, because it is simply too old and too deeply rooted in Chinese history for that to be the case. Certainly it went through a profound change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its antecedents lie deep in the long history of Chinese civilization. Nor is the attitude towards race and identity reducible to the Chinese state or government: rather, it is ingrained in the Chinese psyche. To give one contemporary illustration: support for the return of Taiwan amongst the Chinese people is, if anything, even stronger than it is at a governmental level. Given this, any democratically elected government — admittedly, a most unlikely occurrence in the next twenty years — will almost certainly be more nativist and essentialist in its attitude towards Chinese identity than the present Communist government, which, by virtue of its lack of electoral accountability, enjoys a greater independence from popular prejudices. Nor should we anticipate any significant change in Chinese attitudes on race and ethnicity. It is true that they may have been accentuated by centuries of relative isolation from the rest of the world and China ’s growing integration may, as a consequence, help to weaken prejudices based on the ignorance of isolation, but the fundamental roots of Chinese attitudes will remain untouched. In fact, rather than being confined to a particular period of history, China ’s isolation is fundamental to understanding what I have described as the Middle Kingdom mentality. China saw itself as above, beyond, separate from and superior to the rest of the world. ‘Isolation’, in this sense, was integral to the Chinese world-view, even during the periods, like the Song dynasty or early Ming, when China was not isolationist in policy and outlook. It helps to explain why, for example, China has had such a different attitude from the major European states towards those who settled in other lands. Europeans viewed their settlers and colonizers as an integral part of the national civilizing mission and as still belonging to the homeland; the imperial dynasty, on the other hand, viewed those who departed the Middle Kingdom with relative and continuing indifference, as if leaving China was a step down and outside civilization. This point provides us with a way of understanding the terms on which China ’s growing integration with the rest of the world in the twenty-first century will take place. China is fast joining the world but, true to its history, it will also remain aloof, ensconced in a hierarchical view of humanity, its sense of superiority resting on a combination of cultural and racial hubris.

Fourth, China operates, and will continue to operate, on a quite different continental-sized canvas to other nation-states. There are four other states that might be described as continental in scale. The United States has a surface area only marginally smaller than that of China, but with a population only a quarter of the size. Australia is a continent in its own right, with a surface area around 80 per cent of China ’s, yet its population is a meagre 21 million, less than that of Malaysia or Taiwan, with the vast majority living around its coastal perimeter. Brazil has a surface area of around 90 per cent of China ’s, but a much smaller population of 185 million. Perhaps the nearest parallel to China is India, with a population of equivalent size, but a surface area only a third of that of China ’s. Thus, although China shares certain similarities with each of these countries, its particular combination of population size and surface area is unique. Chinese modernity will come continental-sized, in terms of both population and physical size. This has fundamental implications not only for the way in which China has worked in the past but also for how it will work in the future. A continental-sized country is an utterly different kind of proposition to a conventional nation-state unless its population is tiny like Australia’s, or it started off life as a settler-colony — as in the case of United States and Australia, which were essentially European transplants — with the homogeneity this implies. When a country is as huge as China in both physical scale and population, it is characterized by great diversity and, in certain respects, can be thought of as, in effect, a combination of several, even many, different countries. This is not to detract from the point made throughout this book about the centripetal forces that hold China together, but rather serves to make this unity an even more extraordinary phenomenon. We are dealing with a state that is at one and the same time a country and a continent — in other words, which is both national and multinational — and which therefore must be governed, at one and the same time, according to the imperatives of both a country and a multiplicity of countries.

For these reasons, amongst others, the Chinese state operates in an atypical way in comparison with conventional nation-states. The feedback loops, for example, are different. What might seem a logical consequence of a government action in an ordinary nation-state may not follow at all in China; in a country of such huge scale, furthermore, it is possible to conduct an experiment in one city or province without it being introduced elsewhere, which is what happened with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, even though they could hardly have been more fundamental or far-reaching in their effect. It is possible, in this context, to imagine democratic reforms being introduced in one relatively advanced province or municipality — Zhejiang or Shanghai, for example — but not others. As we saw in Chapter 7, the civilization-state embraces the concept of ‘one civilization, many systems’, which was introduced to the wider world in 1997 with the handover of Hong Kong to China under the formula ‘one country, two systems’; but the idea of systemic differences within China’s borders, in fact, has a very long history. It is conventional wisdom in the West that China should become ‘democratic’ in the West’s own image. The democratic systems that we associate with the West, however, have never taken root on anything like such a vast scale as China, with the single exception of India: indeed, apart from India, the only vaguely comparable example is that of a multinational institution like the European Union, and this has remained determinedly undemocratic in its constitution and modus operandi. One day China may well move, in its own fashion, towards something that resembles democracy, but Western calls that it should do so more or less forthwith glibly ignore the huge differences that exist between a vast continental-sized civilization-state like China and the far smaller Western nation-states. The fact that China ’s true European counterpart, the European Union, is similarly without democracy only serves to reinforce the point.