The amorphous nature of Asian groupings is partly because geography has dictated a sharp dividing line between East Asia and South Asia throughout history. Cultural, philosophical, and religious influences have transcended the geographic dividing lines, and Hindu and Confucian concepts of governance have coexisted in Southeast Asia. But the mountain and jungle barriers were too impenetrable to permit military interaction between the great empires of East Asia and South Asia until the twentieth century. The Mongols and their successors entered the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, not through the Himalayan high passes, and they failed to reach the southern parts of India. The various regions of Asia have geopolitically and historically pursued distinct courses.
The regional orders constructed during these periods included none based on Westphalian premises. Where the European order embraced an equilibrium of territorially defined “sovereign states” recognizing each other’s legal equality, traditional Asian political powers operated by more ambiguous criteria. Until well into the modern era, an “inner Asian” world influenced by the Mongol Empire, Russia, and Islam coexisted with a Chinese imperial tribute system; the latter reached outward to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which entertained China’s claims of universality even as they practiced a form of statecraft deeply influenced by Hindu principles received from India that posited a form of divinity for monarchs.
Now these legacies are meeting, and there is far from a consensus among the various countries about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for twenty-first-century world order. Under contemporary conditions, essentially two balances of power are emerging: one in South Asia, the other in East Asia. Neither possesses the characteristic integral to the European balance of power: a balancer, a country capable of establishing an equilibrium by shifting its weight to the weaker side. The United States (after its withdrawal from Afghanistan) has refrained from treating the contemporary internal South Asian balance primarily as a military problem. But it will have to be active in the diplomacy over reestablishing a regional order lest a vacuum is created, which would inevitably draw all surrounding countries into a regional confrontation.
CHAPTER 6
Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or Partnership?
THE MOST COMMON FEATURE of Asian states is their sense of representing “emerging” or “postcolonial” countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial rule by asserting a strong national identity. They share a conviction that world order is now rebalancing after an unnatural Western irruption over the past several centuries, but they have drawn vastly different lessons from their historical journeys. When top officials seek to evoke core interests, many of them look to a different cultural tradition and idealize a different golden age.
In Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century systems, the preservation of the equilibrium—and by implication the status quo—was seen as a positive virtue. In Asia, almost every state is impelled by its own dynamism. Convinced that it is “rising,” it operates with the conviction that the world has yet to affirm its full deserved role. Even while no state questions the others’ sovereignty and dignity and all affirm a dedication to “non-zero-sum” diplomacy, the simultaneous pursuit of so many programs of national prestige building introduces a measure of volatility to the regional order. With the evolution of modern technology, the major powers of Asia have armed themselves with far more destructive military arsenals than even the strongest nineteenth-century European state possessed, compounding the risks of miscalculation.
The organization of Asia is thus an inherent challenge for world order. Major countries’ perception and pursuit of their national interests, rather than the balance of power as a system, have shaped the mechanisms of order that have developed. Their test will be whether a transpacific partnership, providing a peaceful framework for the interplay of many established interests, will be possible.
ASIA’S INTERNATIONAL ORDER AND CHINA
Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.
From its unification as a single political entity in 221 B.C. through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for it. Only retrospectively did scholars define the “Sinocentric” tribute system. In this traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world. Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between the human and the divine. His purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the central, civilized part: “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity.
In this view, world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing sovereign states. Every known society was conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it. Other monarchs were not fellow sovereigns but earnest pupils in the art of governance, striving toward civilization. Diplomacy was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a series of carefully contrived ceremonies in which foreign societies were given the opportunity to affirm their assigned place in the global hierarchy. In keeping with this perspective, in classical China what would now be called “foreign policy” was the province of the Ministry of Rituals, which determined the shades of the tributary relationship, and the Office of Border Affairs, charged with managing relations with nomadic tribes. A Chinese foreign ministry was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy. The new ministry carried the telling title of the “Office for the Management of the Affairs of All Nations,” implying that China was not engaging in interstate diplomacy at all.
The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily. China’s most imposing architectural achievement, the Great Wall eventually extending over roughly five thousand miles, was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who had just defeated all rivals militarily, ending the period of Warring States and unifying China. It was a grandiose testimony to military victory but also to its inherent limits, denoting vast power coupled with a consciousness of vulnerability. For millennia, China sought to beguile and entice its adversaries more often than it attempted to defeat them by force of arms. Thus a minister in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier, though by conventional analysis China was the superior military power:
To give them … elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach … and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.
The hallmark of China’s diplomatic rituals, the kowtow—kneeling and touching one’s head to the ground to acknowledge the Emperor’s superior authority—was an abasement, to be sure, and proved a stumbling block to relations with modern Western states. But the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so muc
h conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s return gifts.
Traditionally, China sought to dominate psychologically by its achievements and its conduct—interspersed with occasional military excursions to teach recalcitrant barbarians a “lesson” and to induce respect. Both these strategic goals and this fundamentally psychological approach to armed conflict were in evidence as recently as China’s wars with India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, as well as in the manner in which core interests vis-à-vis other neighbors are affirmed.
Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer. Ironically, the only foreigners who achieved something akin to this status were conquerors. In one of history’s most amazing feats of cultural imperialism, two peoples that conquered China—the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth—were induced to adopt core elements of Chinese culture to facilitate the administration of a people so numerous and so obdurate in its assumption of cultural superiority. The conquerors were significantly assimilated by the defeated Chinese society, to a point where substantial parts of their home territory came to be treated as traditionally Chinese. China had not sought to export its political system; rather, it had seen others come to it. In that sense, it has expanded not by conquest but by osmosis.
In the modern era, Western representatives with their own sense of cultural superiority set out to enroll China in the European world system, which was becoming the basic structure of international order. They pressured China to cultivate ties with the rest of the world through exchanges of ambassadors and free trade and to uplift its people through a modernizing economy and a society open to Christian proselytizing.
What the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment and engagement was treated in China as an assault. China tried at first to parry it and then to resist outright. When the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century, bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident embassies in Beijing and London, the Chinese boat that carried him from Guangzhou to Beijing was festooned with a banner that identified him as “The English ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” He was dismissed with a letter to the King of England explaining that no ambassador could be permitted to reside in Beijing because “Europe consists of many other nations besides your own: if each and all demanded to be represented at our Court, how could we possibly consent? The thing is utterly impracticable.” The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods China desired:
Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State; strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar … As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things.
After the defeat of Napoleon, as its mercantile expansion gathered pace, Britain attempted another overture, dispatching a second envoy with a similar proposal. Britain’s display of naval power during the Napoleonic Wars had done little to change China’s estimate of the desirability of diplomatic relations. When William Amherst, the envoy, declined to attend the kowtow ceremony, offering the excuse that his dress uniform had been delayed, his mission was dismissed, and any further attempt at diplomacy was explicitly discouraged. The Emperor dispatched a message to England’s Prince Regent, explaining that as “overlord of all under Heaven,” China could not be troubled to walk each barbarian envoy through the correct protocol. The imperial records would duly acknowledge that “thy kingdom far away across the oceans proffers its loyalty and yearns for civilization,” but (as a nineteenth-century Western missionary publication translated the edict):
henceforward no more envoys need be sent over this distant route, as the result is but a vain waste of travelling energy. If thou canst but incline thine heart to submissive service, thou mayest dispense with sending missions to court at certain periods; that is the true way to turn toward civilization. That thou mayest for ever obey We now issue this mandate.
Though such admonitions seem presumptuous by today’s standards—and were deeply offensive to the country that had just maintained the European equilibrium and could count itself Europe’s most advanced naval, economic, and industrial power—the Emperor was expressing himself in a manner consistent with the ideas about his place in the world that had prevailed for millennia, and that many neighboring peoples had been induced to at least indulge.
The Western powers, to their shame, eventually brought matters to a head over the issue of free trade in the most self-evidently harmful product they sold, insisting on the right to the unrestricted importation of—from all the fruits of Western progress—opium. China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.” Even when under assault by Western forces, the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace.
Temporarily overwhelmed by military pressure in 1842, China signed treaties conceding Western demands. But it did not abandon its sense of uniqueness and fought a tenacious rearguard action. After scoring a decisive victory in an 1856–58 war (fought over an alleged improper impoundment of a British-registered ship in Guangzhou), Britain insisted on a treaty enshrining its long-sought right to station a resident minister in Beijing. Arriving the next year to take up his post with a triumphal retinue, the British envoy found the main river route to the capital blocked with chains and spikes. When he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the obstacles, Chinese forces opened fire; 519 British troops died and another 456 were wounded in the ensuing battle. Britain then dispatched a military force under Lord Elgin that stormed Beijing and burned the Summer Palace as the Qing court fled. This brutal intervention compelled the ruling dynasty’s grudging acceptance of a “legation quarter” to house the diplomatic representatives. China’s acquiescence in the concept of reciprocal diplomacy within a Westphalian system of sovereign states was reluctant and resentful.
At the heart of these disputes was a larger question: Was China a world order entire unto itself or a state like others that was part of a wider international system? China clung to the traditional premise. As late as 1863, after two military defeats by “barbarian” powers and a massive domestic uprising (the Taiping Rebellion) quelled only by calling in foreign troops, the Emperor dispatched a letter to Abraham Lincoln assuring him of China’s benign favor: “Having, with reverence, received the commission from Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire [China] and the outside countries as constituting one family, without any distinction.”
In 1872, the eminent Scottish Sinologist James Legge phrased the issue pointedly and with his era’s characteristic confidence in the self-evident superiority of the Western concept of world order:
During the past forty years her [China’s] position with regard to the more advanced nations of the world has been entirely changed. She has entered into treaties with them upon equal terms; but I do not think her ministers and people have yet looked this truth fairly in the face, so as to realize the fact that China is only one of many independent nations in the world, and that the “beneath the sky,” over which her
emperor has rule, is not all beneath the sky, but only a certain portion of it which is defined on the earth’s surface and can be pointed out upon the map.
With technology and trade impelling contradictory systems into closer contact, which world order’s norms would prevail?
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them.
The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.
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