The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (14 page)

Most autocratic regimes that have modernized their economies—Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Portugal—have weathered the political changes that followed and emerged with greater stability and legitimacy. Beijing has faced challenges before and adapted. And even if the regime mismanages this transition, political upheaval and turmoil will not necessarily stop China from growing. Whatever the future of its politics, it is unlikely that China’s emergence onto the world stage will be reversed. The forces fueling its rise will not disappear even if the current regime collapses—or, more likely, splits into factions. After its revolution, France went through two centuries of political crisis, running through two empires, one quasi-fascist dictatorship, and four republics. Yet through the political tumult, it thrived economically, remaining one of the richest countries in the world.

China is hungry for success and this might well be a key reason for its enduring rise. In the twentieth century, after hundreds of years of poverty, the country went through imperial collapse, civil war, and revolution only to find itself in Mao’s hellish version of communism. It lost 38 million people in the Great Leap Forward, a brutal experiment in collectivization. Then it burrowed itself deeper in isolation and destroyed its entire professional and academic class during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike India, which could be proud of its democracy despite slow economic growth, China by the 1970s was bereft of any reason to raise its head high. Then came Deng’s reforms. Today, China’s leaders, businessmen, and people in general have one desire in common: they want to keep moving ahead. They are unlikely to cast aside casually three decades of relative stability and prosperity.

Hiding Its Light

Whatever happens to China internally is likely to complicate life internationally. Its range of strengths—economic, political, military—ensure that its influence extends well beyond its borders. Countries with this capacity are not born every day. The list of current ones—the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia—has gone mostly unchanged for two centuries. Great powers are like divas: they enter and exit the international stage with great tumult. Think of the rise of Germany and Japan in the early twentieth century, or the decline of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in that same period, which produced multiple crises in the Balkans and the messy modern Middle East.

In recent years, that pattern has not quite held. Modern-day Japan and Germany became the world’s second- and third-largest economies but stayed remarkably inactive politically and militarily. And, so far, China has come into its own with little disruption. For the first decade of its development, the 1980s, China did not really have a foreign policy. Or, more accurately, its growth strategy was its grand strategy. Beijing saw good relations with America as key to its development, in part because it wanted access to the world’s largest market and most advanced technology. In the UN Security Council, China usually voted for, or at least abstained from vetoing, American-sponsored resolutions. More broadly, it kept its head down in an effort, as Deng put it, to “hide its light under a bushel.” This policy of noninterference and nonconfrontation mostly persists. With the exception of anything related to Taiwan, Beijing tends to avoid picking a fight with other governments. The focus remains on growth. In his two-and-a-half-hour address to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007, President Hu Jintao addressed economic, financial, industrial, social, and environmental issues in great detail—but neglected foreign policy almost entirely.

Many veteran Chinese diplomats get nervous talking about their country’s rise to power. “It frightens me,” said Wu Jianmin, the president of China’s Foreign Affairs University and a former ambassador to the United Nations. “We are still a poor country, a developing country. I don’t want people to think of us in . . . exaggerated terms.” Xinghai Fang, the deputy CEO of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, spoke in the same vein: “Please remember, America’s per capita GDP is twenty-five times ours. We have a long way to go.” Such anxiety has manifested itself in an interesting debate within China over how Beijing should articulate its foreign policy doctrine. In 2002, Zheng Bijian, then deputy head of the Central Party School, coined the term “peaceful rise” to convey China’s intention to move quietly up the global ladder. When Zheng spoke, people listened, because his former boss was President Hu Jintao. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao both used the phrase subsequently, giving it official sanction. But then it fell out of favor.

Many Western analysts thought that the problem with the phrase was the word “peaceful,” which could limit China’s options on Taiwan. In fact, there wasn’t much internal division on that matter. China regards Taiwan as a domestic matter and believes that it has all the authority it needs to use force, though as a last resort. As Zheng explained to me, “Lincoln fought a war to preserve the Union, but you can still say that the United States was rising peacefully.” Some key Chinese leaders are instead worried about the phrase’s second word, “rise.” (A more accurate translation would be “thrust” or “surge.”) Senior diplomats recoiled at the idea of going around the world talking up China’s rise. In particular, they worried about critics in the United States who would see China’s rise as a threat. Lee Kuan Yew suggested to Beijing that it speak of a “renaissance” rather than a rise, and party leaders argued about the phrase during a retreat at Beidaihe in the summer of 2003. Since then, they have talked about “peaceful development.” “The concept is the same,” said Zheng. “It’s just a different phrase.” True, but the shift reflects China’s concern with not ruffling any feathers as it steams ahead.

The regime is working to make sure the Chinese people understand its strategy as well. In 2006 and 2007, Chinese television aired a twelve-part series,
The Rise of the Great Nations
, clearly designed as an act of public education.
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Given the intensely political nature of the subject matter, one can be certain that it was carefully vetted to present views that the government wished to be broadcast. The series was thoughtful and intelligent, produced in BBC or PBS style, and it covered the rise of nine great powers, from Portugal and Spain to the Soviet Union and the United States, complete with interviews with scholars from around the world. The sections on the individual countries are mostly accurate and balanced. The rise of Japan, an emotional topic in China, is handled fairly, with little effort to whip up nationalist hysteria about Japanese attacks on China; Japan’s postwar economic rise is praised repeatedly. Some points of emphasis are telling. The episodes on the United States, for example, deal extensively with Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt’s programs to regulate and tame capitalism, highlighting the state’s role in capitalism. And there are a few predictable, but shameful, silences, such as the complete omission of the terror, the purges, or the Gulag from an hour-long program on the Soviet Union. But there are also startling admissions, including considerable praise of the U.S. and British systems of representative government for their ability to bring freedom, legitimacy, and political stability to their countries.

The basic message of the series is that a nation’s path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and that militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end. That point is made repeatedly. The final episode—explicitly on the “lessons” of the series—lays out the keys to great power: national cohesiveness, economic and technological success, political stability, military strength, cultural creativity, and magnetism. The last is explained as the attractiveness of a nation’s ideas, corresponding with concept of “soft power” developed by Joseph Nye, one of the scholars interviewed for the series. The episode ends with a declaration that, in the new world, a nation can sustain its competitive edge only if it has the knowledge and technological capacity to keep innovating. In short, the path to power is through markets, not empires.

God and Foreign Policy

Is China’s way of thinking about the world distinctly, well, Chinese? In many senses, it is not. The lessons drawn from that history of great powers are ones many Westerners have drawn as well—indeed, many of the people interviewed were Western scholars. It reflects the same understanding that has driven the behavior of Germany and Japan in recent years. China’s dealings with the world are practical, reflecting context and interests and its self-perception as a developing country. Despite the enormous shadow that it casts on the world, China recognizes that it is still a country with hundreds of millions of extremely poor people. Its external concerns, accordingly, have to do mostly with development. When asked about issues like human rights, some younger Chinese officials will admit that these are simply not their concerns—as if they see these as luxuries that they cannot afford. No doubt this sense is enhanced by the acute realization that human rights abroad are linked with those at home. If China were to criticize the Burmese dictatorship, what would it say to its own dissidents?

There are also, however, broader cultural elements in China’s way of thinking about the world. One can easily exaggerate the importance of culture, using it as a façade for policies grounded in interest. But there are some real and important differences between Chinese and Western (particularly American) worldviews that are worth exploring. They begin with God. In the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, when asked whether one must believe in God to be moral, a comfortable majority of Americans (57 percent) said yes. In Japan and China, however, much larger majorities said no—in China, a whopping 72 percent! This is a striking and unusual divergence from the norm, even in Asia. The point is not that either country is immoral—in fact all hard evidence suggests quite the opposite—but rather that in neither country do people believe in God.

This might shock many in the West, but for scholars of the subject, it is a well-known reality. East Asians do not believe that the world has a Creator who laid down a set of abstract moral laws that must be followed. That is an Abrahamic, or Semitic, conception of God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but quite alien to Chinese civilization. People sometimes describe China’s religion as Confucianism. But Joseph Needham, an eminent scholar of Confucianism, notes that if you think of religion “as the theology of a transcendent creator-deity,” Confucianism is simply not a religion.
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Confucius was a teacher, not a prophet or holy man in any sense. His writings, or the fragments of them that survive, are strikingly nonreligious. He explicitly warns against thinking about the divine, instead setting out rules for acquiring knowledge, behaving ethically, maintaining social stability, and creating a well-ordered civilization. His work has more in common with the writings of Enlightenment philosophers than with religious tracts.

In fact, during the Enlightenment, Confucius was hot. The Confucian classics, Needham reports, “were read with avidity by all the great forerunners of the French Revolution, by Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, etc.”
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Between 1600 and 1649, 30–50 China-related titles appeared in Europe every decade, and between 1700 and 1709, 599 works on China were published. This frenzy of publications on China coincided with the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), when religion had led to grotesque bloodshed. Many European liberals idealized Confucianism for its basis in natural, as opposed to divine, law. Voltaire put it simply in his Philosophical Dictionary: “No superstitions, no absurd legends, none of those dogmas which insult reason and nature.” Immanuel Kant would later call Confucius “the Chinese Socrates.” Leibniz, a philosopher who straddled the line between religiosity and secularism, went so far as to argue, “We need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion. . . .”

Early Enlightenment thinkers celebrated Confucianism for its reliance on reason rather than on divinity as a guide to human affairs. A thesis developed: While Europe might be far ahead in scientific and technological progress, China had “a more advanced ethics,” a “superior civil organization” (based on merit, not patronage), and a “practical philosophy,” all of which “successfully produced a social peace and a well-organized social hierarchy.” The “climax” of Enlightenment sinophilia came with Voltaire’s 1759
Essai sur les moeurs
, in which, according to the German scholar Thomas Fuchs, he “transformed China into a political utopia and the ideal state of an enlightened absolutism; he held up the mirror of China to provoke self-critical reflection among European monarchs.”
¹²
In the following year, that most enlightened of monarchs, Frederick the Great, wrote his
Report of Phihihu
, a series of letters from a fictitious Chinese ambassador in Europe to the emperor of China. Frederick’s purpose was to contrast the bigotry of the Catholic Church with Chinese rationality.

Westerners have often found it difficult to understand the difference between the place of religion in China and its place in the West. Consider the experiences of a Portuguese missionary in the Far East, Matteo Ricci, as recounted by the great Yale historian Jonathan Spence.
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In his early days in China in the 1580s, Ricci, in an effort to present himself as an honored figure, shaved his head and beard and shrouded himself in the robes of a Buddhist. Only several years later did Ricci realize how misguided this was. Monks and holy men were not held in high esteem in China. He began traveling by sedan chair, or hiring servants to carry him on their shoulders, “as men of rank are accustomed to do,” Ricci later wrote to Claudio Acquaviva, general of the Jesuits, in 1592. “[T]he name of foreigners and priests is considered so vile in China that we need this and other similar devices to show them that we are not priests as vile as their own.” By 1595, Ricci had cast off the ascetic trappings of a monk, which had hindered his missionary work, and instead adopted the dress of a Confucian scholar. Ricci had at first scorned the Confucians for not believing in God, paradise, and the immortality of the soul. The Confucian school, Ricci wrote to a friend, was “the true temple of the literati.” But he eventually saw that even though Confucianism maintained “a strictly neutral stance” toward matters of God and the afterlife, it had a strong sense of ethics, morality, and justice. Like other Enlightenment figures, he came to believe that the West should learn from Confucianism.