The drama of China’s encounter with the developed West and Japan was the impact of great powers, organized as expansionist states, on a civilization that initially saw the trappings of modern statehood as an abasement. The “rise” of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of “All Under Heaven,” technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
CHINA AND WORLD ORDER
The imperial dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the foundation of a Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912 left China with a weak central government and ushered in a decade of warlordism. A stronger central government under Chiang Kai-shek emerged in 1928 and sought to enable China to assume a place in the Westphalian concept of world order and in the global economic system. Seeking to be both modern and traditionally Chinese, it attempted to fit into an international system that was itself in upheaval. Yet at that point, Japan, which had launched its modernization drive half a century earlier, began a bid for Asian hegemony. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 was followed by Japan’s invasion of large stretches of central and eastern China in 1937. The Nationalist government was prevented from consolidating its position, and the Communist insurgency was given breathing space. Though emerging as one of the victorious Allied powers with the end of World War II in 1945, China was torn apart by civil war and revolutionary turmoil that challenged all relationships and legacies.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao:
The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.
In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to China, setting itself apart by a distinctive form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now revolutionary moral authority again swaying “All Under Heaven.”
Mao conducted international affairs by the same reliance on the unique nature of China. Though China was objectively weak by the way the rest of the world measured strength, Mao insisted on its central role via psychological and ideological superiority, to be demonstrated by defying rather than conciliating a world emphasizing superior physical power. When speaking in Moscow to an international conference of Communist Party leaders in 1957, Mao shocked fellow delegates by predicting that in the event of nuclear war China’s more numerous population and hardier culture would be the ultimate victor, and that even casualties of hundreds of millions would not deflect China from its revolutionary course. While this might have been partly bluff to discourage countries with vastly superior nuclear arsenals, Mao wanted the world to believe that he contemplated nuclear war with equanimity. In July 1971—during my secret visit to Beijing—Zhou Enlai summed up Mao’s conception of world order by invoking the Chairman’s claimed purview of Chinese emperors with a sardonic twist: “All under heaven is in chaos, the situation is excellent.” From a world of chaos, the People’s Republic, hardened by years of struggle, would ultimately emerge triumphant not just in China but everywhere “under heaven.” The Communist world order would merge with the traditional view of the Imperial Court.
Like the founder of China’s first all-powerful dynasty (221–207 B.C.), the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Mao sought to unify China while also striving to destroy the ancient culture that he blamed for China’s weakness and humiliation. He governed in a style as remote as that of any Emperor (though the emperors would not have convened mass rallies), and he combined it with the practices of Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s rule embodied the revolutionary’s dilemma. The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao’s goals—most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.
Revolutionaries prevail when their achievements come to be taken for granted and the price paid for them is treated as inevitable. Some of China’s contemporary leaders suffered grievously during the Cultural Revolution, but they now present that suffering as having given them the strength and self-discovery to steel themselves for the daunting tasks of leading another period of vast transformation. And the Chinese public, especially those too young to have experienced the travail directly, seems to accept the depiction of Mao as primarily a unifier on behalf of Chinese dignity. Which aspect of this legacy prevails—the taunting Maoist challenge to the world or the quiet resolve gained through weathering Mao’s upheavals—will do much to determine China’s relationship with twenty-first-century world order.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, China by its own choice had only four ambassadors around the world and was in confrontation with both nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1960s, Mao recognized that the Cultural Revolution had exhausted even the Chinese people’s millennially tested capacity for endurance and that China’s isolation might tempt the foreign interventions he had sought to overcome by ideological rigor and defiance. In 1969, the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of attacking China to a point that caused Mao to disperse all ministries to the provinces, with only Premier Zhou Enlai remaining in Beijing. To this crisis, Mao reacted with a characteristically unexpected reversal of direction. He ended the most anarchical aspects of the Cultural Revolution by using the armed forces to put an end to the Red Guards, who had been his shock troops—sending them to the countryside, where they joined their erstwhile victims at, in effect, forced labor. And he strove to checkmate the Soviet Union by moving toward the heretofore-vilified adversary: the United States.
Mao calculated that the opening with the United States would end China’s isolation and provide other countries that were holding back with a justification for recognizing the People’s Republic of China. (Interestingly, a CIA analysis, written as I was preparing for my first trip, held that Sino-Soviet tensions were so great as to make a U.S.-China rapprochement possible but that Mao’s ideological fervor would prevent it in his lifetime.)
Revolutions, no matter how sweeping, need to be co
nsolidated and, in the end, adapted from a moment of exaltation to what is sustainable over a period of time. That was the historic role played by Deng Xiaoping. Although he had been twice purged by Mao, he became the effective ruler two years after Mao’s death in 1976. He quickly undertook to reform the economy and open up the society. Pursuing what he defined as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he liberated the latent energies of the Chinese people. Within less than a generation, China advanced to become the second-largest economy in the world. To speed up this dramatic transformation—if not necessarily by conviction—China entered international institutions and accepted the established rules of world order.
Yet China’s participation in aspects of the Westphalian structure carried with it an ambivalence born of the history that brought it to enter into the international state system. China has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the existing international order in a manner utterly at odds with its historical image of itself or, for that matter, with the avowed principles of the Westphalian system. When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making. But they expect—and sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.
While waiting for this to transpire, Beijing has become much more active on the world scene. With China’s emergence as potentially the world’s largest economy, its views and support are now sought in every international forum. China has participated in many of the prestige aspects of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western orders: hosting the Olympics; addresses by its presidents before the United Nations; reciprocal visits with heads of state and governments from leading countries around the world. By any standard, China has regained the stature by which it was known in the centuries of its most far-reaching influence. The question now is how it will relate to the contemporary search for world order, particularly in its relations with the United States.
THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA are both indispensable pillars of world order. Remarkably, both have historically exhibited an ambivalent attitude toward the international system they now anchor, affirming their commitment to it even as they reserve judgment on aspects of its design. China has no precedent for the role it is asked to play in twenty-first-century order, as one major state among others. Nor does the United States have experience interacting on a sustained basis with a country of comparable size, reach, and economic performance embracing a distinctly different model of domestic order.
The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans.
China and the United States have, in their histories, only recently fully participated in an international system of sovereign states. China has believed that it was unique and largely contained within its own reality. America also considers itself unique—that is, “exceptional”—but with a moral obligation to support its values around the world for reasons beyond raison d’état. Two great societies of different cultures and different premises are both undergoing fundamental domestic adjustments; whether this translates into rivalry or into a new form of partnership will importantly shape prospects for twenty-first-century world order.
China is now governed by the fifth generation of leaders since the revolution. Each previous leader distilled his generation’s particular vision of China’s needs. Mao Zedong was determined to uproot established institutions, even those he had built in the original phase of his victory, lest they stagnate under China’s bureaucratic propensities. Deng Xiaoping understood that China could not maintain its historic role unless it became internationally engaged. Deng’s style was sharply focused: not to boast—lest foreign countries become disquieted—not to claim to lead but to extend China’s influence by modernizing both the society and the economy. On that basis, starting in 1989, Jiang Zemin, appointed during the Tiananmen Square crisis, overcame its aftermath with his personal diplomacy internationally and by broadening the base of the Communist Party domestically. He led the PRC into the international state and trading system as a full member. Hu Jintao, selected by Deng, skillfully assuaged concerns about China’s growing power and laid the basis for the concept of the new type of major-power relationship enunciated by Xi Jinping.
The Xi Jinping leadership has sought to build on these legacies by undertaking a massive reform program of the Deng scale. It has projected a system that, while eschewing democracy, would be made more transparent and in which outcomes would be determined more by legal procedures than by the established pattern of personal and family relationships. It has announced challenges to many established institutions and practices—state-run enterprises, fiefdoms of regional officials, and large-scale corruption—in a manner that combines vision with courage but is certain to bring in its train a period of flux and some uncertainty.
The composition of the Chinese leadership reflects China’s evolution toward participating in—and even shaping—global affairs. In 1982, not a single member of the Politburo had a college degree. At this writing, almost all of them are college educated, and a significant number have advanced degrees. A college degree in China is based on a Western-style curriculum, not a legacy of the old mandarin system (or the subsequent Communist Party curriculum, which imposed its own form of intellectual inbreeding). This represents a sharp break with China’s past, when the Chinese were intensely and proudly parochial in their perception of the world outside their immediate sphere. Contemporary Chinese leaders are influenced by their knowledge of China’s history but are not captured by it.
A LONGER PERSPECTIVE
Potential tensions between an established and a rising power are not new. Inevitably, the rising power impinges on some spheres heretofore treated as the exclusive preserve of the established power. By the same token, the rising power suspects that its rival may seek to quash its growth before it is too late. A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.
It is therefore not surprising that significant strategic thinkers on both sides invoke patterns of behavior and historical experience to predict the inevitability of conflict between the two societies. On the Chinese side, many American actions are interpreted as a design to thwart China’s rise, and the American promotion of human rights is seen as a project to undermine China’s domestic political structure. Some major figures describe America’s so-called pivot policy as the forerunner of an ultimate showdown designed to keep China permanently in a secondary position—an attitude all the more remarkable because it has not involved any significant military redeployments at this writing.
On the American side, the fear is that a growing China will systematically undermine American preeminence and thus American security. Significant groups view China, by analogy to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, as determined to achieve military as well as economic dominance in all surrounding regions and hence, ultimately, hegemony.
The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.
Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side, the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping:
Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics.
World Order Page 23