Sinicization and the Rise of China

Civilizational Processes Beyond East and West

Peter J. Katzenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415809528
• eBook ISBN: 9781136460197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's rise and processes of Sinicization suggest that recombination of new and old elements rather than a total rupture with or return to the past is China's likely future. In both space and time, civilizational politics offers the broadest social context. It is of particular salience in China. Reification of civilizations into simple categories such as East and West is widespread in everyday politics and common in policy and academic writings. This book's emphasis on Sinicization as a specific instance of civilizational processes counters political and intellectual shortcuts and corrects the mistakes to which they often lead. Sinicization illustrates that like other civilizations China has always been open to variegated social and political processes that have brought together many different kinds of peoples adhering to very different kinds of practices. This book tries to avoid the reifications and celebrations that mark much of the contemporary public debate about China's rise. It highlights instead complex processes and political practices bridging East and West that avoid easy shortcuts. The analytical perspectives of this book are laid out in Katzenstein's opening and concluding chapters. They are explored in six outstanding case studies, written by widely known authors, which over questions of security, political economy and culture.

Featuring an exceptional line-up and representing a diversity of theoretical views within one integrative perspective, this work will be of interest to all scholars and students of international relations, sociology and political science.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

CHINA’S RISE

Rupture, return, or recombination?¹

Peter J. Katzenstein

All states that have experienced the flush moment of their rise in recent decades have had to accommodate to rapid disappointment. In the 1970s and 1980s, Germany and Japan were briefly intoxicated by the prospect that they might provide the institutional models other states would emulate. The United States has lived the same dream for a much longer period of time. Yet, American hopes were dashed by a failed foreign policy strategy adopted in the early months of the first George W. Bush presidency, followed by a disastrous meltdown of its unregulated financial system in the waning months of the second. Talk of the German model was quickly dashed as the country faced a painful decade of structural adjustment in the 1980s, was weighed down by the costs of unification in the 1990s, and needed much of the first decade of this century to recalibrate its political economy. Significantly, Germany’s strong performance during and after the financial crisis of 2008 has not revived such talk. America’s, Germany’s, and Japan’s overblown aspirations were disappointed; and so may be China’s.² And just as the fears of the new Japan, Germany, and even the United States were excessive, so probably will be the fears of China. Rates of change in contemporary world politics, and the unintended consequences of many of these changes, defy the simple, straight-line projections of both optimists and pessimists.

The case of Japan a few decades ago is of immediate relevance for understanding contemporary China’s ascent.³ In the 1970s and 1980s the Japanese sun was rising visibly, both in world affairs and on book covers. Japan’s new technological prowess powered its commercial expansion and its rise to a novel, civilian great power status. The realignment of currency values in 1985 underlined the fact that Japan had become America’s major creditor and Asia’s major investor. Japanese-style industrial policy was refashioned to create a region-wide infrastructure designed to benefit both Japan and its Asian partners.⁴ Japan’s power was not encased in formal institutions but rested instead in decentralized network structures.⁵ Its exciting take-off and trajectory appeared to create enough draft to pull along the rest of Asia. But suddenly Japan stopped in midair, as its real estate and financial bubbles burst simultaneously. Just as its partner countries were changing their sense of self and their aspirations, so was Japan. Networks realigned, with new nodes emerging, old ones refurbishing, and some connections being broken altogether. Rather than providing a model for others to follow, Asia’s regional development moved beyond Japan.⁶ This does not mean that Japan fell off a cliff. Far from it. After two decades of economic stagnation, Japan’s per capita income is about $42,000, compared to $47,000 for the United States and $4,300 for China.⁷ Asia, however, was not revolving around the Japanese sun. Japanization processes were multi- rather than unidirectional. Japanization did not mean only, as the Japanese had expected, making Asia more like Japan. It also meant making Japan more like Asia and the larger world beyond. Understandably, at both human and political levels, disappointment followed in the wake of failed expectations that had rested on an incomplete understanding of power.

Often referred to in China as revival or rejuvenation, China’s rise and processes of Sinicization are best analyzed with an understanding of the concept of power that includes all of its dimensions. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall have insisted that the behavioral effects of power which are directly targeted and exercised in specific and observable ways are important but do not exhaust the full panoply of power. Equally important are the non-behavioral effects of power that are indirectly targeted and are exercised in diffuse and not readily observable ways.⁸ China’s rise includes both the invisible and non-behavioral as well as the visible and behavioral dimensions of power. Recombination rather than rupture or return is China’s likely future.

Power is closely linked to politics. Civilizational politics is a matter of concern primarily for intellectual and political elites. In both space and time, it offers the broadest social context and worldview. The breadth of civilizational attachments is politically highly salient, especially in China.⁹ This is not to deny that other and often more powerful identities are nested within civilizational identities. Historically, national identities tended to crystallize on the peripheries of civilizations, illustrated by Vietnam, Korea, and Japan in their relations to China; England and Germany in their relations to France; and Spain in its relations to Islam.¹⁰ In an era of mass politics, nationalism provides for most people the most powerful collective identity, reflected in what Ernest Renan has called plebiscites of everyday practice. Furthermore, nationalism embeds other identities, among them local, professional, and personal ones. For their own political benefits and purposes, governments typically seek to mold civilizational and other types of identities.

Reification of numerous civilizations into simple categories such as East and West is widespread in everyday politics and common in policy and academic writings. Through the concept of Sinicization and an emphasis on process, I seek to counter these political and intellectual shortcuts and correct the mistakes to which they can lead. Acknowledging the importance of complex processes, the contributors to this book – and, I assume, many of its readers – remain divided on whether or not these processes invoke, touch on, and alter irreducibly different core values that distinguish “Self” from “Other.” I argue here that a recognition of complex processes and an insistence on the existence of core values are two aspects of the same political dynamic. Creating the belief in the existence of uniform, crystallized, core values and practices is a political project that reduces uncertainty in a world of change. Change can lead to a degree of individual and collective insecurity and a politics of threat and fear that elicits a political and intellectual response – simplification through the creation of misleading binaries. Conditions of uncertainty and change and the search for stability are thus politically closely linked. What the authors of this volume do agree on is that Sinicization exists and that it is politically consequential for policy and practice. At the point of origin, over the course of civilizational evolution, and at whatever point of destiny we choose to impute to history, civilizations have always been open to variegated social and political processes that have brought together many different kinds of peoples adhering to very different kinds of practices. In the language of Martin Bernal, Athena has always been brown, not black or white.¹¹ The insistence on the openness of Sinic (or Han) civilization or their unique role in bridging otherwise unbridgeable civilizational divides are common arguments that are not unique to China.

In the past, China was at the center of a Sinocentric order that encompassed large parts of East Asia and the surrounding seas. In cultural affairs, this Sinocentric order distinguished among insiders (civilized people, who belonged to it); outsiders (beasts, who did not); and an intermediary group (barbarians, who might become civilized through continuous interaction with the civilization’s center). Pervasive female, juvenile, or historical metaphors often crop up as legitimizing the Confucian, Christian, and Communist civilizational projects that have been applied to China’s cultural peripheries.¹² In economic affairs, this order recorded astounding accomplishments and distinctive practices, such as tributary trade, that helped to define interstate relations in a regional hierarchy. In security affairs the Sinocentric order remained remarkably peaceful for long stretches of time, especially toward the South and East – although it was always open to challenge, particularly when the power of the center broke down. The specific cultural, economic, and security models and practices of the Sinic world were never fixed but forever contested and changing.

Today China’s physical and demographic size, its economic growth, and its government’s determination to enhance national unity and shape broader political outcomes in world politics make it understandable why many Chinese and foreign observers alike focus on the central Chinese state and impute unity and legitimacy to it. As is true of others, China’s civilization provides a complex context for political action that is marked by multiple traditions and dynamic processes of Sinicization. Sinic civilization does not act. And examining Sinicization is different from making a case for it. This book seeks to avoid the reifications and celebrations that mark much of the contemporary public debate about China’s rise. It aims instead to open the subject to scholarly inquiry from a perspective that highlights complex processes and avoids easy shortcuts.

Widely acknowledged as an issue of prime importance, China’s rise now elicits starkly different reactions from those of the past.¹³ Unqualified economic admiration exists side by side with ominous political warnings. The potential for high economic growth and large profits in China’s enormous domestic market, we are told, is stabilizing a global political economy that weakened dramatically during the financial crisis induced by America’s unregulated financial system in 2008. Alternatively, economic growth is occurring in a country that is fated to become a serious political rival and perhaps a deadly military challenge to the United States – if not today, then tomorrow, or the day after. Such optimistic and pessimistic views permeate not only journalistic writings and policy debates but also the more detached scholarship on what William Callahan has dubbed “the pessoptimist” nation.¹⁴

This chapter reviews rupture, return, and recombination as three lenses through which to view China’s rise, analyzes in general terms China’s civilizational identities and processes, examines more specifically the cultural, economic, and security aspects of China’s rise, and concludes with a discussion of recombination in terms of Sinicization.

Return, rupture, and recombination in China’s rise

Martin Jacques makes the contemporary case for China’s “return” to the past.¹⁵ In his sweeping analysis, China will soon rule the world again, as the rise of the Middle Kingdom brings an end to the Western world. For a few decades we may see a transition, as globalization fractures into a world of regional blocs with different currencies and spheres of influences; but thereafter, China will rule and the world will be Easternized as it turns hierarchical, illiberal, and statist. With American power fading quickly, China will step ahead of both the rest and the West. As China rises to economic preeminence – measured in aggregate rather than per capita income – military, political, and cultural power will flow to Beijing. In the return of a Pax Sinica, now on a global scale, the renminbi will become the world’s reserve currency. Shanghai will replace New York and London as the world’s center of financial power. Mandarin will replace English as the global language. People will celebrate the great discoverer He Zheng rather than Christopher Columbus; the Chinese Renaissance and polymath Kuo Shen rather than the Italian Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci; and Confucius and Mencius rather than Plato and Aristotle. Jacques’ analysis is a simple straight-line projection. Some macro-historians have provided indirect support for this view. In their frontal assaults on Eurocentrism, John Hobson and Andre Gunder Frank, for example, suggest that China will soon regain its ability to set the international agenda by itself rather than merely reacting to others.¹⁶ In brief, the future is about to restore China to its ancient position of global preeminence.¹⁷

This view is implausible. Many sociologists and historians have in recent decades taken a less unilinear view of the longue durée of Chinese history.¹⁸ Without denying the importance of China’s central position in the old order, this perspective emphasizes the growth of intra-regional trade, migration, capital and money flows both before and after the encounter with the European powers and America.¹⁹ Asia’s regional industrialization was greatly influenced by trade and other economic exchanges between China and Japan. Neither country imported technology or organiz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1. China’s Rise: Rupture, return, or recombination?1
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• References
• Index