When China Rules the World

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When China Rules the World Page 29

by Martin Jacques


  My companion on the journey to interview the founder of the magnificent Shanghai Museum was a sociology student, Gao, who was in her final year at Fudan University before leaving to pursue a doctorate at one of the top American universities. She had been asked by her professor to assist me during my month’s stay at Fudan and she had proved wonderfully supportive. She was one of the most intelligent and committed undergraduates I had ever met and was extraordinarily well read. More than that, she was very pleasant and agreeable company, full of suggestions, always prepared to meet my requests, as well as having plenty of ideas of her own. She helped to make my stay in Shanghai a real pleasure. On this occasion she was coming with me to help with any translating that might be required during the interview.

  In the taxi we talked about the interview, the Museum, which I had visited on a couple of previous occasions, and the interviews planned before my return home to Hong Kong in just over a week’s time. Then our conversation drifted on to other subjects. Gao was naturally excited about the prospect of studying in the United States and suddenly said: ‘Did you know that some Chinese students that go to America marry Americans?’ I told her about the television programme I had made the previous year about the overseas Chinese, including an interview with such a mixed-race couple living in San Francisco. ‘Actually, three weeks ago I saw a mixed couple at the supermarket checkout at the end of our road,’ I said. ‘A Chinese woman and an American guy.’ Then I added after a pause: ‘He was black.’ Why did I say that to her? I guess there were several reasons. In Hong Kong such a couple was a rare sight — indeed it was the only time I had ever seen one, and it had stuck in my mind. And my wife was Indian-Malaysian, possessed of the most beautiful dark brown skin, but I was painfully aware that not everyone perceived her colour in the way that I did, especially the Hong Kong Chinese.

  I was totally unprepared for Gao’s reaction. Her face became contorted and she reacted as if she had just heard something offensive and abhorrent. She clearly found the very thought repellent, as if it was unnatural and alien, akin to having a relationship with another species. Her reaction was a demonstration of prolonged physical repulsion the like of which I had never previously witnessed. For her the idea was simply inconceivable. Gao was a highly educated and intelligent woman; and an extremely nice one. I was shocked. I asked her what the matter was as she writhed in disgust, but there was no answer and no possibility to reason with her. That was more or less the beginning and end of our conversation on the subject. The memory of that journey has remained with me ever since. There was, alas, no reason to think that Gao’s reaction was unusual or exceptional. This was not simply the reaction of an individual but the attitude of a culture. And she was surely destined to become a member of China ’s elite.

  What will China be like as a great power? The traditional way of answering this question is in terms of geopolitics, foreign policy and interstate relations. In other words, it is seen as a specialist area of foreign ministries, diplomacy, bilateral talks, multinational negotiations and the military. A concentration on the formal structures of international relations, however, fails to address the cultural factors that shape the way a people think, behave and perceive others. The geopolitical approach informs how a state elite reasons and acts, while a cultural analysis, rooted in history and popular consciousness, seeks to explain the values, attitudes, prejudices and assumptions of a people. In the short run, the former may explain the conduct of relations between countries, but in the longer run people’s values and prejudices are far more significant and consequential. [704] Ultimately, nations see the world in terms of their own history, values and mindset and seek to shape that world in the light of those experiences and perceptions.

  Take the example of the United States. Fundamental to any understanding of American behaviour over the last three centuries is that this was a country established by European settlers [705] who, by war and disease, largely eliminated the indigenous population of Amerindians; who, having destroyed what had existed before, were able to start afresh on the basis of the European traditions that they had brought with them; who engaged in an aggressive westward expansion until they came to occupy the whole of the continent; and who were to grow rich in large measure through the efforts of their African slaves. [706] Without these building blocks, it is impossible to make any sense of subsequent American history. They help us to understand the basic contours of American behaviour, including the idea of the United States as a universal model and the belief in its manifest destiny. It is clear that race and ethnicity are fundamental to this picture. Consciously or unconsciously, they lie at the heart of the way in which people define themselves and their relationship to others. [707]

  This more cultural approach is, if anything, even more important in China’s case because it has only very recently come to see itself as a nation-state and engage in the protocol of a nation-state: most Chinese attitudes, perceptions and behaviour, as we saw in the last chapter, are still best understood in terms of its civilizational inheritance rather than its status as a nation-state. If we want to comprehend how China is likely to behave towards the rest of the world, then first we need to make sense of what has made China what it is today, how it has evolved, where the Chinese come from, and how they see themselves. We cannot appreciate their attitude towards the rest of the world without first understanding their view of themselves. Once again, history, culture, race and ethnicity are central to the story.

  FROM DIVERSITY TO HOMOGENEITY

  China, or at least the land mass we now call China, was once, like any other huge territory, occupied by a great multitude of races. [708] Today, however, China sees and projects itself as an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation, with over 91 per cent of the population defined as Han Chinese. True, the constitution defines China as a unitary, multi-ethnic state, but the other races compose less than 9 per cent of the population, a remarkably small percentage given its vast size. A tourist who visits the three great cities of Guangzhou in the south, Shanghai in the east and Beijing in the north-east, however, ought to have no difficulty in noticing that there are very marked physical differences between their inhabitants, even though they all describe themselves as Han Chinese. While Beijingers are every bit as tall as Caucasians, those from Guangzhou tend to be rather shorter. Given that modern China is the product of a multiplicity of races, this is not surprising. The difference between China and other populous nations has not been the lack of diversity, but rather the extraordinary longevity and continuity of Chinese civilization, such that the identity of most races has, over thousands of years, been lost through a combination of conquest, absorption, assimilation, intermarriage, marginalization and extermination.

  Like all racial categories, the Han Chinese — a product of the gradual fusion of many different races — is an imagined group. The term ‘Han Chinese’, indeed, only came into existence in the late nineteenth century. But such has been the power of the idea, and its roots in the long history of Chinese civilization, that it has spawned what can only be described as its own historical myth, involving the projection of the present into the distant past. That myth holds that the Chinese are and always have been of one race, that they share a common origin, and that those who occupy what is China today have always enjoyed a natural affinity with each other as one big family. [709] This has become an integral part of Chinese folklore and is shared by the Confucian, Republican and Communist traditions alike. [710] A recent official Chinese publication on patriotic education declared: ‘Patri otism is a fine tradition of our Chinese nation. For thousands of years, as an enormous spiritual force, it continuously stimulated the progress of our history.’ [711] There is a commonly held view amongst the Chinese that Chinese civilization commenced with the Yellow Emperor (Huang Di), who, as legend has it, was born in 2704 BC and ruled a kingdom near the Yellow River on the central plain that is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Many Chinese, both on the mainland and overseas, believe that they are g
enealogically descended from the Yellow Emperor. [712] Although Mao rejected the idea, it has staged something of a revival since the mid eighties. In a speech in 1984, Deng Xiaoping suggested that the desire for the reunification of the mainland and Taiwan was innately ‘rooted in the hearts of all descendants of the Yellow Emperor’. [713] A well-known intellectual, Su Xiaokang, has written: ‘This Yellow River, it so happens, bred a nation identified by its yellow skin pigment. Moreover, this nation also refers to its earliest ancestor as the Yellow Emperor. Today, on the face of the earth, of every five human beings, there is one that is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor.’ [714] This statement implies that the Chinese have different origins from everyone else. Like the Japanese, the Chinese have long held, albeit with significant dissenting voices, a polygenist view of the origins of Homo sapiens, believing that — in contrast to the generally held view that we all stem from a single ancestry in Africa — humanity has, in fact, multiple origins. [715] Peking Man, discovered in Zhoukoudian near Beijing in 1929-30, [716] has been widely interpreted in China as the ‘ancestor’ of the Mongoloid race. [717] In 2008 a further important discovery was made of skull fossils of a hominid — Xuchang Man — at the Xuchang site in Henan province, [718] which was believed to date back 80-100,000 years. An article in the China Daily claimed that ‘the discovery at Xuchang supports the theory that modern Chinese man originated in what is present-day Chinese territory rather than Africa.’ It continued, ‘Extraordinary archaeological discoveries are critical to maintaining our national identity as well as the history of our ancient civilization.’ [719] While internationally archaeological findings are regarded as part of a worldwide effort to understand the evolution of the human race, in China, where they are given unusual prominence, they are instead seen as an integral part of national history and are used ‘to promote a unifying concept of unique origin and continuity within the Chinese nation’. [720]

  Chinese historians generally describe the process of Chinese territorial expansion as one of ‘unification’ rather than ‘conquest’, with expansion being seen as a progressive evolution towards a preordained and inevitable unity. Territory, once taken, has been regarded as immutably Chinese. [721] There is a powerful underlying assumption that the numerous races and nationalities have always demonstrated undivided loyalty to the imperial regimes. [722] The truth, in fact, is rather different. Far from China’s expansion to its present borders being a harmonious and natural process, the realization of a nation always waiting to be born, it was in fact, as one would expect, a complicated process of war, rivalry, ethnic conflict, hegemony, assimilation, conquest and settlement. [723] The embryo of contemporary China was born out of the military victory of the Qin kingdom (221–206 BC), following the Warring State period during which over 100 states fought for supremacy in north and central China. The Qin dynasty — which, prior to its triumph, roughly coincided with the present north-west province of Shaanxi — eventually emerged victorious over six other kingdoms and succeeded in expanding its territory sixfold. [724] During the 2,000 years that followed the Qin victory, China expanded southwards to the South China Sea, northwards to incorporate much of the steppe lands, and westwards into Central Asia. Far from this enormous geographical expansion being characterized by a natural process of fusion, peace and harmony, it predictably entailed much conflict and many wars. [725]

  The growth of China is the story of the outward expansion of the northern Chinese. The best-known area of conflict concerns the region to the north of Beijing, bordering on what we now know roughly as Mongolia and Manchuria. For thousands of years this region was contested between the northern horse-bound nomads of the steppes and the agrarian-based Chinese. The picture painted by official Chinese histories is of aggressive, rampaging nomads and peace-loving Chinese peasants. [726] While it is true that the Chinese were constantly preoccupied with the security of their northern borders — until the Qing dynasty, the steppe nomads showed themselves to be highly effective fighters — the Chinese frequently sought to conquer and hold the steppe lands to their north. Rather than seeing the Great Wall as a line of fortified defence against the nomads, in fact, it is more appropriate to regard it as the outer perimeter of an expanding Chinese empire. [727] The names of the fortifications reveal the nature of the Chinese intent: ‘Tower for Suppressing the North’ and ‘Fort Where the Barbarians are Killed’. The Chinese saw the nomads as much their inferior, referring to them as barbarians. It was the long-running conflict between the Chinese and the steppe nomads that shaped the Chinese sense of cultural superiority, gave rise to the distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarians’, and largely conditioned Chinese thinking about ‘self’ and ‘the other’. [728] The cleavage is not surprising: settled agricultural communities everywhere looked down on nomads as backward and primitive. Nevertheless, the Chinese and the steppe nomads, although more or less constantly at war, also experienced something of a symbiotic relationship. On many occasions, the ‘barbarians’ successfully conquered China and became its rulers, most famously in the case of the Mongols and later the Manchus of the Qing dynasty. Indeed, as testimony to the extent of mutual incursion and interaction over the millennia, the ruling Chinese caste was essentially a racial mix of the northern Chinese and the nomadic steppe tribes. [729] The ascendancy of the Chinese, however, is illustrated by the manner in which both the Mongols and the Manchus — and all other conquerors of China from the steppes — invariably, sooner or later, went ‘Chinese’ once in power. The historian Wang Gungwu has suggested that ‘in the last thousand years, the Chinese can only claim to have ruled their own country for 280 of those years’, yet in every case the ‘foreign’ rulers adopted Confucian culture and the Confucian system of governance. [730] There is no more powerful demonstration of the advanced nature of Confucian civilization and the hegemonic influence that it exercised over the peoples around its borders.

  The conquest of the lands to the south is less well known. It took place over a period of nearly three millennia and involved the movement of whole populations, the intermixing of races, and the disappearance or transformation of cultures. Some races vanished altogether, while substantial kingdoms were either destroyed or subject to a process of absorption and assimilation. The rich foliage of these subtropical lands lent themselves to guerrilla warfare and the Han rulers, during the Qin and Han dynasties in particular, were kept in a more or less permanent state of insecurity. [731] By far the largest single expansion — and certainly the most rapid — took place in the early phase of the Manchu-controlled Qing dynasty, from 1644 until the late eighteenth century, when the territory under Chinese rule more than doubled. This involved the conquest of lands to the north, notably those occupied by the Mongols, and to the north-west, the homelands of the diverse Muslim populations of Turkestan. [732] Many of the peoples conquered, particularly in Central Asia and Tibet, had little or nothing in common with the Han Chinese. These lands became colonial territories of the Qing empire, huge in extent, sparsely populated and rich in some natural resources. China ’s expansion usually involved a combination of military force and cultural example. This was certainly true of the southern and central parts of China as well as the steppe lands. But the Qing conquest of the north-west and west was different, being achieved by the use of particular force and brutality. [733] Most of the Zunghars, for example, who occupied much of what we now know as Xinjiang, were exterminated. [734]

  The expansion of the Chinese empire over such a long historical period involved what might be described as a steadily moving frontier or, to be more precise, many moving frontiers. One of the characteristics of Chinese expansion was the resettlement of enormous numbers of people across China, with population movement, always highly regulated, being an important instrument of government policy. The Qin, for example, deployed it on a massive scale to occupy and pacify their greatly expanded territory. One of the most remarkable examples was the huge resettlement of Sichuan province in the south-west, whose population
had fallen to around half a million by 1681, but which reached 207 million in 1812 as a result of the movement of migrant-settlers, organized and orchestrated by the Qing dynasty. [735] This process is still evident today, with the steady influx of Han migrants into Inner Mongolia, where they now constitute a very large majority, and into Tibet and Xinjiang, where they represent substantial minorities, possibly even a majority in the case of the latter. Resettlement has been a key tool in the process of Chinese expansion and Hanification.

  It is important, in this context, to distinguish between a land-based expansion like China ’s and a maritime-based expansion such as those of the European empires of Britain and France. The European colonies never acquired any degree of permanence because, except in those cases where there was overwhelming white settlement, as for example in Australia and North America, it was impossible to assimilate races and cultures which, by virtue of place and distance, were entirely alien. This was quite different from China, which, because of its land-based expansion, always enjoyed the advantage of proximity, thereby enabling, if need be, the process of absorption and incorporation to take thousands of years. [736] As a consequence, in terms of the consciousness of its multitudinous component groups, the Chinese empire is no longer an empire, except at its northern and especially north-western and western edges, with the population of these areas representing only 6 per cent of China ’s total. [737] China thus only confronts difference, for the most part, at its perimeter. On the other hand, in terms of land these regions are extremely important, accounting for around 64 per cent of China ’s land mass. Territorially speaking, China remains an empire.

 

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