It is the 21st century. Can’t you speak Putonghua [Ershiyi shiji, ni hai bu hui shuo Putonghua ma]?—A slogan from the annual national Putonghua Promotion Week (the third week in September since 1998)
1.1 International Perspectives of Rising China
The People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) is rising this century, a process that actually started in the last decade of the twentieth century and seems to be moving in full momentum this century. In the current cycle of globalization , China has built the world’s second largest economy that is expected to surpass the USA as the largest in the coming decades (Nye, 2010). At the same time, China has been expanding militarily, challenging the US’s military supremacy, particularly in the South China Sea (Glaser, 2011). What other impacts does rising China have regionally and globally? Answers to this question depend on who are asked.
Closer to China, the immediate indication of its rise is East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbors’ uneasy responses to China’s unfolding developments and their anxious expectations of US’s outreach to balance China’s impacts in this region, with either accommodation, realignment, and/or resistance (Kang, 2008; McDougall, 2012). Specifically, tensions across the Taiwan Strait and territorial disputes between China and Japan in the East China Sea and with Southeast Asian countries in the South China Sea reflect China’s stronger military muscles in resolving historical issues, the resolution of which may alter the world order created after the World War II.
Farther away and more broadly, the overriding impressions are the pouring of cheap imports from China, eventually leading to the migration of capital and jobs to China (Shenkar, 2005). Next comes China’s challenge to the West in the clean energy and transportation industries, including such things as solar panels, high-speed railways, and commercial aircraft (Bradsher, 2010; Szepan, 2012). Moreover, intentionally or unintentionally, rising China appears to present a tough challenge to the existing world order . Whether this is a true threat or simply a perception, it brings about a lot of anxieties in the West as well (Goldstein, 2005; Hoge, 2004; House of Representatives, 2015; Kwon, 2012). Seemingly developing in this direction, China officially rolled out two grand strategies in 2015, the Belt and Road Initiative , an official platform to expand through Asia to Africa and Europe (Ploberger, 2017; H. Yu, 2017), and Made in China 2025 , a master plan that targets all smart manufacturing in advanced economies in the West (Wübbeke, Meissner, Zenglein, Ives, & Conrad 2016).
Fundamentally, China appears to pose a threat to the liberal system that is the foundation of Western democracies and market societies, a system that withstood the challenges by fascism and communism in the twentieth century (Ikenberry, 2008). It is generally believed in the West that the liberal system is invincible, particularly when China is accepted in the world order underpinned by this system (Ikenberry, 2008, 2014). However, the West is not familiar with a story from the sixteenth-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, in which the Monkey King transforms himself to get into the stomach of the monster, Iron-Fan Princess, and beats her from inside after several failed attempts to attack her from outside. In China, that is considered the most effective strategy to defeat one’s most formidable rivals. When did China pose more economic challenges to Western industries and trade? Before it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) or after it joined WTO in 2001? The answer is obviously after it joined WTO. Will the same thing happen to the liberal system ? Open market societies allow a rather free flow of Chinese goods, thoughts, and institutions into the West. However, China began to close foreign NGOs after the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and remains gated to Western institutions unless those institutions bow to China’s rules of the game as Cambridge University Press did in 2017 and Facebook wants to do (Johnson, 2017; Li, 2017). The threat to the foundation of the liberal system appears to be real and close at home, for instance, in America. In October 2017 before the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Nineteenth National Congress, Chinese American members of a Wechat group for retirement finance based in Dallas, Texas were reminded by the group host to follow the Chinese censorship rules, rules that would close a Wechat group account and prosecute the group host if any violation is found. It was chilling to think of the long arm of rising China, under the proletarian dictatorship and via a Chinese tech company, that threatens freedom of speech in the land of freedom.
Besides the instant and enormous economic and military growth, what else serves as the foundation of rising China so that it has increasingly broad impact on the international community? Looking from outside, international scholars tend to make inquiries into China’s soft power , but they appear to have some disagreement regarding the scope of China’s soft power . The narrow definition of soft power covers agenda setting and attraction projected through institutions, values, cultures, and policies (Nye, 2004, p. 8). On the other hand, in the eyes of the Chinese at least, the broad definition of soft power involves any influences that are exerted by China, including its carrot and stick approach, but excluding the military (Kurlantzick, 2007, p. 6). China embraces the broad definition of soft power probably because soft power is still its Achilles’ heel, though it may have a long tradition of the conceptualization of soft power (Ding, 2008, pp. 24–29; Huang & Ding, 2006). Chinese culture should be one of the three primary resources of its soft power , the other two being its political values and foreign policies (Nye, 2002, pp. 1–2). However, what is Chinese culture and what is the role of traditional Chinese culture in contemporary China? These have been puzzling questions for the Chinese as well, at least since the May Fourth Movement in 1919. The most recent perplexing case is that China sneaked a Confucius statue into Tiananmen Square and soon took it out within a short period of four months in 2011, even though it has been promoting Confucius Institutes globally since 2004. Thus, how China reconstructs its culture both domestically and internationally as the resource for its soft power is of great interest in our inquiry about rising China and its impact, but it is not examined as closely as it should be (Edney, 2015).
1.2 The Cultural Leg of Rising China
Since the Opium War in the 1840s, there has been uncertainty as to whether the Chinese nation should be rejuvenated through westernization, the traditions of Chinese civilization, or a combination of both as well as uncertainty as to what exactly the Chinese nation is in the first place (Leibold, 2004; Lu, 2009). Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925) clearly meant the Han as the Chinese nation when he established the Society for Regenerating China (Xingzhonghui) and put forward the slogan “Rejuvenate the Chinese nation” (zhenxing zhonghua) in the 1890s. His thinking had evolved to include all ethnic minorities in the Chinese nation through assimilation by the time he delivered a speech on this topic in Guangzhou in 1924. This concept of the Chinese nation continued and was strengthened during the war against the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s, when his successor, Chiang Kai-Shek (1887–1975), viewed the Chinese nation as one blood system being blended with elements from various minorities (Leibold, 2006; Zhao, 2004, pp. 171–172). However, this concept of the Chinese nation was discontinued during the first four decades of the PRC, which had adopted the Soviet model of multinational state construction. But it was readopted and expanded to build an inclusive Chinese nation, incorporating every ethnic minority group as a component of it and every citizen as a member of it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s (Zhou, 2010, 2016). Thus, Sun Yat-Sen’s slogan of “Rejuvenate the Chinese nation” was not readopted by Deng Xiaoping until the 1980s when it was envisioned as the final goal for China’s four modernizations and economic development.
In the last two decades, this slogan has been gradually transformed, first as “the Comprehensive Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” (Zhonghua minzu de quanmian zhenxing) at the CCP Fifteenth National Congress in September 1997 (see the concluding section of its political report) and then as “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” (Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing) at the CCP Sixteenth National Congress in November 2002 (see the introduction section of its political report). During...