Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

As the country gravitates towards capitalism, changes are also taking place in China ’s class structure that are bound, in the longer term, to have far-reaching political implications. For the time being, however, the technocratic leadership will continue to dominate both the Party and the government, with little immediate prospect of a challenge to their position. The peasantry, though increasingly restive in response to the seizure of their land, remain weak and marginalized. [688] [688] Seminar paper by Song Weiquiang, Aichi University, 21 May 2005. According to the Ministry of Public Security, the number of disturbances to public order rose to 87,000 in 2005 ( South China Morning Post , 20 January 2006). See also Song Weiquiang, ‘Study on Massive Group Incidents of Chinese Peasants’, PhD dissertation, Nankai University, 20 April 2006, pp. 4–5. The working class has seen a serious diminution in its status and influence, with its protests limited to piecemeal, factory-by-factory action. The new class of private entrepreneurs, meanwhile, seems to be conforming to the traditional role of merchants, seeking an accommodation with, and individual favours from, the government, rather than an independent role of its own. [689] [689] Zheng Yongnian, Will China Become Democratic? , pp. 283-90, 302-8.

In the longer run there are four possible political directions that Chinese politics might take. [690] [690] Ibid., pp. 308-17. The first is towards a multi-party system. This, for the time being, seems the least likely. The second would be the de facto recognition of factions within the Party. To some extent this process has, at least tacitly, been taking place, with former general secretary Jiang Zemin’s power base resting on what came to be known as the Shanghai faction, who were associated with super-growth, privatization, pro-market policies and private entrepreneurs, in contrast to Hu Jintao’s constituency, which has given greater priority to sustainable growth, social equality, environmental protection, and state support for education, health and social security. [691] [691] Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 48. The third would be reforms designed to instil more life and independence into the People’s Congress and the People’s Consultative Conference, which are state rather than Party institutions. If all three of these directions were followed, they would result in an outcome not dissimilar from that in Japan, where there is a multi-party system in which only one party matters, where the various factions within the Liberal Democrats count for rather more than the other political parties, and where the diet enjoys a limited degree of autonomy. Another possible scenario, in this same context, is that of Singapore — in whose arrangements Deng Xiaoping showed some interest [692] [692] Interview with Yu Zengke, Beijing, 22 May 2006. — where the ruling party dominates an ostensibly multi-party system, with the opposition parties dwarfed, harassed and hobbled by the government. The fourth direction, which has been advocated by the Chinese intellectual Pan Wei, puts the emphasis on the rule of law rather than democracy, on how the government is run rather than who runs it, with state officials required to operate according to the law with legal forms of redress if they do not, and the establishment of a truly independent civil service and judiciary, a proposal which, overall, bears a certain similarity to governance in Singapore and Hong Kong. [693] [693] Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? , pp. 64-6, 74-5. Should this route be pursued then it would mark a continuing rejection of any form of democratic outcome and an affirmation of a relatively orthodox Confucian tradition of elitest government committed to the highest ethical standards.

None of these scenarios seems particularly imminent. For the foreseeable future the most likely outcome is a continuation of the process of reform already under way, notwithstanding the growing problems of governance consequent upon social unrest and chronic corruption. [694] [694] Howell, Governance in China , pp. 227-8. The worst-case scenario for both China and the world would be the collapse and demise of the Communist Party in the manner of the Soviet Union, [695] [695] Nolan, China at the Crossroads , pp. 72, 77. which had a disastrous effect on Russian living standards for over a decade. The ramifications, nationally and globally, of a similar implosion in China, which has a far bigger population, a much larger economy and is far more integrated with the outside world, would be vastly greater. A period of chaos would threaten the country’s stability, usher in a phase of uncertainty and conflict, threaten a premature end to its modernization, and potentially culminate in a return to one of China ’s periodic phases of introspection and division. The best prospect for China, and the world, is if the present regime continues to direct the country’s transformation on a similar basis of reform and mutation until such time as there can be a relatively benign transition to a different kind of era. Given China ’s huge success over the last thirty years, this remains by far the most likely scenario.

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which marked the end of the Thirty Years War and initiated a new order in Central Europe based on state sovereignty), the European nation-state slowly emerged as the dominant unit in the international system. The rise of China poses an implicit challenge to this idea. For the West the key operational concept is the nation-state, but for the Chinese it is the civilization-state. At a minimum this will present the world with formidable problems of mutual understanding. This can be illustrated by the linguistic differences: whereas in English there are different words for nation, country, state and government, these are not only relatively recent in Chinese, but the Chinese still largely use the same character for ‘country’ and ‘state’. [696] [696] John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 85. These terms and others such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ethnicity’ were often Western imports. Shi Anbin, ‘Mediating Chinese-ness’, p. 2, in Reid and Zheng, Negotiating Asymmetry . The real difficulty, of course, lies not in linguistic differences but in the different cultural assumptions and meanings that are attached to those words in the two languages. The same word can have a very different meaning for an American or a French person in contrast to a Chinese, even though they might appear to be singing from the same sheet. Huang Ping believes that this cultural difference ‘is going to be a huge problem’. [697] [697] Interview with Huang Ping, Beijing, 10 December 2005. In a world hitherto dominated by Western concepts, values, institutions and propositions, to which China has been obliged to adapt, this has been a far bigger problem for China than for the West. But fast-forward to the future and it becomes clear that, as China ’s power and influence grow apace, it will become the West’s problem more than China ’s. [698] [698] Callahan, Contingent States , p. xxi.

In such circumstances it is pointless to think that China is going to change and adopt Western cultural norms: the practices and ways of thinking are simply too old and too deeply rooted for that to happen. Far from China converging on the Western model and thereby conforming to the established patterns of the nation-state, there is likely to be a rather different scenario. This is not necessarily because China will want to change things: on the contrary, it has been at pains to assure the global community that it certainly does not see itself as an agent of change anxious to overthrow the established international order. But countries naturally and inevitably see the world according to their own history and experiences, an outlook that is tempered only by the constraints of geopolitics and realpolitik. The European powers, the major architects of the international system as we know it today, brought their own traditions and history to bear on the shaping and design of that system, at the core of which lay the nation-state, a European invention. The way in which the United States sees the world reflects both its European ancestry and the specific characteristics of its own formation and growth. The fact that it expanded by a continuous process of conquest and that, as a settler-nation, it had to invent itself from scratch has imbued the country with a universalizing and missionary conception of its role. [699] [699] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600 - 1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), pp. 15–17, 130-33,137, 250-51. The rules that govern the international system may be universal in application, but that does not mean that they were universal in creation, that they emerged magically out of the international ether: on the contrary, they were the invention of those nations that were strong and dominant enough to enforce their will and to ensure that their interests were those that triumphed. As China becomes a global power, and ultimately a superpower, probably in time the dominant superpower, then it, like every other previous major power, will view the world through the prism of its own history and will seek, subject to the prevailing constraints, to reshape that world in its own image. Above all, that means that China will see the world in terms of its identity and experience as a civilization-state, with its attendant characteristics and assumptions, rather than primarily as a nation-state.