From The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Edward Luce, 2017) p162-7
Hegel and then Marx dismissed China as an oriental despotism. Mill saw it as a flawed civilisation. Social Darwinians classified the Chinese as belonging to the lower races. Max Weber said Confucian culture would forestall the rise of capitalism since it had no conception of life after death. Is it worth adding that none of these thinkers set foot in China?
Each of these precepts, some of them highly eccentric, has been belied by China’s rise. ‘The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a World order by their maxims,’ writes Henry Kissinger, who is well acquainted with China. Yet we keep replacing one flawed prognosis with another. In the 1990s, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote off the ‘Asian growth miracle’ as a mirage. Asia’s economies were simply mobilising resources, much as the Soviet Union had done. Their model would go the same way as Stalin’s. Our most recent forecast that China is on a one-way track to democracy is faring little better. What strikes Westerners (and I am no exception) as self-evidently a good thing sounds to Chinese ears just another example of missionary zeal. There is a ‘deeply held unconscious assumption that the West remains, in one way or another, a morally superior civilization,’ writes Kishore Mahbubani, one of Singapore’s foremost foreign policy thinkers.
The secret to any nation’s diplomatic character is embedded in its popular imagination. If asked which historic events made them proudest, most British would choose the darkest days of the Second World War, when Britain faced Nazi Germany alone. Many would also mention the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, or victory over Napoleon. Britain’s worst fears, and deepest triumphs, have always coincided with Europe’s unification under one power. The past is never really dead. It is not even past. The 2016 Brexit vote was today’s version of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Most Americans would probably point to the defeat of the Axis Powers in the Second World War and victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Many would also mention the US Constitution. Others would cite the landing of the first humans on the moon. Or perhaps the internet. Each instance reflects America’s deep-seated belief in its own freedoms and spreading them to others. Think of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty and George W Bush’s Freedom Agenda. What makes Chinese proud? I asked Eric Li, the Shanghai-based private equity investor, which two historic events he prized above others. The first was China’s detonation of the hydrogen bomb in October 1964. This proved the Chinese people had ‘stood up’, as Mao promised in 1949. ‘It was so extraordinary because the People’s Republic was just fifteen years old and very poor,’ said Li. The test also proved China was capable of catching up with Western technology. The second was Britain’s transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The handover ‘closed the curtain on China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign invaders’. Both of Li’s examples show China’s deep-rooted desire to be treated with respect and dignity.
Alas, the West keeps shifting the goal posts. It was only in the early 1990s, several years after the Sino-British deal on Hong Kong, that the UK introduced a modest amount of representative democracy to the city state. The Hong Kong legislative council’s new powers were little match for those of the London-appointed governor. Partly, it is a matter of tone. The one country, two systems framework to which China agreed is far more democratic than anything the UK granted to Hong Kong. Yet even today, British Members of Parliament noisily protest when China fails to live up to the letter of its democratic promises. It is as though Manchu China had only just returned the Channel Islands to Britain after seizing them in the nineteenth century, then spent the next twenty years hectoring the UK about how it should govern them. China can easily brush aside Britain’s double standards: London, in any case, is switching to a more mercantilist stance in which it now rolls out the red carpet for China. America is a different matter. So, too, is Taiwan. China’s incentive to maintain Hong Kong’s relative freedoms has less to do with honouring its obligations to Britain than with convincing Taiwan that its way of life would be secure under China’s rule. Taiwan is the big prize. Washington is the biggest obstacle. It is critical to try to see the dispute from China’s point of view. Since Washington proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in 1822. the US has treated outside interference in the Western hemisphere as a threat to its national interests. That includes Cuba, which the US helped liberate from Spanish colonial rule in 1898. The Caribbean island never fell under US sovereignty. Yet John F. Kennedy was prepared to risk nuclear war with the Soviets over the transfer of Soviet missiles to Cuba. In contrast, Taiwan was not only an historic part of China, but is recognised as such by the US and most of the rest of the world. It split off from the mainland only in 1949, after the defeated Kuomintang fled there following the communist revolution. Taiwan was shielded from Mao’s wrath by America. Today, US nuclear-armed warships regularly patrol twelve miles from China’s shores. What would happen if China’s nuclear-equipped warships were spotted off the coast of Virginia? How would Washington respond if Chinese drones took out separatist exiles in, say, Central America, or even Central Asia? Not calmly, it can be safely assumed.
Until Trump, Washington could still just about argue that only the US could be trusted to play the role of global policeman. As an autocracy without allies, China lacked the basic means to uphold the global commons. Bush Junior’s pre-emptive wars badly damaged America’s unipolar credentials. Trump’s victory has smashed them to pieces. It is questionable whether Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. A more serious question is whether China would aspire to play such a role, even if it could somehow convince the rest of the world to go along with it. China’s history casts a lot of doubt on that theory. In the early fifteenth century, almost ninety years before Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, China assembled the largest naval fleet then known to history under the admiralship of Zheng He. The fleet took several trips south and west, ranging as far as the mouth of the Red Sea and down Africa’s eastern coastline. Yet it set up no colonies along the way. On Zheng’s final voyage he dropped off the foreign envoys he had picked up on the earlier trips. Even at the height of its imperial power, China preferred to diffuse its culture through osmosis rather than by conquest. As Kissinger points out, both the US and China see themselves as exceptional. But China’s version of exceptionalism is unique to itself. Others were encouraged to copy China’s culture and pay tribute. Those who refused to do so were treated as barbarians and slapped into line. But China has rarely sought to export its model by force or colonise other lands. The last time China disciplined a recalcitrant was in 1979, when the People’s Liberation Army crossed the border into Vietnam and gave it a bloody nose. China then promptly withdrew. Prior to that was the Sino-Indian war of 1962, in which Chinese forces overran Indian resistance but halted once they reached the line Beijing claimed was the correct border. It was less a war to put India in its place than a war to rectify China’s century of humiliation: the British had shifted India’s border eastwards in the nineteenth century, at a moment of Chinese weakness. Today, Taiwan remains by far China’s largest item of unfinished business. Only the US stands in its way. Under Trump, the two great countries seem almost destined to stray into some kind of crisis.
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