by Amy Chua
Nevertheless, the reality remains that foreign expats are…foreign expats. American Google software engineers and Boeing scientists living in China are not Chinese citizens. Neither are the Japanese technicians who work at Mitsubishi China or the German executives who work at Siemens China.
Could they be, if they wanted to?
This brings us to the fascinating puzzle of contemporary Chinese identity. In researching this book over the last five years, I posed different versions of just this question to numerous people from the People's Republic.
“Could an ethnic Malay or Filipino ever be Han Chinese?” The answer was always a resounding no.
“Could a member of one of China's fifty-fi ve ethnic minorities ever become Han Chinese?” When I was visiting Sichuan a few years ago, I asked this of a young man from the minority Yi community. To my surprise, he replied, “Oh yes. My parents are both Yi. But unlike them I don't speak the Yi language, so I'm not really Yi anymore. Also, I married a Han Chinese woman. So I am really Han Chinese now, and certainly my son is Han.” To my further surprise, I found that his attitude was confirmed by many others, both Han and non-Han.
Finally, I framed the question in terms of citizenship. “Could a Westerner who speaks fluent Chinese, loves Chinese culture, and wants to move permanently to the PRC ever become a Chinese citizen?” I asked this of numerous Chinese officials, Chinese lawyers, and Chinese visiting legal scholars. In a country like the United States, this kind of question would have an easily ascertainable answer. But the Chinese I asked all hemmed and hawed, looking baffled. Many pointed out that most foreigners do not want Chinese citizenship (which is probably true). In the end, no one was able to answer the question squarely, although more than one person said, “A foreigner? I don't think so.”*
These uncertainties and confusions reflect a millennia-old struggle over the meaning of Chinese identity—a struggle that if anything grew more intense in the twentieth century. During the tumultuous period leading up to the 1911 revolution that overthrew three thousand years of imperial dynastic rule, Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionary leaders championed an explicitly ethnic— indeed racial—concept of the Chinese nation. They saw China as “more than a national state: it was a race-nation that should be ruled by the Han Chinese.” The “Chinese nation” thus included anyone of Han Chinese blood, whether he or she lived in San Francisco or Malaysia. This racial concept of China was extremely powerful in uniting the Chinese against their “alien” Manchu Qing rulers—descendants of the Jurchen steppe people—who although they had lived in China for centuries, were always perceived and resented as foreigners.15
After the Communist victory in 1949, this ethnic concept of Chinese nationality became problematic for the government in its dealings with China's millions of ethnic minorities who, although representing just a tiny fraction of the population, occupy roughly 60 percent of China's territory, including strategically important border areas such as Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. For purposes of maintaining control over China's vast territory, the government found it expedient to adopt a geographical concept of Chinese nationality. Today, the official line is that China is a multiethnic nation that happens to be 92 percent Han Chinese but also includes fifty-five ethnic minorities, all of whom are Chinese nationals.’*‘
But like other nations, China cannot escape its history. Lucian Pye once wrote, “China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations;” rather, China is “a civilization pretending to be a state.”16 It is a civilization, moreover, rooted in notions of ethnic identity and superiority. For three thousand years, the Chinese have understood themselves as sharing a common ancestry, an ancestry not shared by Tibetans or Uighurs, and certainly not by any Westerners.
With respect to the twenty-first century, the bottom line is that China is still the farthest cry from an immigrant society. The Western and Japanese expats working in foreign enclaves in Chinese cities today are not immigrants. They are not en route to becoming Chinese citizens; neither is the government seeking to make them citizens. Although there are more foreigners working in China today than there have been for a long time, the government is not trying to integrate them into Chinese society or encouraging them to view themselves as Chinese. In part, this is why China is not even close to being a magnet pulling in the best scientists, engineers, thinkers, and innovators from the West—or anywhere else.
Chinese leaders, of course, fully realize this. China doesn't especially want to be an immigrant society. But it has found two other ways to bring in international skills, technology, and know-how. First, again playing the “ethnic card,” China has appealed with astounding success to the pride and loyalty—not to mention self-interest—of “overseas Chinese”: some fifty-five million people of Chinese descent living in more than 160 countries.* In many ways, the overseas Chinese are an extraordinary pool. They collectively control some $2 trillion in assets, and generate an estimated annual economic output of $600 billion, roughly the current GDP of Australia.17 In addition, they include many highly educated individuals, among them Nobel Prize winners.
Other countries, for example Israel and India, have also successfully made use of their “diaspora” populations. But the size and resources of China's diaspora are unparalleled. From its initial opening in 1978, the central government shrewdly targeted this pool, offering special investment incentives and tax preferences to foreign investors of Chinese descent. At the same time, many local governments bestowed “honorary titles” on overseas Chinese who were particularly generous and “loyal” to their “motherland” and “ancestral home villages.”18
These strategies paid off. In the 1980s and 1990s, overseas Chinese poured more than $190 billion into China, accounting for more than half of the foreign direct investment that helped catapult China from third world backwater to “Rising Dragon.” (In the booming southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, as much as 80 percent of foreign investment has come from overseas Chinese.) Moreover, overseas Chinese are transferring not only wealth to China, but knowledge. For example, Shing-Tung Yau, a professor at Harvard and winner of the Fields Medal (the highest international honor in mathematics), has recently joined forces with China's government and a Hong Kong real estate mogul in an effort to build a new generation of world-class Chinese scientists.19
At the same time, China has found ways to acquire Western know-how from non-Chinese corporate behemoths. For example, dangling the prize of access to China's immense domestic market, the Chinese government conditioned a $900 million turbine-engine deal with General Electric on the latter's agreement to share technology. General Electric is hardly alone. According to a Wall Street Journal article titled “China's Price for Market Entry: Give Us Your Technology, Too”:
[T]o gain easier access to markets in China, Motorola Inc. has poured more than $300 million into 19 technology-research centers in the country. A Microsoft Corp. center in Beijing now employs more than 200 researchers. Siemens AG says it has spent more than $200 million since 1998 working with a Chinese academic institution to develop a mobile-phone technology that the government wants to be the country's standard.
Many other foreign corporations, including Japan's Kawasaki and France's Alstom SA, have agreed to similar technology transfers in exchange for market access.20
In the end, however, these strategies are highly imperfect substitutes for bringing in the world's best talent and know-how. The preferences granted to overseas Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s opened the door to the large-scale corruption mentioned above. For every Shiing-Shen Chern—the brilliant UC Berkeley mathematician who dedicated much of his later life to promoting the study of math and science in China—there are dozens of Chinese businessmen from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia who have made millions in China through bribery and other backdoor techniques. Because of the visibility of powerful overseas Chinese tycoons like Indonesia's James Riady, there is a widespread perception that “personal connections” (guanxi) are everything—that commer
cial success in China depends on who has the most “old friends” and who can offer local officials the biggest gifts and the most sumptuous banquets. Thus, while the Chinese government may have hoped that overseas Chinese—being “all in the family”—would make loyal and dependable investors, ironically their prominence in China has fueled local resentment and contributed to the sense that there is no level playing field in China.
Meanwhile, China's approach to getting Western technology has clear limits as well. Western firms compelled to share know-how with China (in exchange for market access) have predictably avoided revealing their most cutting-edge technologies. According to GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt, China's engineers remain at least “two generations” behind in turbine engine manufacturing, despite GE's technology-sharing agreement with them. Or as one Chinese official pointedly put it: “The foreigners are now agreeing to tell us how and where to dig a hole, but we still do not know why to dig a hole there.”21
China's ascent to superpower status is practically a foregone conclusion. True, China faces a daunting list of internal challenges, including staggering pollution, corruption, regional wealth disparities, and soulless mass consumerism. Nevertheless, in terms of building on its present successes, China seems to be doing everything right. Keeping an eye on the long term, it is pouring massive sums into infrastructure, research and development, and education at all levels. Few today doubt that China will become one of the great powers of the world within a short time.
But if my thesis is correct, China will not become a hyper-power. Today, more than ever, global dominance depends on the ability to attract and retain the world's top scientific, technological, and creative talent, and China—a quintessential nonimmigrant, ethnically based nation—is not in a position to do so. This is hardly a calamity for China, which may not want the burdens or the global resentment that world dominance entails. Indeed, China's official foreign policy emphasizes “noninterference.” Being a “mere” superpower may suit China just fine.
In a world in which China is a superpower, could America remain a hyperpower? In principle, it's possible. If America continued to be the destination for the world's best and brightest— including even China's best and brightest—the United States could conceivably retain its technological, military, and economic edge over all rivals. More likely, however, a Chinese superpower would dictate a return to at least a bipolar world order. If China becomes the economic colossus many predict, its sheer wealth will command enormous power in the modern world, with many countries (including possibly the United States) dependent on its trade and investment capital. At the same time, China's defense spending has been mounting rapidly over the last decade, and it is by no means impossible that by the middle of the twenty-first century China's military could rival (if not surpass) that of the United States.
THE EUROPEAN UNION: A
“POST-IMPERIAL SUPERPOWER”
As the clock struck midnight and the champagne glasses clinked on May 1, 2004, the European Union officially welcomed ten new member states, increasing its membership from fifteen to twenty-five. “Fireworks exploded and church bells rang out” across a Europe with borders now stretching across three time zones, from Poland to Ireland, from Finland to Malta. A Europe divided by decades of Cold War and centuries of internecine conflict came together—warmly, and for the first time in history, peacefully.
The occasion was particularly poignant for the people of the eight nations who had spent fifty years behind the iron curtain. The Polish Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, called the moment the fulfillment of his “dreams and lifetime's work,” while the Hungarian prime minister Peter Medgyessy “set a giant hourglass in motion to symbolise the beginning of a new era.” Meanwhile, in the former Soviet republic of Lithuania, the government urged its citizens to light lamps and candles to make their country “the brightest spot in Europe.” Founded largely as a bulwark against the westward expansion of Communism, the community that is now the EU not only outlasted its rivals but lived to take them in.22
The moment's triumph was not limited to formerly Eastern Bloc EU members. The inclusion of ten new countries also marked a stunning victory over a much deeper history of division, rivalry, and bloodshed. For centuries, leading European philosophers and statesmen—among them Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Winston Churchill—had recognized that unity held the best hope for European peace, prosperity, and power. In the mid-fifteenth century, Bohemia's King George proposed a federation arrangement strikingly similar to the EU's current structure, albeit to guard against the external threat of Turkish invasion, not to address internal division. But these nascent visions of a pan-European union could not overcome the fierce nationalism, enmity, and religious division that had grown increasingly entrenched in the bloody millennium following the fall of Rome. Over and over, culminating in World War II, ferocious nationalist ambition had torn Europe apart, killing and maiming millions.23
Yet, astonishingly, what began as a modest economic agreement over coal and steel production between postwar France and Germany has, in just two generations, forged a European unity unprecedented since the height of the Roman Empire. Today the EU numbers twenty-seven nations—Bulgaria and Romania joined in January 2007—sharing a common body of law covering nearly half a billion people. The EU has been called “the largest single market in the developed world,” and its gross domestic product of roughly $13 trillion is comparable to that of the United States.24 In population the EU has an edge—by 150 million. With two nuclear powers (Britain and France) and more troops under arms than the United States, the EU is at least on paper a potential military giant as well. And the EU has not finished expanding. Under the EU's rules for enlargement, candidate countries may join provided that they meet certain economic and political criteria, including the observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Countries currently under consideration include Albania, Croatia, Serbia, and, most controversially, Turkey. In theory, the EU could someday extend to Africa and the Middle East and even incorporate Russia.
The EU's territorial expansion—not through military conquest but through a process of qualification and accession—represents an astonishing new form of strategic tolerance. In the past, with a coveted package of freedoms and economic incentives, countries such as the Dutch Republic or the United States made themselves magnets for individuals. With a new package of freedoms and economic incentives, the EU has made itself a magnet for nations.
In this sense, the EU is comparable to Rome. In its golden age, Rome too attracted entire peoples into its orbit. But Rome always had its legions, which could threaten to achieve by sword the incorporation of peoples who did not willingly submit. The EU has become a magnet for nations without force or even the threat of force. As the British author Mark Leonard puts it, the EU is a “post-imperial superpower,” increasing its dominion “not by threatening to invade other countries” but rather by dangling economic carrots. Rather than imposing democracy and the rule of law on other countries, the EU gives countries incentives to transform themselves. Rather than taking over governments, the EU, which has only a skeletal bureaucracy, works through national parliaments and local councils. Precisely because it is anti-empke, Leonard suggests, the EU eventually “will change the way the world works.”25
As part of its anti-imperial challenge to U.S. hegemony, the EU is seeking to establish itself as the world's true beacon of freedom, equality, and Enlightenment values. Even before 9/11, many Europeans saw their own societies—with their generally much more generous welfare systems and social services—as superior to that of the United States, offering more genuine tolerance and opportunity despite the rhetoric of the American Dream. In a 2000 survey, for example, the French public was asked, “As far as you're concerned, what kind of a country is the United States?” Forty-five percent answered “A nation of great social inequality,” and 33 percent said “A racist nation.” Only 24 percent answered “A nation where anyone can get rich,�
�� and just 15 percent replied “A nation that welcomes immigrants.”26
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, European criticism of the United States has grown only more intense. In a 2003 article that appeared in newspapers throughout Europe, the eminent German and French philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida assert a European identity defined acerbically in opposition to the United States, highlighting Europe's softer approach to capitalism, its rejection of the death penalty, and perhaps most critically its “moral sensibility, informed by the memory of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the Holocaust.” America's “unilateralism”—its perceived willingness to violate international law and to undermine the United Nations—is widely criticized in Europe, where from Ireland to Poland the maze of EU treaties and charters today offers the most progressive stance on human rights and nondiscrimination the world has ever known.27
There is, of course, a strategic dimension to all this. To reap the economic rewards of integration, the European states had to overcome their historical enmities, suppress their own nationalist tendencies (for example, relinquishing their national currencies), tolerate one another's religions, and ensure that workers and products from the various states would not be discriminated against in other states. In other words, if the EU's stirring devotion to international human rights and “Unity in Diversity” (the EU's motto, published in twenty different languages) reflects a new European moral sensibility, it also reflects a shrewd calculation of free market self-interest.