China Reclaims World Power Status

Putting an end to the world America made

Paolo Urio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351704731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using both Chinese and Western theoretical approaches, this book analyses the strategies implemented by China for reclaiming power in the international domain. Examining domestic measures taken by China to assure its economic and social development, it also considers the strengths and weaknesses of its major international opponent, the US, and analyses their competing approaches to developing power resources and leadership dominance. It studies the foreign policies of both China and the US, first by going back to the historical origins of their ideological foundations and secondly by analysing their power building from the nineteenth century to the Trump and Xi Jinping presidencies. Finally, this book focuses on the One Belt One Road Initiative as China's response to putting an end to the 'world America made' and debates the question of whether China will emerge as a new capitalist country embedded in the liberal capitalist world system, or as an authoritarian state with a socialist market economy, able to change the rules of the international order.

Providing a comparison of the two major world powers and a comprehensive overview of their relationship, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and international relations, as well as Chinese Studies more generally.

1 Understanding China’s strategy

Plans always fall behind changes
[Jìhuà ganbushàng biànhuà]

Chinese proverb

Approaching China from outside and from within

Understanding how the Chinese think and behave is not an easy task. Not only is China geographically far away from the West, but its culture is also far away from Western languages, thinking and behaving.¹ Most of the time Western people, i.e. journalists and politicians, but also scholars and even sinologists, cannot help understanding and evaluating China from the Western point of view, that is, using our concepts, values, theories and ideology.² François Jullien has made this point very well. The West has dominated the world for the last five centuries. Practically no other culture has been able to resist its domination, at least until very recently. This relationship between the West and the rest of the world has given Westerners the feeling, and for many even the certitude, that, on every count, their culture is superior to the other cultures: better government, economy, military, legal system and social relations, and even a ‘better God’. The titles of a few books published by Western authors on China tell us that the Chinese are lying; beware, conflict with China is coming; China is a threat as it targets America; don’t worry, China is a fragile superpower; and in any case its collapse is coming.³ The foundation of this way of thinking is summarized by the title and subtitle of another book: ‘Economics does not lie: a defense of the free market in a time of crisis’.⁴ Which clearly means: in the West we have a free market economy (i.e. capitalism) supported by liberal democracy.⁵ Freedom is one of the two fundamental values of the West, assured by liberal democracy, along with material comfort, assured by the economic efficiency of the market economy. China has neither. True, China has introduced some market mechanisms. But if it does not abandon its authoritarian regime, adopt liberal democracy and a complete market economy (i.e. capitalism), it will inevitably collapse. This way of seeing China is clearly based upon the theory of one of the most influential neoliberal thinkers, Milton Friedman, for whom freedom in the capitalist economy is the guarantee of freedom in the polity. These ideas are today shared even by scholars generally considered to belong to the moderate left-wing intelligentsia.⁶ With the exception of curiosity, and in some cases also genuine admiration for the arts produced by other cultures, the case is clear: we are the best. Even when one admits that our democracy has some problems, China’s problems look much worse. For example, a recent report written for the Project 2049 Institute says that

the United States, while an imperfect democracy, is an inspiration to people everywhere who yearn for the freedom and dignity that come from having a representative government, independent legal system, and market economy. In contrast, all power in the PRC is monopolized by the Chinese Communist Party, a political organization whose legitimacy is called into question by its troubled history. Read the State Department annual report on human rights and it quickly becomes apparent that this is a deeply authoritarian regime, and one that continues to oppress the Chinese people.⁷

It is this kind of analysis that has entitled us to take possession of the rest of the world, to teach the ‘good savage’ how society should be organized. Of course, the Chinese could say: read the Chinese report on human rights in the United States (US), and the World Bank reports that recognize that China has lifted 500 million people out of poverty in about a quarter of a century.

So, we boarded our ‘caravels’ and discovered what we have labelled ‘the New World’.⁸ There we found an empty world, or a world that we have emptied, or at least that has not been able to resist us. There we have found the ‘good savage’, we have dressed him, and we have converted him. And, I should like to add, not much remains today of the original cultures in the Americas. Today, the inhabitants of the Americas, not those who came from Europe and, for example, founded the US, but the descendants of the local ‘Indians’, speak English, Spanish or Portuguese.⁹ We have emptied their world and filled it according to our image, in the same way God created mankind. But when we arrived in China, we found a very different situation. The world we found here was full. The missionaries and artists who arrived in China had to learn the Chinese language, respect the rites and honour the emperor. Some of them dressed the Chinese way and took Chinese names.¹⁰ In short, somewhere they were ‘sinicized’.

Nevertheless, still today we persist in believing that the West, which has dominated the world for such a long time, remains the reference point for ways of thinking and doing. Moreover, we claim that we possess universal values that have become ‘the law of reason’. Therefore, even when we claim that we have escaped this cultural ethnocentric posture, we are still submitted to it, without even being aware.¹¹ This has two consequences: first, we have difficulties in opening our mind to other coherences outside those with which we are familiar, those that for us are self- evident. Second, we have difficulties in articulating China’s cultural dimension with its other dimensions, i.e. economy, polity and society, and this is for us an important point if we want to understand China’s strategy to reclaim world power status.¹²

François Jullien’s purpose is to overcome this inadequacy. For assessing the choices made by Western philosophy, Jullien thinks that one must assess them ‘from an elsewhere’, which should be as far away as possible. One may think of India. But as India belongs to the family of Indo- European languages, it is not far enough. For Jullien, the only possible choice is China, a country that has developed a world as civilized as ours. But it has done so outside our language, outside our history, independently from us, indifferently to us, in any case until the seventeenth century, or even the nineteenth century.¹³

As a philosopher, Jullien questions the assumptions and choices made by the West around the fifth century bc that have oriented our way of thinking up to the present day. Greek philosophers have chosen rationality, categorizations, clear definitions that fix opposite states (weak–strong, young–old, beautiful–ugly) that inevitably lead to the construction of models. For example, for feminine beauty, the Venus de Milo is pure beauty, and does not show the slightest sign of ugliness. Moreover, we plan action according to a model, for example, market economy and liberal democracy. In other words, the Western way of thinking prefers to analyse the ‘being’ instead of the ‘becoming’. Also, it pays more attention to events, which are ‘fixed moments or states’, than to the underlying long-term forces: look at the information on TV, a patchwork of vociferous events. In contrast, Chinese thinking pays more attention to the movement, the transition, the way (dao), the transformation and especially the ‘silent transformations’, i.e. the underlying forces operating silently over the ‘long time’ that shape the environment in which the actors behave, thus defining the limit of their freedom. More on this concept hereafter, which is very important for understanding China’s strategy.

In order to be open to Chinese culture and eventually to introduce some of its thinking into our own culture, it will be necessary for us Europeans to place ourselves at a distance from the thinking whence we come, to break its filiations and question it from the outside, to question its evidences and to discover what our thought has not thought. Jullien strongly suggests that it may be possible that the two ways of thinking, the Western and the Chinese, may enrich each other, by helping each other to discover that there is ‘a somewhere else for the thinking’, another way of thinking. This opening to Chinese culture should help us to question the evidence of our way of thinking and discover the ‘non- thought’ of our thinking.¹⁴

It should be noted that Jullien informs his readers that he is not attracted to China because of the fascination of the distance and the pleasure of ‘exotism’, but he resorts to China as a ‘theoretical revealer’ with the aim of opening up some other ‘possibles’ in our mind and thereafter to start philosophy anew.¹⁵ But beware, Jullien does not look for a (new) way of thinking that will, in the end, replace the Western way. He says that the ‘detour’ to China must be followed by a ‘return’ to the Western philosophy with the purpose of questioning it in what it does not question. So, there is not a complete opposition between the West and China. Moreover, Jullien does not consider that the two ways of thinking are completely different. Therefore, mutual enrichment is even more possible as one can build upon the already existing commonalities. In fact, as said above, the difference appeared towards the fifth century bc when the West (i.e. Greek philosophy) chose rationality and modelling. Nevertheless, prior to this choice, the difference between China and the West was very weak. To prove this Jullien invites us to (re)read the two classics of ancient Greece, i.e. the Iliad and the Odyssey, and think about the behaviour of one of its major characters: Ulysses. Ulysses is not someone who first defines a model and then implements it. What makes him powerful is his capacity to see the advantage he can get from the circumstances. He is smart, he understands in what direction the situation will evolve and how to make the best out of it. He possesses flair, cunning and intelligence. In this sense, his way of thinking and behaving is very close to the traditional Chinese way.¹⁶

So, if we accept Jullien’s suggestion, we have to look at China’s strategy from both outside (i.e. from the West) and inside. In order to achieve this goal, we have to find in the two cultures some commonalities in their ways of thinking about history and the organization of society. Luckily there are quite a few. For the purpose of this book, whose aim is to understand China’s strategy for reclaiming world power status, the most interesting authors are those working on history, philosophy and political science.¹⁷ Apart from Jullien, who has introduced me to the traditional Chinese way of understanding and practising strategy, and especially to the concept of ‘silent transformations’, several other authors have helped me to construct the design of the research on which this book is based. First of all, Fernand Braudel, who has developed two fundamental concepts. The first is an invaluable complement to the ‘silent transformations’, i.e. the idea that the time of history is not uniform or unique, but that there are several historical times, and one of them, the ‘long time’ (or the ‘longue durée’), very clearly complements Jullien’s ‘silent transformations’. Moreover, Braudel is also, like Jullien, very careful not to attribute too much importance to ‘events’, and, as he says, to escape the ‘dictatorship of events’.¹⁸ Indeed, the latter are in fact the vociferous (i.e. audible) and evident (i.e. ‘seeable’) temporary emergences of superficial phenomena that do not explain in depth the evolution of history. Second, Braudel offers an in- depth historical analysis that allows us to make a clear distinction between market economy and capitalism. Complementary to these two authors is the insight provided by Nicolas Zufferey, who has compared Western philosophy to Chinese thought by showing not only the remarkable differences that exist between them, but also the interesting similarities.¹⁹

Three Chinese authors, who have an in- depth knowledge of Western literature, present some commonality with Western thinking. Wang Hui develops a historical analysis of his country based upon long- term changes, which correspond very well to Jullien’s ‘silent transformations’, and concurs with Braudel (whom he quotes on several occasions) on the distinction between market economy and capitalism. In line with both Jullien and Braudel, Hu Angang has developed an in- depth analysis of China’s strategy to reclaim world power status based upon long- term data series on the development of strategic resources that describe and explain China’s growing power in the international system. I will analyse in detail Hu’s contribution to the understanding of China’s modernization process in Chapter 3. Here it is sufficient to mention that for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding China’s strategy
• 2 Understanding power in the twenty-first century’s international relations
• 3 China’s strategy: a view from Beijing
• 4 Understanding US strategy: how the US became the world hegemon of the twentieth century and how it tries to retain this status for the twenty-first century
• 5 China’s strategy for reclaiming world power status: putting an end to the ‘world America made’
• Conclusion: the rise of China and the new international order
• Annex
• Bibliography
• Index