The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  The Asian financial crisis in 1997 provided a huge tactical opening. From Bangkok to Seoul, Asian capitals were incensed at the high-handed and dogmatic way they were treated by the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund. Leaders complained loudly that Washington paid no attention to the particular conditions of their countries, opting instead to push the same cookie-cutter solution for everyone’s problems. At the same time, China won respect for resisting the urge to devalue its currency and for its calm stewardship during the crisis. China also started to offer cheap loans and aid packages across the region. Anyone traveling through Southeast Asia these days can hardly miss the Chinese-made schools, government buildings, or football stadiums. The mood toward China shifted dramatically. Asian students started to come in large numbers to Chinese universities. Anti-Chinese sentiment had been so intense in Indonesia in the 1970s that Suharto banned the use of Chinese characters in newspapers for the country’s large ethnic Chinese population. Yet, when my wife, Angelica, enrolled at a Chinese-language course in 2005 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, almost half her classmates were Indonesians.

  Chinese diplomats even had a poetic phrase to frame the policy—“mulin, fulin, anlin,” “establish good neighbors, make them feel prosperous, and make them feel secure.” Diplomats from other countries would marvel at the patience and long-term strategy they witnessed in their Chinese counterparts. After 9/11, when the U.S. became obsessed with the threat from terrorism and embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Chinese stepped up their efforts to present themselves to the rest of Asia as a reliable and trustworthy regional leader. Beijing also promoted regional organizations that excluded the U.S.—with some success, given that senior Bush-administration officials did not even bother to attend a handful of the regional summits. (President George W. Bush annoyed some of his colleagues by pushing to have Islamist terrorism on the agenda at Asia-Pacific summits.) Across the region, America’s friends and allies started to doubt its commitment, providing an opening for China to cultivate its own supporters. During much of the 2000s, it was easy to imagine that Asia was gradually slipping into a Chinese sphere of influence, and it became fashionable to write obituaries for American influence in the region. “We are happy to have China as our big brother,” Gloria Arroyo, the president of the Philippines—once a U.S. colony and still a treaty ally—said in 2007.

  In many ways, Deng’s strategy mimicked Bismarck’s approach for managing the rise of a unified Germany in the nineteenth century. Bismarck also knew that the country’s economy could be stifled if its neighbors formed a coalition to oppose it, and he set about trying to smooth historical enmities, forging strong ties with any country that might potentially become an adversary. As the American writer Walter Russell Mead once put it, this intricate and exhausting policy “sometimes looked like a French bedroom farce as Bismarck hid Austria in the closet when Russia stormed into the bedroom.” But Bismarck’s diplomacy worked, and Germany’s economy overtook Britain’s amid relative geopolitical calm. Adopting a similar approach, China has also boomed amid regional stability, its economy overtaking third-place Germany in 2007 and then Japan in 2010 to become the second-largest in the world.

  Yet Bismarck’s conciliatory approach did not outlast his own downfall from power. When Germany started trying to throw its weight around more in the 1890s, building up its navy and grumbling about territorial disputes, it soon found that republican France and conservative Russia had developed a firm alliance to oppose it. In one symbolic gesture, the Russian tsar stood for “The Marseillaise,” the blood-curdling anthem of French republicanism, whose ideas his predecessors had spent much of the previous century fighting. The Hanoi summit in 2010 was also a symbolic turning point, one of those moments when the ground in Asian politics started to shift. As China has become more powerful, it has shown itself to be remarkably tone-deaf about its neighbors. For all the focus on the rivalry between China and the U.S., the most important shift in the region in recent years has been the rise in Asian anxiety about China. For many of the Asian governments in the room, Yang’s diatribe lifted away the veil on how China would really behave when it decided that the period of “nourishing obscurity” was over. “It was a revelatory moment,” one Asian diplomat present told me.

  For two decades, academics have speculated whether the rest of Asia would “balance” or “bandwagon” with China. The Hanoi summit demonstrated that the new dynamic in Asia will involve a form of balancing, a sign that many of the other Asian powers will come together to block China if it pushes hard to assume a dominant role in the region. This will not be the sort of brittle balance-of-power dynamic that plagued Europe in the late nineteenth century, when countries made rigid military commitments to defend one another. Instead, it will be a more fluid and looser arrangement which seeks to marry greater emphasis on security with continued economic integration. Asia has its own built-in balance of power, which will be used to restrain Beijing’s worst instincts. Of course, the backlash did not occur in a vacuum. It is important to understand some of the historical baggage that Asian governments bring to the current situation. Yang Jiechi’s implicit threat about big countries and small countries was so powerful because it carried deep memories of a historical relationship many Asian nations once had with China, one they do not want to return to. China may be the new great power of today’s global politics, but in Asia it is also very much the traditional power.

  THE ORIGINAL MALACCA DILEMMA

  The observation tower in Malacca is not for the squeamish. Visitors enter into a circular glass booth, which is then pulled up a white pole to the top, like one of those hotel elevators with glass walls on three sides, but much, much higher. The top is 110 meters into the sky and gives tourists a spectacular 360-degree view of the Malaysian city. The real interest, however, is the extraordinary vista of the narrow sea channel that shares its name with the city. Look southeast and the Strait of Malacca stretches all the way down to Singapore and the entrance to the South China Sea, where, at its narrowest point, it is 2.8 miles wide. To the northwest, the channel eventually gives way to the Indian Ocean. On a clear day, the Indonesian island of Sumatra is visible on the other side, around thirty miles away. It was a Saturday when I visited, but global commerce has no respect for weekends, and, despite the haze, I could make out a large tanker as it was gliding slowly past the city. On any given week, four times more oil tankers pass along this narrow strip of water than go through the Suez Canal, making it perhaps the single most important conduit of globalization. This is the same Strait of Malacca that Hu Jintao fears could be shut down by “certain major powers” in order to asphyxiate the Chinese economy slowly.

  Hu’s warning, it turns out, is not an entirely new Chinese preoccupation. Not too far from Malacca’s observation tower, past the replica of a Portuguese battleship, past the churches painted in red with large white crosses, and next to the old Dutch town hall, there is a small park which almost has a view of the strait. The park boasts a large, imposing statue of Zheng He, the commander of a Chinese fleet that made several visits to Malacca in the early fifteenth century—the last time China had an impressive navy. Nearby is the newly opened museum about Zheng He, which celebrates his presence in the city and tells the story of an earlier era of Chinese naval expeditions.

  In the long arc of Chinese history, Zheng He is one of the most intriguing figures. A Muslim with the surname Ma, he was captured during a Ming dynasty army’s invasion of what is now China’s Yunnan Province. Castrated by his captors, he was sent to serve in Beijing as a palace eunuch; here he became a close confidant of Zhu Di, son of the Ming founder. (It was Zhu Di who gave him the name Zheng He.) Overlooked in the imperial succession by his father, Zhu Di staged a coup and imposed himself as the new emperor, assuming the name Yongle, meaning “perpetual happiness.” One of Yongle’s most important initiatives was to order a massive expansion in shipbuilding, and when he needed a commander to take charge of the new fleet, he t
urned to his loyal confidant Zheng He. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He led seven different voyages that explored the littorals of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, even making it as far as Kenya, from where he brought back a giraffe to an astonished Chinese court.

  His ships were known as “treasure boats.” The biggest of them boasted nine masts and were four hundred feet long—making them four times the size of the Portuguese vessels of the age. When Zheng He’s fleet set out on one of its voyages, there could be as many as a hundred other ships alongside, some carrying the porcelain, silks, and lacquerware that the Chinese commanders took with them to dazzle their hosts. There were boats to carry cavalry horses, and others that were essentially gunships, with gunpowder catapults. Including the traveling soldiers, the total crew on each trip numbered nearly thirty thousand. Zheng He and his vast fleets traveled freely around the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, all this almost a century before Vasco da Gama’s much smaller fleet arrived in the region.

  The city of Malacca became a crucial staging post on his voyages, a place where goods could be stored while the fleet continued its travels around the region. Zheng He built a stockade with towers and four gates near the harbor, and inside it there were granaries and warehouses. As Louise Levathes, author of the excellent history on the voyages When China Ruled the Seas, puts it, Zheng He’s fifteenth-century armadas were so vast that they were “not to be surpassed until the invasion fleets of the First World War sailed the seas.” Such was their scope and power that they threatened to reshape the map of the region completely. “China extended its sphere of political power and influence throughout the Indian Ocean,” she writes. “Half the world was in China’s grasp.”

  And then they stopped. Yongle’s successor had no interest in the expensive voyages. Some of the ships rotted away in the harbor; others were burned. Many of the records were destroyed, and laws were passed banning future adventures. For a long time, the voyages of Zheng He’s treasure fleet attracted more attention for why they were canceled than for what they actually did. Some historians put it down to new security threats from Mongol invaders in the north, others to the overwhelming cost of running such a large fleet. Confucian scholars resented the influence at court of the eunuchs, many of whom were involved in the naval adventures. Whatever the reason, it was a crucial turning point. China looked inward—just as Europe was catapulting to global dominance, led by its own naval adventurers. The burning of the “treasure fleet” became a symbol for the introspection and stagnation that eventually brought down imperial China in the early twentieth century.

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  Over the last decade, there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the story of Zheng He. A new museum has opened in Nanjing, and the six hundredth anniversary of his first voyage was celebrated with great fanfare in 2005, including a flurry of books and lavish television shows. The museum in Malacca is another example of the burgeoning interest. It is no coincidence that the revival of the Zheng He legend came at the very moment when China’s naval modernization was beginning to take shape. The travels of the “eunuch commander” have been recast to provide a compelling and coherent story that knits together China’s past maritime adventures with its new age of naval expansion. After an era when naval power was almost a taboo in China, the Zheng He story is a way of legitimizing the topic.

  The legend has different messages for different audiences. For the domestic audience, Zheng He is a figure whom Chinese can take pride in, helping to build support for the new tilt toward the oceans. For China’s neighbors, the messages Beijing hopes to send are equally important. The magnanimous nature of Zheng He’s treasure voyages is a sign that China can be trusted as a benevolent guarantor of the regional order, and that the region need not fear China’s new navy. It is also an appeal to a certain spirit of Asian pride. The arrival of Vasco da Gama to the region in the late fifteenth century ushered in an era of five hundred years of colonialism and outside control. After the Portuguese came fleets from the Netherlands, then the British and the French, followed eventually by America and its hulking aircraft carriers. The Zheng He story is a way of saying that Asia can reclaim control over its own destiny, with China’s new navy at the helm.

  “During the overall course of the seven voyages to the Western Ocean, Zheng He did not occupy a single piece of land, establish any fortress, or seize any wealth from other countries,” as Xu Zuyuan, a vice minister of communications, put it in 2004. “He adopted the practice of giving more than he received, and thus he was welcomed and lauded by the people of the various countries along his routes.” He added: “The essence of Zheng He’s voyages does not lie in how strong the Chinese navy once was, but that China adhered to peaceful diplomacy.”

  China’s most senior leaders have tried to promote the message of Zheng He. During a visit to the U.S., Premier Wen Jiabao used the Zheng He legend to launch a quiet dig at American interventionism in the Bush years. Zheng He “brought silk, tea, and the Chinese culture” to foreign peoples, he said, “but not one inch of land was occupied.” Hu Jintao was even more audacious. In a 2003 speech in Australia, he told a Zheng He–inspired story about Chinese links to Australia that well predate Britain, a tale that historians consider far-fetched, but which is rich in symbolism. “The Chinese people have all along cherished amicable feelings about the Australian people,” Hu said. “Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today’s Australia. They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society, and its thriving pluralistic culture.” Why would anyone in Asia seek to balance against a nation, Hu suggested, that only wants such “harmonious” ties with its neighbors? And after five hundred years of outside domination and colonialism, why would Asia need foreigners interfering in its affairs?

  At the same time that Beijing was reviving the Zheng He legend, some of the main themes behind the story were beginning to gain currency in Western academic circles. A number of scholars started to suggest that East Asia had sustained a much more stable system of interstate relations in the era before Western colonialists arrived, with China at the helm. Wars and territorial conflicts were much less common than in Europe, the argument went, and diplomatic interactions were more sophisticated. At the heart of this arrangement was a broad acceptance of Chinese leadership, in the form of the “tributary” system. Rulers who paid a level of tribute to China, both political and symbolic, were left to govern their own affairs, untroubled by too much interference from China, which was the principal cultural and intellectual influence in the region.

  Such views permeated both the academia and journalism. The American scholar David Kang wrote a well-received 2007 book called China Rising, which essentially argued that East Asia was quite content to return to a similar pattern of relations, whereby most countries in the region accepted a degree of Chinese leadership as a natural and stabilizing influence. “China’s neighbors recognized the preponderance of Chinese power and accepted it, rather than trying to balance against it,” he said of the old regional system. Turning to the present, he added: “Most East Asian states view China’s return to being the gravitational center of East Asia as inevitable.” In The Second World, writer Parag Khanna argued in 2008 that while the U.S. was invading Iraq, China had been binding Asia together into a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a reference to Japan’s 1930s project for an Asian economic bloc, through the force of its economy and the attraction of its culture. He quoted a Malaysian diplomat who claimed, “Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown—but not the white.”

  One of the problems of the Zheng He story is that so few records exist to explain what really happened on his voyages, and the fragments that do remain are open to lots of different interpretations. It may well be that Chinese power and the
tributary system acted as a soothing balm over the region long before the West arrived, and that Zheng He organized “voyages of friendship.” But there are lots of other ways that his story can be told, many of which cast a very different light on Chinese power and the way it is remembered across the rest of the region. By some accounts, the Zheng He voyages were less about mutual respect and more about inspiring fear in China’s neighbors through naval superiority.

  The treasure fleet was an impressive sight, to be sure, but there is also some evidence that the voyages were accompanied by substantial violence. Geoffrey Wade, an Australian historian of the Ming period, describes the fleets as an exercise in “shock and awe,” an “early form of maritime colonialism,” or, more provocatively, as “gunboat diplomacy.” Christopher Columbus set out across the oceans with three ships, Vasco da Gama with four, and Magellan with five; Zheng He’s fleets had two to three hundred different boats. These huge armadas enjoyed “the best and most advanced firearms in the world,” as Wade puts it. Zheng He projected political influence across Southeast Asia not through the inventiveness of Chinese products or the benevolence of Chinese rule, but through a show of naval power that could not be matched. His forces became involved in a civil war in northern Sumatra and in another conflict in Java. In one incident, Zheng He intervened in a conflict in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), destroying its military before capturing the king and his family members and bringing them back to Nanjing. The military nature of his voyages also left its mark on Malacca. The Chinese used Malacca not just as a place to store goods, Wade argues, but as the site of a semi-permanent military garrison, which Zheng He used to control the traffic along the Strait of Malacca. Even then, policing the strait was an important way of imposing the will of the Ming Empire on the states in the region that relied on maritime commerce. If Wade is correct, that would make Malacca China’s first overseas naval base.