by Bruno Maçães
Be that as it may, China has a number of indisputable achievements to show for itself in recent decades: many hundreds of millions of people were pulled out of poverty—or better put, pulled themselves out of poverty—while Chinese society modernized quickly, developing new technology and building infrastructure that now seems to overshadow that of the West. It must be possible to theorize these achievements, discover what explains them, the political and social traits behind China’s rise, and then these could plausibly be applied elsewhere.
Popular Chinese authors such as Zhang Weiwei argue that the Western model has failed by not being able to provide for a genuine separation of powers. In a modern state, he writes, at least three powers are permanently interacting with each other, thus shaping the trajectory and the fate of that country: political, social and financial. Indeed, a modern political system of good governance should be able to guarantee that there be an equilibrium of the political, social and capital powers to act in favor of the interests of the majority. In the case of the United States, predominance of financial power over political and social powers have sapped the strength of system and perhaps even poisoned the American dream.
What then explains China’s success, what are the political values underpinning its dramatic rise over the past three decades? Zhang seems to think the fundamental value is the spirit of “seeking truth from facts,” which he is convinced has been abandoned by Western societies. There are so many ideological taboos in Western political and social life and to be politically correct has become far more important than to be able to “grasp reality.” Is this because democracy and the knowledge of reality have come into contradiction, because ideas that are acceptable to all have become more important that true ideas? Zhang does not spell it out, but he believes that only the ability to grasp reality can provide a solid basis for politics. In its absence the clash of different sources of power and opposing social groups will lead to chaos and disorder. Different interest groups will battle for power, each using every political and legal tool to prevent reforms and protect its privileges.
In a spectacular reversal of our traditional assumptions, Western societies appear captured by the status quo, unable to embrace change and in mortal danger of losing their dynamism. China, by contrast, represents social and economic improvement or, as Zhang calls it, good governance. The West wants to prevent certain outcomes—democracy and rights are meant to prevent the illegitimate use of power—while China wants to bring about positive outcomes. Churchill’s famous dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried may be appealing in the Western cultural context. For Zhang, the Chinese path is not to avoid the worst but to strive for the best.35 In the old quarrel between philosophy and democracy, China seems to be siding with philosophy.
In an essay published in the Guangzhou journal Open Times in January 2018, the Peking University constitutional lawyer Jiang Shigong tries to show why Xi Jinping’s thought provides the right framework for a new historical period when China will occupy the center of the world system. ‘Standing up’, ‘getting rich’, and ‘becoming powerful’ are ways to divide the histories of the Party and the Republic, referring respectively to the Mao Zedong era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and the Xi Jinping era that we are currently entering. History does not unfold naturally; it is created by “leaders leading people.” Western thought may attempt to obscure this truth, in which case it is Western thought that must be overcome. As Jiang puts it, the construction of China’s rule of law gradually fell into the erroneous zone of Western concepts in the process of studying the Western rule of law, and consciously or not, the notions of ‘rule of law’ and ‘rule of man’ came to be seen as antagonistic. “We overly fetishized legal dogma and institutional reforms and came to understand the rule of law simplistically as a machine in which rules functioned automatically, overlooking the fact that if we want to use ‘good laws’ to carry out ‘good governance’ then we need good social culture and moral values to systematically support the effective functioning of legal institutions and regulations.”
Faced with the Western ban on truly creative human action and decisions, China sees itself as embracing the openness of history and the inception of a new age. The Belt and Road takes its significance from the search for the future of human civilization. Whether Chinese civilization will make new contributions to all of mankind remains of course to be seen—the story of the century is only now beginning—but its efforts take place in the realm of those world-changing or world-shaping endeavors providing humanity with a future vision of an ideal life, endeavors the West was once capable of but whose creative springs now reside elsewhere. This means not only the end to the global political landscape of Western civilization’s domination since the age of great discoveries, but also breaking the global dominance of Western civilization in the past half a millennium in the cultural sense, and hence ushering in a new era in human progress.36
Zhang Weiwei and Jiang Shigong may be right or wrong on these points of doctrine. That in the end is not the question. What their arguments show is that, far from suffering from a dearth of alternatives, we have too many universal values to choose from and they are evidently not compatible or even fully commensurable between them.
When discussing world politics today, we often revert to one of two models. The first, popularized by Francis Fukuyama, sees the whole world converging to a European or Western political framework, after which no further historical development is possible. Every country or region is measured by the time it will still take to reach this final destination, but all doubts and debates about where we are heading have been fundamentally resolved. The other model, defended by Samuel Huntington, is skeptical of such irreversible movement. The world it depicts is that of a clash between different civilizations having little or nothing in common, particularly since Western political culture will remain geographically limited. But there is a third way, which I tried to develop in my book The Dawn of Eurasia. I agree with Fukuyama that the whole world is on the path to modern society, but there are numerous paths and, naturally, different visions of what a modern society looks like.
Everyone is modern now, but there are different models of modern society. From this fact the essential terms of the new world order follow more or less directly. The hard distinction between modern and traditional has broken down, giving way to a deeply integrated world, but its most distinctive trait is the incessant competition between different ideas of how worldwide networks should be organized.
* * *
Let us recapitulate our four scenarios. In the first, China is gradually integrated into the liberal world order. Its political model converges with that of Western liberal democracies, even as it continues to show some distinctive traits. Its economy grows, reaching parity with the United States and approaching Western standards of living. The two countries effectively rule the world economy together, but on other dimensions of global power—political, military, cultural—China does not attempt to overturn American hegemony.
In the second scenario, China replaces the United States as the center of global power, but everything else remains more or less the same. The Chinese political and economic model converges with Western patterns—but less drastically than in the first scenario—and, more importantly, the liberal world order survives unscathed: multilateral institutions, open trade, international cooperation on common challenges and even some form of individual and community rights.
The third scenario is one where China takes over from the Unites States as the center of global power with the result that the very structure and values of the world system are rethought and reconfigured. The liberal world order is replaced with a Chinese order, Western values give way to Chinese values and the pace of historical development is increasingly dictated from Beijing.
In the fourth scenario two visions of the world order are forced to coexist: China and the United States need to reach some kind of balance, eith
er through a division of the world into two distinct spheres of influence or as some combination or compound where integration goes together with conflict and rivalry.
The year is 2049, one hundred years after the founding of the People’s Republic. Following its century of national humiliation, China stood up, became rich, and ultimately grew more and more powerful. The Belt and Road is complete. That does not mean it will stop or disappear. It is concluded in the same way a bridge or a road is built. Its development is finished and it is ready to start working or operating at full power. Some of the infrastructure projects are truly stunning and now stand as the highest example of what human ingenuity can achieve in its drive to master natural forces. A bridge crossing the Caspian Sea—200 km from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan—has made road transport between Europe and China fast and easy, changing old mental maps separating continents. The Kra Isthmus Canal in Thailand has done the same for the Indian and Pacific Oceans. No longer do we think of them as two separate oceans. Sea transportation is now entirely conducted by autonomous seafaring freighters. Shipyards based in southern China have dominated the “ghost ship” market ever since the first model, the Somersault Cloud, named after the magical cloud that transports the Monkey King in the classic Chinese saga Journey to the West. In Africa a high-speed railway connects the two coasts, traversing Djibouti, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Cameroon in under twenty hours. Trade between Africa, Asia and South America increasingly uses this route.
In the meantime, the third segment of the initiative, announced in its second decade, is progressing apace. Self-driving vehicles on land, sea and air and trillions of connected devices worldwide are already empowered by a Belt, Road and Space fleet of China-centered satellites. China now regularly flies reusable space planes and has them carry taikonauts and freight into space. More dramatically, a nuclear-powered spacecraft has been used for the first manned Chinese Martian mission. Chinese companies regularly engage in deep-space economic activity, like building orbit solar power plants, and mining asteroids and the moon. As the head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, Ye Peijian, remarked, “the universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to.” Satellites equipped with new quantum sensor technologies are able to identify and track targets that were once invisible from space, such as stealth bombers taking off at night. Ghost imaging satellites have two cameras, one aiming at the targeted area of interest with a bucket-like, single-pixel sensor while the other camera measures variations in a wider field of light across the environment. Nothing can hide from them.
On earth, new cities have grown in once desolate or forbidden landscapes. They have already gone through many stages of transformation: logistics hubs ravaged by crime and corruption to booming immigration metropoles attracting vast influxes of migrants and refugees spurned by the United States and the European Union and finally economic powerhouses of low regulation where successive technological revolutions take no more than a few years. Many successful entrepreneurs have moved to new cities in Central Asia in order to be equally close to China and Europe. Many of the new cities have sizable Chinese populations. These Chinese expats are the entrepreneurs and investment bankers, the trend setters and technology prophets. In many countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, Mandarin has already replaced English as the international lingua franca.
Global Energy Interconnection, a Belt and Road project, has created an intercontinental energy grid, so as to optimize large-scale allocation of clean energy, across wide areas and with high efficiency setting up global regulation and control systems, so that the intercontinental and transnational electricity trade volume accounts for almost half of global electricity consumption. By 2030, the interconnections of Africa-Europe, Asia-Europe and Asia-Africa were formed; by 2040, the interconnections of North America-South America, Oceania-Asia and Asia-North America; by 2049, the interconnection of Europe-North America, and the whole planet relies on a few clean energy bases, including those in the Arctic, the wind power base, and the Equator, the solar power base.
Is this still a recognizable world? Is it still the world we live in today, only more balanced and more divided between different economic poles in Europe, Asia and America? Is it the world of globalization as we have come to know it? In her own “speculative leap into Eurasia’s future,” Nadège Rolland describes a world where people do not “google,” have a Facebook or Twitter account, or watch the news on CNN or the BBC. Instead, they “baidu,” use Weibo for their social connections, and watch China Global Television Network. Children do not play “cowboys and Indians” but mimic the exploits of the Monkey King, one of their favorite heroes from the Journey to the West tale. Eurasian youths seek acceptance to the highly regarded universities of Beijing, Xian, Urumqi, and Kunming, whose degrees are recognized across the region. These schools offer substantial scholarships to the best and most promising students of the region and give a guarantee of employment in the local branches of Chinese state-owned enterprises.37 The description is of course inspired by the existing world order and tries to project a future where China has replaced the United States, but the essential shape of things—institutions, values, and relations—remains largely unmodified. The differences are limited to what China lacks by contrast to the current ruler of the system—Rolland mentions freedom of speech and individual rights—as if a few items of furniture have been lost during the house move and spring cleaning.
Similarly, Jonathan Holslag imagines a future Asian order replicating more or less perfectly the European order we know from the last few decades, with China occupying the core, as Germany and France do in Europe. The area from Shanghai to Chengdu and from Shenyang to Kunming would have turned into a densely developed zone, saturated with middle classes, and boasting advanced industries, internationally renowned brands, and quality services. Fast trains and airlines would channel millions of tourists to quiet or quaint places, to Tibet, emerging as the Chinese Pyrenees, to the Northeast, the future Chinese Alps, to Xinjiang, the new Andalusia, and to the southern beaches, China’s Club Med. China’s new multinationals would have tied all other Asian countries to the motherland by means of roads, railways, pipelines and financial flows. Japan’s fate would be comparable to a depopulating version of the United Kingdom, quietly musing on its glorious past. Southeast Asia, China’s Italy, would be vibrant and enthralling, yet heavily penetrated by Chinese companies, banks, and high-livers. The stretch from Bangladesh to Kazakhstan could well be China’s Northern Africa and Middle East…38
This is unlikely. The kind of transformation we are speculating about here would change everything. The system itself would be differently organized and the goals and values inspiring it would be radically different. The new world would not be one where one piece on the chessboard will be replaced, not even one where the pieces will have been reorganized. It will be a world built anew by very different people and according to very different ideas. David Rennie, Beijing bureau chief for The Economist, gets somewhat closer to the truth in his forecasting exercise, projected to 2024. Like Rolland, Rennie starts by imagining a dystopian negation of the West. China’s intelligence services, working with the country’s technology firms, have turned millions of cars in America, Europe and Asia into remote spying devices, letting Beijing track vehicles in real time and identify passengers with facial-recognition technology. A new international organization, the Global Infrastructure Center, decides which schemes are eligible for billions of dollars in Chinese loans and grants, and picks foreign firms as partners using opaque rules devised by Communist Party planners. But Rennie goes on to describe how the new Chinese-led global economic order is based on fundamentally different ideas and principles. New international courts have been created and they draw no distinction between nat
ions with state-directed and market economies. Its judges take a benign view of subsidies that claim to support national development and believe that sovereign governments, rather than individual businesses, should have the final say in patent disputes. “Rarely mounting direct challenges, China has instead tested, probed and introduced ambiguities into every aspect of global governance. Established powers have not so much acquiesced as proved too weary to resist.”39
There is another respect in which the Belt and Road as dysto-pian scenario fails to convince: the way it is predicated on the supposition of a wholesale collapse of the Western political order. The way in which Rolland, for example, defines the future Chinese order as a negation of the West seems to refer us to a previous moment—which she coyly refrains from mentioning—when the two alternatives fought for supremacy, or then a previous moment when the West, consumed by internal conflict and disorder, collapsed on its own. Now, as I argued in The Dawn of Eurasia, such a scenario seems unlikely at present and, what is more, seems bound to remain unlikely. This chapter and the preceding one sought to explain why this is the case: one cannot extrapolate from China’s extraordinary rise over the past four decades to the shape of future events and developments. On the one hand, the challenges China faces now are fundamentally different in nature—political more than economic, with security concerns raising their ugly head. On the other, that very rise or expansion creates new variables—reactions, responses, changes of attitude, as other countries increasingly regard China as a threat or, at the very least, a competitor.