Asian Thought on China's Changing International Relations

Emilian Kavalski, N. Horesh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137299321
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299338
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At the end of the Cold War, commentators were pondering how far Western ideas would spread; today, the debate seems to be how far Chinese ideas will reach. This volume examines Chinese international relations thought and practices, identifying the extent to which China's rise has provoked fresh geo-strategic and intellectual shifts within Asia.

Part I

Chinese International Relations Reframed?

1

Chinese Exceptionalism and the Politics of History

William A. Callahan

It is common sense now to say that the world is in the midst of a grand shift of power from the West to the East. Due to its rapid economic growth, large territory and population, modernizing military, and glorious civilization, many commentators have concluded that China will not only be the next superpower, but is destined to dominate the twenty-first century. People in China and around the world thus are asking about Beijing’s plans for the future: How will it reshape international norms and institutions as China shifts from being a rule-taker to a rule-maker?

In the 2000s the trend among scholars was to see China’s values converging with Western ones as its economy and society became more integrated into the international system. In Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000, for example, Alastair Iain Johnston argues persuasively that Beijing has been socialized into international norms through its growing practice of multilateral diplomacy (Johnston, 2008). Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter go even further to argue that China is more of a status quo power than the United States – at least during the George W. Bush administration (Foot and Walter, 2011). According to this view, the future is located in the West (although maybe not the US), and involves the innovation and distribution of the international society’s new values and institutions.

While the trend in the 2000s was to look to future convergence between East and West, this chapter examines books that look to the past – China’s imperial history – not only for China’s future but also the world’s future. Rather than figure China’s modernization as a process of socialization, which they would criticize as ‘Westernization’, books as diverse as Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World (2009) and Liu Mingfu’s Zhongguo meng [The China Dream] (2010) argue that China has its own modernity, which is not only different from the West but is actually its opposite. According to this view, which is promoted by both academics and policy-makers, China is building its own path, following a model of Chinese exceptionalism that promotes global peace and harmony rather than what they see as Pax Americana’s incessant wars. While in the 1990s the debate about identity focused on ‘Chinese nationalism’, in the 2000s China’s identity politics have gone global, using traditional Chinese ideals to order the world. By the autumn of 2008, this new approach seemed to be validated by changes on the ground. The combination of the successful Beijing Olympics and the start of the global financial crisis in New York showed that China could be successful on its own terms.

But writing about the present, let alone predicting the future, is a risky business. Since these books were published things have changed again. By 2009, Beijing’s foreign policy had become much more assertive, with China aggressively pushing its own core interests and values onto the world stage in a less than charming manner. China’s futurologists, however, remain undaunted; they address this problem of constant and unpredictable change in a particular way: to understand the future, they look to long-term trends from the past. Even books that take a more sober view of China’s ‘peaceful rise’ – Charles Horner’s Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate (2009) and Anthony Reid and Yangwen Zheng’s edited volume, Negotiating Asymmetry (2010) – likewise look to history to argue their points.

So history is everywhere – but as we will see, these books take radically different approaches to historiography: some search for how China’s true history determines its past-present-future, while others see history as a toolbox of precedents, concepts, and advice for the challenges that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) faces today. In this way we move from singular understandings of China’s destiny to multiple understandings of China’s role in the world. The conclusion considers the growing influence of the discourse of ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ by comparing it with the celebrations of the rise of other Asian giants like Japan and the Pacific Rim in the late twentieth century.

The new orientalists: Martin Jacques and Liu Mingfu

For the past decade, many authors have been busy charting the rise of China to superpower status. As the title When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order attests, Martin Jacques has even grander ambitions. This epic, which was written for a wide readership, including opinion-makers and policy-makers, aims to expand our horizons to show how China’s rise will reshape the world economically, politically and culturally. China, Jacques tells us again and again, is not a ‘copy’ that ‘ape[s] the West’ (2009: 9). It is unique and thus needs to be understood on its own terms. After providing a revisionist history of the West’s imperial hegemony, he deconstructs the universal ideals of modernity to show how they are products of Europe’s particular cultural and historical experiences. Jacques then explores the multiple modernities that Eurocentrism has obscured, arguing that we need to appreciate how China’s modernity is not only unique, but better.

This is so, Jacques tells us, because China is the only ancient civilization that has an unbroken and intimate link with its past. (Indians, among others, would dispute this.) Due to the enormous weight of this continuous history, convergence with ‘Western’ values is impossible. Because of historical differences, political divergence is the only possible option. Thus, ‘difference’ is the key concept for understanding China; indeed, Jacques concludes his book by explaining China’s ‘Eight Differences’ (compared with the West). He is particularly fascinated by two ideas that directly challenge the conventional political vocabulary: Jacques figures domestic politics in terms of the civilization-state rather than the nation-state, and global politics in terms of China’s tributary system rather than the Westphalian international system. Together these ideas describe a hierarchical Sinocentric order both at home and abroad; other states will have to adapt to this new order, starting in Asia and eventually the rest of the world as well.

Although the book has many academic sources and references, Jacques’s understanding of history and tradition is quite thin. History is looted for episodes and ideas that support the ‘China’s rise/the fall of the West’ thesis in ways that are remarkably similar to official writings in the PRC. Howard French thus presciently concludes that Jacques is unable ‘to get beyond China’s own official cant. The book often reads like a compilation of ideas gleaned by the water cooler at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the state’s official think tank’ (French 2010). On the basis of spotty evidence, Jacques argues that due to its glorious civilization, China is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world.

Although Jacques raises the possibility of multiple modernities, he simultaneously limits the range of possibilities available to the PRC because he asserts a singular China. Throughout the book, he stresses ‘unity’ as a key Chinese value. This unity is not simply political, but also ontological and epistemological: there is one China, one Chinese identity, and one proper way to understand China. The book is full of determinist statements of ‘inevitables’ and ‘inconceivables’ that tell us what ‘China’ can – and more importantly cannot – do. Most notably: ‘it is inconceivable that Chinese politics will come to resemble those of the West’ (2009: 395). This appeal to a singular China that is the opposite of the liberal democratic West imposes a strict East/West geocultural framework that is reminiscent of Orientalist projects of the past, except in reverse.

Jacques discards one grand dichotomy, tradition/modernity, in order to assert another: East/West. He likewise questions neoliberalism’s economic determinism (capitalism leads to democracy) in order to assert the cultural determinism of China’s civilizational destiny. The result is an Eternal China in an essentialized world that is devoid of political choices. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: China is China is China, is China. Jacques therefore does more than argue against ‘convergence through socialization’; he is actually telling ‘the West’ that it needs to be socialized into the Chinese way: Westernization needs to be replaced by Easternization.

Why should we care? When China Rules the World is not noteworthy because of new sources or nuanced analysis; Jacques cherry-picks amenable facts from secondary sources for a simplistic and partisan reading of China’s past and future. The book is important, however, because many world leaders, policy-makers and opinion-makers are influenced by it. It was translated into Chinese with great fanfare in 2010, and is now popular among Chinese scholars, officials, and leaders because it confirms the view that China’s past is the world’s future. Although Jacques proudly displays his left-wing credentials (he edited the British Communist Party’s house journal Marxism Today), his arguments actually feed into hawkish notions of power politics on both sides of the Pacific that see China and the US as destined for conflict. Indeed, Jacques is widely quoted in the next book I will discuss, The China Dream, which is written by a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Liu Mingfu’s The China Dream: The Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age generated considerable interest both in China and internationally when it was published in 2010. In contrast to Beijing’s policies of peaceful rise in a harmonious world, Liu tells us that to guard its economic rise, China needs to have a ‘military rise’ to contest American power. He warns that being an economic superpower like Japan is insufficient; as a trading state, China risks being a ‘plump lamb’ that other military powers might gobble up (Liu 2010: 255). To be a strong nation, Liu argues, a wealthy country needs to convert its economic success into military power. Rather than follow Deng Xiaoping’s ‘peace and development’ policy to beat swords into ploughshares, he tells us that China needs to ‘turn some “money bags” into “ammunition belts”’ (2010: 244).

Yet The China Dream does not see military conflict with the US as inevitable: ‘China’s military rise is not to attack America, but to make sure that China is not attacked by America’ (2010: 263). Liu thus uses deterrence logic to stress that China must seek peace through strength: its peaceful rise to great power status must include a ‘military rise with Chinese characteristics that is defensive, peaceful, limited, necessary, important and urgent’ (2010: 263). If the US chooses to accommodate China’s rise rather than challenge it, then ‘China’s dream need not be America’s nightmare,’ he assures us (2010: 263). Rather, the goal of this strategy is ‘to grasp the strategic opportunity for strengthening the military’ in order to surpass America to become the world’s number one great power (2010: 25).

Why should we pay attention to The China Dream? Liu is a Senior Colonel in the PLA who teaches at China’s National Defense University, so his work could reflect the military’s views. But since Liu is a political officer who deals with ideology rather than a field officer who leads troops, many wonder if The China Dream is actually that significant. Although some commentators warn us not to exaggerate Liu’s ‘extreme’ views, I think that The China Dream is an important part of the conversations about China’s geostrategic future taking place in the barracks, on the web, and among public intellectuals. In response to the book, over 80% of the netizens polled by Huanqiu shibao (Global Times) agreed that China should pursue global military supremacy. While some military intellectuals see Liu’s China dream as a ‘fantasy’, others like the widely-quoted military strategist Colonel Dai Xu are even more pessimistic about inevitable conflict between China and the US (Global Times 2010). Indeed, compared with the conspiracy theories that characterize much of China’s strategic thought, The China Dream is quite ‘reasonable’. The point is that Liu’s book is discussed as part of the debate over the direction of China’s future, therefore we should value The China Dream in the same way as When China Rules the World: it is important because people are talking about it and being influenced by it.

It is not surprising that Jacques and Liu both agree that China will soon rule the world, but they describe China’s strengths in very different ways: Jacques looks to China’s enduring civilization as the bedrock of its economic, political and cultural power; Liu stresses that a great power is not truly great unless it is based on the hard power of its military. Indeed, Liu sees Confucianism as a problem for China rather than as China’s solution for the world. He promotes military over civilian virtues, but in an interesting way, stressing China’s cultural strengths only when they help explain the necessity for China’s military power. As a new major power, China’s strong military will benefit world peace and order, he argues, because China always pursues the ‘kingly way’ (wangdao); America’s military power, on the other hand, is always illegitimate because it pursues the ‘way of the hegemon’ (badao) (Liu 2010: 101–136).

Like Jacques, Liu employs history in his arguments for China’s twenty-first century role. While Jacques offers a broad-brush history of Eternal China, Liu trawls dynastic history for ‘heroic’ leaders. He picks three famous emperors for their ‘innovations in military culture’: Qin Shihuang (259–210 BCE), Han Wudi (156–187 BCE) and Tang Taizong (599–649). Together, these three heroic Chinese emperors teach us that ‘realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation requires the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’s martial spirit’ (2010: 245). While many see the Song dynasty (960–1279) as a high point of Chinese civilization, Liu sees it as the source of China’s weakness. Its focus on civilian culture led not only to the downfall of the Song; it also weakened China’s martial spirit. China’s centuries of defeat only ended when its martial spirit was revived by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which led it to victory in the Anti-Japanese War, China’s Civil War, the Korean War, and so on. Liu uses this specific reading of history to address contemporary issues and concludes that China needs a strong military not only to guard China’s unity and security, but also to preserve global peace and order.

Like Jacques, Liu repeatedly tells us that China’s rise cannot be a ‘copy’ of Western great powers’ experience; China’s success thus must be judged according to the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of ‘Oriental civilization’. Liu argues that we are entering the new ‘Yellow-Fortune Era’ that heralds the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation to its ‘rightful place’ at the center of global politics (2010: 75ff). Rather than a security dilemma, geopolitics here is an ‘identity dilemma’ of competing civilizational models; The China Dream here echoes popular arguments for a ‘China model’ of politics, economics, and culture (see Pan 2009), but this new orientalism is more than a standard cultural argument. Liu’s Yellow-Fortune Era highlights the georacial politics of what could be called ‘yellow supremacism’, stressing that the Chinese ‘race’ is the ‘most excellent race,’ the ‘superior race,’ that is ‘even better t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Are Asia’s Thinkers Accommodating China’s Rise?
• Part I  Chinese International Relations Reframed?
• Part II  Reflections on Chinese International Relations
• Conclusion: Recognizing Chinese International Relations Theory
• Index