by Chris Patten
All Wen’s ‘uns’ seem today to have grown and at their heart is the existential problem created by Leninism. For the economy to grow in a sustainable way, the party has to surrender much of its control over the economy: for example, the state-owned enterprises which consume the lion’s share of state investment but produce less than the output of the private sector. If the party does this, hardliners argue, it will sooner or later lose control of the state. If on the other hand it does not do this, it will certainly lose control of the state as the economy slows down with more and more credit being pumped into producing less and less growth. This is what cannot go on for ever. China’s dilemma is how it can square this circle.
President Xi’s response is to take more power to himself. He has become stronger than any leader since Deng and probably since Mao. His henchman Wang Qishan (a clever man now in charge of a wide-ranging attack on corruption, dragging in at the same time the President’s potential adversaries) draws some parallels from the history of the French Revolution. He distributed copies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the Revolution to members of the Politburo and to cadres at the Central Party School, noting with Tocqueville that economic growth could increase insurrectionary pressures and that authoritarian regimes were at their most vulnerable when they began the process of reform. So Xi has cracked down on every sort of dissent. Propaganda has been stepped up. Western countries are blamed for stirring up trouble in China and other countries. Hong Kong is regarded with greater suspicion. The influence of the West is denounced, both today and historically, as though no one apparently recalls where Karl Marx was born and where he worked. Lawyers and human rights defenders are imprisoned; freedom of expression and civil society organizations are stamped on; more and more repressive legislation is passed; abductions are carried out and regional aspirations suppressed. The behaviour of the leadership does not suggest great confidence in the stability and strength of the system. Any real reform has been replaced by state thuggery, to return to Sir Percy’s language.
This is where Leninism always leads eventually, with the rich getting their money and children out of the country and trying to find bolt holes for themselves. ‘We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means.’ The one thing that it does not seem to incorporate is much in the way of real communism: while the numbers removed from absolute poverty rose after Deng’s reforms, the share of China’s growth that has gone subsequently to the workers has slumped. The party cannot show that the achievement of communist goals (a fair, more equal society) legitimizes its hold on power, so it has to fall back on Chinese nationalism to try to justify control of everything. Morally bankrupt and no longer communist, the party must at least show that it is Chinese.
This probably accounts for China’s aggressive behaviour in the South and East China seas and its rejection of UN arbitration in settling these disputes. The old Chinese proverb that two tigers cannot exist on the same mountain has worrying implications for Japan and India as well as the United States (and its allies like Australia). Managing these relationships, as well as China’s dealings with its smaller neighbours, is likely to produce some of the most sensitive issues in international politics over the next decade.
Hong Kong is likely to be one arena in which China’s trustworthiness and preparedness to act as a responsible world citizen are severely tested. Do Chinese Communists really keep their word even when their word is included in international treaties? If over time they slough off their legal and moral obligations in Hong Kong, where else should they be trusted to hold to them? It used to be said by some of the ‘old friends of China’ – diplomats and businessmen, mostly, who could always be relied upon to put the best spin on whatever Chinese Communists did – that however tough it was to negotiate with them, once an agreement was reached they stuck to it as though it was fly paper. I was never entirely sure why the old friends should encourage us to ignore our own experiences in this way. Perhaps, whatever has happened to date – only a few major breaches of the Joint Declaration, the steady erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and rule of law – President Xi will go out of his way to make it plain that, in Deng Xiaoping’s words in 1984, he is ‘convinced that the people of Hong Kong are capable of running the affairs of Hong Kong well’. That would certainly help to put unsettled minds and hearts in this city at rest. It is difficult to convince Asia and the world that you have a model of governance for others when you cannot even run this part of your own country where you have made a pledge to its seven million or more citizens which it is essential for you to keep. ‘One country, two systems’ still means what it has always meant; never more so. We should all enormously admire the young men and women in Hong Kong with their yellow umbrellas and their bravely asserted principles who have made that so pellucidly clear.
So there should be no doubt that though China is big enough – and potentially awkward enough – to shake the world, it currently provides no model for running the world. The Communist Party has enough of a problem running China without taking on a more ambitious burden. Its foreign policy is focused on historical issues of territorial integrity (like Taiwan), its own continuing dominance in domestic politics, and securing the economic resources it needs. It has no model of good, sustainable governance to offer the rest of us. Its principal friends tend to be basket cases from Venezuela to Zimbabwe to North Korea. Compared to its economic strength, it has little soft power. In that respect it punches well below its economic weight and leaves a very light footprint. Chinese Leninism is not an identity that attracts followers. I hope that Chinese behaviour changes, and that China does not itself trigger the snapping shut of what is called the Thucydides trap.
The American political scientist Graham Allison has written about the rise of new powers throughout history, drawing first on an early example that Thucydides wrote about in his study of the Peloponnesian wars, namely the fight between Athens and Sparta. Sparta turned to force when it thought that its supremacy in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean was being challenged by the Athenian building of its own navy. President Xi has himself referred to this, clearly pointing a finger at the United States. He argues that it should accommodate the rise of China peacefully, rather than challenge it as Sparta challenged Athens, and as France and Britain just over a hundred years ago confronted the rise of Germany as it built its own naval force to take on the older imperial powers. Before making this speech President Xi might have asked himself who looks like the provocateur today. Which country is building up its naval strength? Which is spying on other great countries and assaulting them in cyber space? Which rejects rulings by UN arbitration?
President Xi’s reading list should perhaps not only include Thucydides and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as well as The Ancien Régime, but also China’s most famous philosophical work, The Analects of Confucius. Tsu-kung asked about the necessities of government. The Master said, ‘Enough food, enough weapons, and the confidence of the people.’ Tsu-kung said, ‘Suppose you had no alternative but to give up one of these three, which would you relinquish first?’ The Master said, ‘Weapons.’ Tsu-kung said, ‘Suppose you definitely had no alternative but to give up one of the remaining two, which would you relinquish first?’ The Master said, ‘Food. From of old, death has come to all men, but a people without confidence in its rulers will not stand.’ More important than presidents, premiers, monarchs or even party secretaries are citizens.
Whether President Trump and his appointees will encourage a peaceful escape from the Thucydides trap and an atmosphere in which China confronts its internal dilemmas successfully is an issue which will determine peace and well-being for all of us in the future. They will also need to enlist China’s assistance in dealing with the menace from the rogue state of North Korea. As in classical mechanics, rampant American nationalism in East Asia is likely to produce an equal and opposite reaction.
Trump, Xi and growing nationalism in China and America seem a long way from sailing aw
ay with my family from Hong Kong in 1997 on the Royal Yacht, surrounded by flying fish, dolphins and the navy of an old Empire in which we had just turned off the lights. Yet twenty years since we left it, Hong Kong still represents the same enduring values, as relevant to Asia as to the rest of the world. It is likely to be a city and community where some of the ideas that shape the century ahead are fought over and resolved.
9
The Loneliness of the Long Distance European
‘You should think about nobody and go your own way.’
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
‘Of course, if we had succeeded in losing two world wars, wrote off all our debts – instead of having nearly £30 billion in debt – got rid of all our foreign obligations, and kept no force overseas, then we might be as rich as the Germans.’
Harold Macmillan
During what was called ‘the new Elizabethan age’ – the middle of the 1950s – we used as a family to go regularly to our suburban cinemas in Ealing with their art deco and Alhambra facades. ‘Don’t be disappointed if we can’t get in,’ Dad would say every Friday evening as the family piled into the car. There were cheerful films like Doctor in the House and Genevieve but also movies to remind us of our wartime heroics. (Now they are invariably shown on the television, early in the day, on bank holidays.) There were The Cruel Sea, The Dam Busters and Cockleshell Heroes. But the content darkened as we moved past former wartime heroes as in The Bridge on the River Kwai into gritty kitchen sink dramas in the 1960s like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. We were indeed on our own, running uphill, through woods and across streams, trying to retain the illusion that we were still a global leader, our winner’s status guaranteed by our lonely wartime bravery when we stood and ran alone, except for our friends from what we still called the British Empire.
Outside the cinema, our imperial dreams died at Suez in 1956. Our trade with the Commonwealth (as we struggled to recover from near bankruptcy) was less then than with Europe, even though the latter was still recovering from a devastating war. America did not see its role as sustaining us in our post-Churchillian dotage. Brave as we had been in the 1940s, no one owed us a pension. Though we were one of the wartime victors, we had to face the unpleasant truth that the European Economic Community, as it was then known, was more likely to protect us from decline than the small group of Scandinavian and Alpine countries that we spatchcocked together as a possible alternative to joining the more integrationist club formed after the Messina conference in 1955. So, with the threat of becoming irretrievably the sick man of Europe, we swallowed our pride and applied, eventually successfully, to join the European Economic Community. We decided to run with the pack rather than try to make our way solo; we had tried ‘lonely’ and it did not work too well.
The challenge to our national psyche was profound. Whilst Winston Churchill wrote with greater European commitment after the war, two sentences he had written in the 1930s seemed to describe our position even after we were members of the European club. ‘We are with Europe,’ he wrote in the 1930s, ‘but not of it. We are linked but not combined.’ Maybe that has always been the problem. Did we ever really join? It was not just that, for us unlike most of our fellow members, the economic case for belonging usually trumped the political, though we definitely recognized the importance of a Western Europe which combined its strengths to secure peace and greater influence in the world. More important still was the difference between the foundation myths and ground zero moments for the principal members of the European adventure. We thought back to The Dam Busters and Cockleshell Heroes, to standing alone, and committing ourselves to the amazement and admiration of the rest of the world to fight for Europe’s freedom on Britain’s beaches. We thought of the bravery of ‘the few’ in 1940, and still heard the Churchillian cadences which had sustained the nation in its ‘finest hour’. For the French, their sense of identity and the importance of turning the European continent away from aggressive xenophobic competition (from which they had suffered so much) were tied to memories of defeat and humiliation in 1940 and of General de Gaulle struggling through indignities to secure a place at the top table with the Americans, British and Russians. For Germany, ground zero was the physical rubble of 1945 and the moral rubble of the death camps where the Nazis’ previously unimaginable genocide was carried out. Against this background the wonder is not that the European Union was in many respects such a rickety construction, but that it was assembled at all. Its early successes perhaps persuaded some of its members subsequently to try for too much. To invoke another film of the 1960s, there was A Kind of Loving in Europe, but the devotion was often awkward and sometimes feigned.
Despite the fact that I held views such as these, which would have been regarded as heterodox by many of my future European colleagues, part of the British media still regarded my decision to move to Brussels as a European Commissioner in 1999 as an act of perfidy. The Telegraph opined that, in accepting this post, I had ‘turned my back on the British way of life’. The article might have been a little more accurately focused, certainly in more recent times, if it had equated Brussels with hostility to the nationalist English, rather than the British, way of life. After all, both Scotland and Northern Ireland were to vote by large margins to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum; hardly then a lion’s roar for Britain. The elision of Britishness and Englishness, something for which we have long criticized Americans and other foreigners, has been pretty dramatically splintered by the issue of Europe. Our own Union in the British Isles, whose largest member (England) is a nation but not a state, is itself a possible long-term casualty of the vote to leave the EU. The Scots ponder whether or when to call for another referendum on independence; citizens in Northern Ireland apply in droves for passports for the Republic in the south and the future of the border which separates them will cause big problems for Brexit negotiators.
What exactly was it that the dear old Telegraph thought I was abandoning? Ideas of Britishness and of Englishness are not identical. They have rather different narratives at their heart, narratives occasionally wound more tightly together: for example, in the days of Empire and in times of conflict against an external adversary. Maybe the fact that, while English by birth, I am in part Irish by descent makes me warm most to the sense of being British. I regard Scotland as a different country but an invaluable part of a unified state, and one that brings enormous cultural and political quality to Britain. I worry about Scottish independence not only because of what Scotland would lose by separation from the rest of Britain but, perhaps even more, because of what the rest of us would lose. Edinburgh and Glasgow always feel like slightly foreign cities, yet magnificent ones that I am proud to share as a British citizen. If Scotland were to declare for independence I would feel that the national community of which I am a citizen had suffered serious amputation.
One thing that Britain and England have very much in common is that we are comprised of a mix of European and non-European identities, plainly more so in England than in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. We are a jumble of pedigrees – to borrow from Daniel Defoe, a nation of mongrels. We also have histories, taken together, shaped by our island geography which has separated us from the European mainland and opened up the world to our travels, imaginations and trade; this was one of the reasons why General de Gaulle thought we were unsuited for membership of the European Common Market. Today, when you look at the size of our commercial fishing and naval fleets, you might find it hard to believe how important the sea and these wider horizons have been to us. Our relations with our European neighbours have been intimate, sometimes hostile, often friendly and always culturally close. Our Royal Family is as German as I am Irish. When, in 1914, war between Britain and Germany broke out, Oxford University dons scurried about to get hundreds of German students home before the shooting started; earlier that summer distinguished Germans had starred in the list of honorary
degrees at the university. The university did not offer degree courses in French and German until shortly before this on the grounds that anyone intelligent enough to study at Oxford would naturally have a good knowledge of these languages. It was a common assumption among politicians that the peace, economic rejuvenation and stability of Europe after the Second World War were national interests of our own. While we had once to stand alone, we now had to build together.
Which of the things that are emblematic of our island home are British and which English? Where would you place roast beef or chicken tikka masala, now apparently the nation’s most popular dish? Where manicured front gardens or hybrid tea roses? Where beer or whisky? Where sponge cakes or bran biscuits? Where hedgerows or moors? Where the rule of law or habeas corpus? Where parliamentary sovereignty – difficult because England does not have a parliament? On the other hand, here is an easy one – what about Nigel Farage and his Brexit posters? Or Iain Duncan-Smith and his right-wing sidekicks? Are they more English or British? See what happens if you dare ask these questions in Glasgow.
When I arrived in Brussels in 1999, feeling both English and British, there was not much of a culture shock. For a start, despite the number of member states, all with their own language, English was the language most commonly spoken and written. I could have worked in my own mother tongue the whole time I was there, though occasionally I essayed a meeting in French, inevitably displaying my inadequate grasp of the subjunctive. The French worked hard, as we would have done in the circumstances, to protect the use of their own tongue, the historic language of diplomacy. I remember one meeting in Helsinki of European heads of state and government and their equivalent officials from candidate countries. At the ‘tour de table’, most present spoke English. At one point, President Chirac crossly interrupted the Italian President of the Commission to demand ‘langue maternelle’. Romano Prodi continued to speak in English. For most, this was the easiest thing to do. The European house magazine was a British newspaper – the Financial Times.