China and the West

Hope and Fear in the Age of Asia

Fokke Obbema

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784533847
• eBook ISBN: 9780857739223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China sees its relations with the West as absolutely crucial to its future. This wider relationship, between the new world and the old, is changing the global political and economic landscape. But can Europe and China overcome their cultural and political differences to develop a relationship of trust? Here, experienced journalist Fokke Obbema travels through Europe and China and speaks with dozens of entrepreneurs, students, experts and politicians. He shows how mutual relations are affected by a feeling of superiority on both sides, and sheds light on the thousands of interactions between people in finance, politics, economics and education. Above all he shows how a fear of China has permeated the discourse, and that we should instead take a balanced view of the future of China relations, even be excited by the change which is coming. Apart from anything else, the west could be on the brink of another financial disaster - What if the Chinese Don't Come?

Part I

History and the Media

Past and Present Perspectives

Chapter 1

Pounding on the Table

A Chinese Professor in Brussels

‘Europe is full of pride and prejudice. You never give an inch in negotiations. If you really were our friends, you could become China’s most important partner within the next five years; our number one. We could form a united front against the United States. But only if you stop discriminating against us and acknowledge us as a market economy.’

A speech like machine-gun fire, practically shouted out. This is the first time I see it happening: a Chinese man shedding his traditional, modest role in a large Chinese–European gathering. The man on the rostrum is Xia Youfu, professor and director of a think tank for Chinese–European economic cooperation. Short and stocky, and bursting with ener­gy and passion, he has been invited to Brussels by Friends of Europe, a group of idealists who believe in the European Union and are confidently seeking to establish a dialogue with China. The setting, Le Cercle Gaulois, is a beautiful nineteenth-century ballroom on Rue de la Loi, at the heart of Belgium’s government district. It is late 2011 and some 500 Chinese and European delegates have flocked to this symposium on Chinese–European relations. One of the speakers is Xia.

He refuses to adopt the submissive attitude prescribed by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for dealing with foreigners, even for a moment. Speaking heatedly, albeit with a broad smile, Xia tries hard to open our eyes to the true enemy. ‘Who is behind your crisis? The United States of course! They are trying to pin the blame for the debt crisis on you. And who will come out on top? The United States. They are undermining the peaceful relations between Asia and Europe. European investments in China have hardly increased since the beginning of the crisis, and neither have our exports to Europe.’

As Xia pounds his notes covered in Chinese characters with his fist, the well-turned English phrases roll off his tongue. Louder and louder, until even Leon Brittan, who is seated on the podium beside him, opens his eyes. Having been made a peer, the distinguished septuagenarian was introduced as Baron Brittan of Spennithorne. His heyday as UK home secretary and European commissioner for competition behind him, he is now sitting out his career on the boards of various international companies. He delivered a short, sharp speech after which he shut his eyes in full view of the hundreds of listeners. Who knows, maybe this is fuelling Xia’s agitation. It is hard not to see the dozing Briton and the excitable Chinese speaker as symbols of Europe and China.

‘Your economic growth is low, yet your social systems are extremely expensive. This will have to change,’ Xia tells his European audience. The Eu­ropean Central Bank should ‘concentrate on creating full employment and not just on fighting inflation. This too will have to change.’ His assertive, high-pitched voice puts an end to the respectful silence in the ballroom. Suddenly the place is buzzing. Two young Chinese diplomats next to me do not know which way to look, embarrassed at their countryman’s impudence.

At the same time, I cannot help but appreciate the attack. For a while the meeting was threatening to get bogged down in good intentions, conflict avoidance and lethargy – the very things that often plague symposia like this. The organisers clearly tried to inject a note of tension into the day’s proceedings with the title: ‘Europe and China: Rivals or Strategic Partners?’ But from the word go the European and Chinese diplomats who funded the event have been trying to take the sting out of it. Of course we are not rivals, is the common consensus. The Chinese ambassador to the European Union and co-sponsor is praised to the sky and back before he takes the floor himself. Top diplomat Song Zhe conveys Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s very best wishes and expresses his delight at so much European interest in China. It is wonderful to see such excellent cooperation in so many fields. Yawn.

The Brussels-based official speaking on behalf of EU President Herman van Rompuy does not do a much better job. ‘Ri­vals or partners’? He claims he does not even understand the dilemma. In his sugar-coated way of thinking the first is not an option. He reiterates the EU mantra: China is important; China is an opportunity; China and Eu­rope are equal partners. I am beginning to wonder why all this amassed intellect from China and Europe is prepared to waste its time with this. Unfortunately the idealists from Friends of Europe who organised the symposium do the same. Their leading man claims we have advanced beyond mere courtesies and are seeing ‘real progress’ – a phrase that, on a day like this, seems as clichéd as the assertion that China is ‘an opportunity’. I fail to see the leap forwards.

But luckily there is Lord Brittan. Establishment through and through, but always good for some trenchant observations. It is all very well, this official ‘strategic partnership’ between Europe and China, ‘but it is no more than a hollow political sound bite unless the obstacles to a mutual relationship are removed’, he argues. The sums invested on both sides are still very small, ‘despite the fact that even the most backward company in Europe now knows what is going on in China. The days of feigning ignorance are over.’

Next he outlines what he sees as the problem areas: intellectual property in China, public contracts in China, subsidies to companies by China. Incidentally all areas where Europe is very sure of its own position, I cannot fail but notice. In passing he praises the European Com­mission for having so far resisted the temptation of protectionism. Hitting back by protecting your own market is ill-advised, Brittan believes. ‘Not because we’re such good boys, but because it would reduce our chances on the Chinese market. An open economy is best for everyone. We will have to convince our Chinese friends of that.’

Sounding amused and not quite as vitriolic as Xia, the Englishman expresses himself more eloquently than his Chinese neighbour. But is his message really substantially different from that of his opponent? Both avoid self-criticism and take aim at the other instead. As a European I am inclined to agree with Brittan; his criticism seems perfectly valid from a European perspective. My first impulse upon hearing Xia disparage our social systems is to tell him to mind his own business; this is all very easy to say for someone from a country without safety nets. Only later do I realise that this kind of ‘meddling in our internal affairs’ is something we ought to take seriously if we want to view the Chine­se as equal partners. Chinese government officials regard our talk of human rights violations as ‘meddling’ in their affairs. Is their indignation comparable to what I felt when Xia dismissed our social security system?

The elephant and the frog mother

I got an inkling of just how difficult that openness is when a large Chinese delegation visited the editorial office of my newspaper. Led by an under-secretary, this delegation travelled around Europe making courtesy visits to various media in 2010. But all was not as innocent as it seemed. The under-secretary took advantage of his visit to de Volkskrant to express his displeasure with news reports from our correspondent in Shanghai. He pulled an article from his pocket which said that the latest meeting of the National People’s Congress had produced nothing new. According to the under-secretary, however, some very important reforms had been introduced. He also cracked a joke about a frog mother warning her children about their neighbour, an elephant. It was an attempt to remind us of the balance of power, and while we tried to laugh it off afterwards, it also struck us as quite exceptional. ‘The Chinese would never have dared to do this in the old days’, a veteran foreign commentator said. ‘I can’t believe they expect this kind of behaviour to be effective’, the editor-in-chief remarked. Having an official from a one-party state trying to curb our freedom of expression – every journalistic bone in our bodies railed against the idea. As it was, the Chinese under-secretary’s intervention was counterproductive, arousing resistance and briefly fanning the flames of anti-Chi­nese sentiment among us. Eventually the incident was swept away by fresh waves of news.

Yet it is important that we face up to our own ‘pride and prejudice’. Not just European journalists, but all Europeans. Europe is brimming with pride – Xia has a point – as evidenced by our perception of Europe’s leading role in world history, the political system that despite its many flaws we consider the ‘least of all evils’, the cultural legacy we imagine to be the envy of the world and Western technological supremacy. I for one cannot deny feeling superior at times.

Xia’s Chinese arrogance holds up a mirror to me. And his views have an unexpected champion in the British academic and journalist Martin Jacques, also present in Brussels. His book When China Ru­les the World made it onto US President Obama’s bedside table in 2009. ‘European pride and prejudice? Yes, that rings a bell’, he says with an ironic smile. He predicts no less than ‘the end of the Western world’ now that China is casting off 150 years of lethargy to claim its rightful place in the world. He once again underlines the West’s fundamentally flawed view of China. We measure success by how much a society is Westernised. ‘The West likes to think of itself as cosmopolitan, but is actually extremely provincial. It is incapable of respecting differences.’

According to Jacques, Europeans look down on China because it is not a democracy, violates human rights and is increasingly polluting the environment. ‘This is what China is reduced to. It betrays a great deal of ignorance, effectively hiding one of the greatest revolutions ever: in the past thirty years China has done more to eliminate global poverty than any other country. We have to treat this with respect.’

Kerry Brown, a British professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney, is another seasoned China expert. He too is sympathetic to Xia’s strident outburst. In the West we always want the Chinese to speak out more clearly and not be so vague, he reminds us. As an example he cites former President Hu Jintao, whose biography he wrote. ‘A man of many qualities, but communication was not one of them’, Brown remarks drily. But neither are we happy when someone like Xia defies our expectations. ‘Then we turn round and say: whoa, tone it down a bit!’

Chapter 2

Superiority and Humiliation

How China Sees Us

Did the irate professor in Brussels give us a glimpse of how China really thinks about us, or can we bank on the more common image of the friendly and smiling Chinese? My efforts to get to the bottom of the Chinese attitude towards the West have brought me to an inconspicuous white terraced house in the London borough of Chelsea on a sunny morning in autumn. It is the home of George Walden, in his early seventies and with well over forty years of fascination with China under his belt. A former diplomat in the country at the time of the Cultural Revolution, he later became a Conservative politician and is now a writer and essayist.

He is the author of the personal and compelling account China: A Wolf in the World?. The book proved to be a rich source of erudition, not least because of Walden’s fluency in Chinese, Russian and French. He never presumes to know it all, but espouses, rather modestly, that ‘each of us has his or her own personal China’. His answer to the question of how the Chinese see us has been shaped by four decades of persona­l experience, as well as by his interest in the country’s history.

Walden gives me a shy smile when we introduce ourselves and then ushers me into the kitchen, where he makes coffee. The intimacy of the setting gives me the courage to crack a joke about a large, arty portrait of the young Mao on his wall. In Walden’s book he is depicted as an even worse mass murderer than Hitler. Surely the latter won’t be given a place on the wall too, I ask with mock concern. Walden, a man with blue eyes, a strong jawline and a mouth that soon talks nineteen to the dozen, bursts out laughing: ‘I guess I’m guilty of double standards.’

In the living room filled with ancient and modern Asian art we embark on a conversation that races through the centuries and locations but always comes back to the Cultural Revolution. Mao proclaimed it in 1966 to rid himself of ‘rightist elements’ in his Communist Party. The ‘proletarian’ campaign resulted in years of chaos. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people perished, either murdered or starved to death. Much of what represented the old, such as temples, monasteries and churches, was destroyed. Families were torn apart and separated by forced labour in the countryside. Ever since, the phrase ‘never again’ has been as pertinent to right-minded Chinese citizens over the age of fifty as to Europeans who lived through World War II.

According to Mao, the ‘rightist elements’ received support from foreign spies. As a young diplomat in his mid-twenties Walden had first-hand experience of the repercussions of this. He was stationed first in Hong Kong, still British at the time, and then in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. ‘A terse hostility was the best I could hope for in the street, in shops and in restaurants.’ Whenever the tall Walden joined the Chinese readers of a wall newspaper, there was a good chance he would be mistaken for a ‘spy’ or an ‘imperialist’. ‘I remember people shaking fists at my face. Their aim wasn’t so much to lynch me as to humiliate me. This in turn provoked a strong urge to deprive them of that pleasure. I liked to respond with a quote from Mao, who had said that foreign guests of the Chinese government ought to be treated with respect.’ He quips: ‘Face is no Chinese monopoly.’ The Chinese may have wanted to avoid loss of face at all costs, but Walden did not fancy it much either.

His stories about xenophobia seem strange these days. How can the people who now tend to extend a warm welcome to foreign visitors have been capable of doing the exact opposite? It is the same question, I note, we ask with regard to the Germans, even seventy years on. The analogy makes sense to Walden: ‘Contemporary China is as much a product of the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution as modern Europe is of Hitler’s defeat.’ He believes that putting the past behind you, a Chinese variation on the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, i.e. the process of coming to terms with one’s past, is indispensable for progress and reform.

Despite many subsequent visits, his memories of the Cultural Revolution continue to haunt him. He describes his anxiety when, thirty years later, four youngsters approached him on the street in China. A flashback took him back to the dangers of yesteryear. But the youths bore him no ill will. On the contrary: they thought he was interesting and were keen to practise their English on him. ‘I was struck by the friendly expressions on their faces’, he writes. The meeting reassured him.

But one such positive encounter will not tempt Walden, with all of his life experience, to draw overly optimistic conclusions. While foreigners may be better tolerated now, they are seldom made to feel truly welcome. Not weighed down by memories of the Cultural Revolution, I do not recognise this feeling. My experiences in China are more positive, I point out. He goes one step further: ‘I experience a degree of arrogance, mixed with resentment. Covered with only a thin veil of civility.’ It is a characterisation that meets with widespread support when I put it to other China experts later.

‘Red-haired barbarians’

This ‘resentment’ is tied up with an earlier period which has left its mark on Chinese–European relations: the nineteenth century. It remains extremely vivid in China’s collective conscience as ‘the century of humiliation, perpetrated by Westerners’. The government is doing everything it can to keep it that way, Walden tells me. After 1989, when the protests on Tiananmen Square were crushed, patriotism reappeared on the school curriculum. The bloodbath prompted leaders to conclude that education had taken a wrong turn somewhere. So ever since, China’s young people are taught love of their country and its history. It has the wondrously paradoxical effect that the age of the empire no longer stands for the suppression of the people, as Mao used to claim. These days it is depicted as a glorious era, which Western ‘barbarians’ ended by occupying China and exploiting it for their own gain.

The humiliation by the West was a particularly big blow because China had been convinced of its global superiority for centuries. As Walden puts it: ‘Their attitude was: why associate with the rest of mankind?’ This sense of superiority was underpinned by immense wealth, advanced technology and an impressive culture replete with inventions, ‘long before the West got around to it’.

Emblematic of this penchant for isolation was China’s abandonment, at the start of the fifteenth century, of the maritime voyages of discovery that had brought the renowned Admiral Zheng He to the east coast of Africa and the Arab world. Some 150 years before the Spanish Armada, He was in charge of a much bigger and far more advanced fleet than the Spaniards. But the Emperor did not use his lead for aggressive conquests. The Chine­se authorities like to cite this peace-loving stance to allay fears over aggression today.

Since recognition of his supremacy was an important element of these voyages, alongside commerce, Zheng He gave lavish gifts to the rulers of the countries he visited. Next he invited them to the imperial court to come and ‘kowtow’. The ritual demands that a person prostrate himself nine times before the Emperor, forehead pressed to the floor. This was a reflection of the balance of power, at least in Chinese eyes. China was the Central Kingdom and the Emperor the Heavenly Son. The Chinese saw their country as the last word in civilisation and the British as ‘red-haired barbarians’.

This Chinese arrogance met its European match. The British envoy Lord George Macartney categorically refused to kowtow before the Emperor: he was prepared to genuflect, as he would for the British sovereign, but no more. He was allowed to do so, although Chinese chroniclers report that Macart­ney did indeed prostrate himself. At the decisive moment, they write, he had been particularly impressed by the Emperor. Either way, Macartney failed to establish the intended diplomatic relations. What if every nation demanded to have an embassy in Beijing? It would be utterly impractical, was the Emperor’s reasoning. It marked the start of a supremely grim century in Chinese–European relations.

It was the opium trade from the early nineteenth century onwards that particularly fanned the flames of Chinese indignation about Western behaviour. As Walden describes the relations: ‘In accordance with their sense of superiority, the Chinese had shown no interest whatsoever in ordinary British merchandise, whereas we were crazy about Chinese products such as silk, tea and porcelain.’ To offset the resulting trade deficit, his compatriots came up with something that incenses the Chinese to this day. The British stimulated opium cultivation in India. The sale was banned in China for health reasons, but this interdiction did not stop them from bringing the substance into the country via Chinese smugglers. As prices were moderate to begin with, a section of the population soon became addicted. A price hike followed.

In the Chinese version of events the role of domestic opium traders is generally overlooked. The same is true for the reason the underclass got hooked in the first place – opium offered them an escape from a life of misery. In contrast, there is plenty of attention given to a national hero, Lin Zexu, a special envoy to the Emperor. In 1839 he was dispatched to Guangzhou, where most of the opium...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: History and the Media: Past and Present Perspectives
• Part II: Globalisation: Collisions and Interconnections
• Part III: Politics and Values
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography