On China (4 page)

The Emperor’s second, metaphysical, role was his status as the “Son of Heaven,” the symbolic intermediary between Heaven, Earth, and humanity. This role also implied moral obligation on the Emperor’s part. Through humane conduct, performance of correct rituals, and occasional stern punishments, the Emperor was perceived as the linchpin of the “Great Harmony” of all things great and small. If the Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.
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Just as there are no great cathedrals in China, there are no Blenheim Palaces. Aristocratic political grandees like the Duke of Marlborough, who built Blenheim, did not come into being. Europe entered the modern age a welter of political diversity—independent princes and dukes and counts, cities that governed themselves, the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed an authority outside of state purview, and Protestant groups, which aspired to building their own self-governing civil societies. By contrast, when it entered the modern period, China had for well over one thousand years a fully formed imperial bureaucracy recruited by competitive examination, permeating and regulating all aspects of the economy and society.

The Chinese approach to world order was thus vastly different from the system that took hold in the West. The modern Western conception of international relations emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the medieval structure of Europe dissolved into a group of states of approximately equal strength, and the Catholic Church split into various denominations. Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy.

China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude. That the Chinese Empire should tower over its geographical sphere was taken virtually as a law of nature, an expression of the Mandate of Heaven. For Chinese Emperors, the mandate did not necessarily imply an adversarial relationship with neighboring peoples; preferably it did not. Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world. It confined itself to controlling the barbarians immediately at its doorstep. It strove for tributary states like Korea to recognize China’s special status, and in return, it conferred benefits such as trading rights. As for the remote barbarians such as Europeans, about whom they knew little, the Chinese maintained a friendly, if condescending, aloofness. They had little interest in converting them to Chinese ways. The founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty expressed this view in 1372: “Countries of the western ocean are rightly called distant regions. They come [to us] across the seas. And it is difficult for them to calculate the year and month [of arrival]. Regardless of their numbers, we treat them [on the principle of] ‘those who come modestly are sent off generously.’”
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The Chinese Emperors felt it was impractical to contemplate influencing countries that nature had given the misfortune of locating at such a great distance from China. In the Chinese version of exceptionalism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them. Neighboring peoples, the Chinese believed, benefited from contact with China and civilization so long as they acknowledged the suzerainty of the Chinese government. Those who did not were barbarian. Subservience to the Emperor and observance of imperial rituals was the core of culture.
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When the empire was strong, this cultural sphere expanded: All Under Heaven was a multinational entity comprising the ethnic Han Chinese majority and numerous non-Han Chinese ethnic groups.

In official Chinese records, foreign envoys did not come to the imperial court to engage in negotiations or affairs of state; they “came to be transformed” by the Emperor’s civilizing influence. The Emperor did not hold “summit meetings” with other heads of state; instead, audiences with him represented the “tender cherishing of men from afar,” who brought tribute to recognize his overlordship. When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but “Heavenly Envoys” from the Celestial Court.

The organization of the Chinese government reflected the hierarchical approach to world order. China handled ties with tribute-paying states such as Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam through the Ministry of Rituals, implying that diplomacy with these peoples was but one aspect of the larger metaphysical task of administering the Great Harmony. With less Sinicized mounted tribes to the north and west, China came to rely on a “Court of Dependencies,” analogous to a colonial office, whose mission was to invest vassal princes with titles and maintain peace on the frontier.
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Only under the pressure of Western incursions in the nineteenth century did China establish something analogous to a foreign ministry to manage diplomacy as an independent function of government, in 1861 after the defeat in two wars with the Western powers. It was considered a temporary necessity, to be abolished once the immediate crisis subsided. The new ministry was deliberately located in an old and undistinguished building previously used by the Department of Iron Coins, to convey, in the words of the leading Qing Dynasty statesman, Prince Gong, “the hidden meaning that it cannot have a standing equal to that of other traditional government offices, thus preserving the distinction between China and foreign countries.”
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European-style ideas of interstate politics and diplomacy were not unknown in the Chinese experience; rather, they existed as a kind of countertradition taking place within China in times of disunity. But as if by some unwritten law, these periods of division ended with the reunification of All Under Heaven, and the reassertion of Chinese centrality by a new dynasty.

In its imperial role, China offered surrounding foreign peoples impartiality, not equality: it would treat them humanely and compassionately in proportion to their attainment of Chinese culture and their observance of rituals connoting submission to China.

What was most remarkable about the Chinese approach to international affairs was less its monumental formal pretensions than its underlying strategic acumen and longevity. For during most of Chinese history, the numerous “lesser” peoples along China’s long and shifting frontiers were often better armed and more mobile than the Chinese. To China’s north and west were seminomadic peoples—the Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and eventually the expansionist Russian Empire—whose mounted cavalry could launch raids across its extended frontiers on China’s agricultural heartland with relative impunity. Retaliatory expeditions faced inhospitable terrain and extended supply lines. To China’s south and east were peoples who, though nominally subordinate in the Chinese cosmology, possessed significant martial traditions and national identities. The most tenacious of them, the Vietnamese, had fiercely resisted Chinese claims of superiority and could claim to have bested China in battle.

China was in no position to conquer all of its neighbors. Its population consisted mainly of farmers bound to their ancestral plots. Its mandarin elite earned their positions not through displays of martial valor but by way of mastery of the Confucian classics and refined arts such as calligraphy and poetry. Individually, neighboring peoples could pose formidable threats; with any degree of unity, they would be overwhelming. The historian Owen Lattimore wrote, “Barbarian invasion therefore hung over China as a permanent threat. . . . Any barbarian nation that could guard its own rear and flanks against the other barbarians could set out confidently to invade China.”
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China’s vaunted centrality and material wealth would turn on itself and into an invitation for invasion from all sides.

The Great Wall, so prominent in Western iconography of China, was a reflection of this basic vulnerability, though rarely a successful solution to it. Instead, Chinese statesmen relied on a rich array of diplomatic and economic instruments to draw potentially hostile foreigners into relationships the Chinese could manage. The highest aspiration was less to conquer (though China occasionally mounted major military campaigns) than to deter invasion and prevent the formation of barbarian coalitions.

Through trade incentives and skillful use of political theater, China coaxed neighboring peoples into observing the norms of Chinese centrality while projecting an image of awesome majesty to deter potential invaders from testing China’s strength. Its goal was not to conquer and subjugate the barbarians but to “rule [them] with a loose rein” (
ji mi
). For those who would not obey, China would exploit divisions among them, famously “using barbarians to check barbarians” and, when necessary, “using barbarians to attack barbarians.”
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For as a Ming Dynasty official wrote of the potentially threatening tribes on China’s northeastern frontier:

The goal of this system was essentially defensive: to prevent the formation of coalitions on China’s borders. The principles of barbarian management became so ingrained in Chinese official thought that when the European “barbarians” arrived on China’s shores in force in the nineteenth century, Chinese officials described their challenge with the same phrases used by their dynastic predecessors: they would “use barbarians against barbarians” until they could be soothed and subdued. And they applied a traditional strategy to answer the initial British attack. They invited other European countries in for the purpose of first stimulating and then manipulating their rivalry.

In pursuit of these aims, the Chinese court was remarkably pragmatic about the means it employed. The Chinese bribed the barbarians, or used Han demographic superiority to dilute them; when defeated, they submitted to them, as in the beginning of the Yuan and Qing Dynasties, as a prelude to Sinicizing them. The Chinese court regularly practiced what in other contexts would be considered appeasement, albeit through an elaborate filter of protocol that allowed the Chinese elites to claim it was an assertion of benevolent superiority. Thus a Han Dynasty minister described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier:

In periods of strength, the diplomacy of the Middle Kingdom was an ideological rationalization for imperial power. During periods of decline, it served to mask weakness and helped China manipulate contending forces.

In comparison to more recent regional contenders for power, China was a satisfied empire with limited territorial ambition. As a scholar during the Han Dynasty (A.D. 25–220) put it, “the emperor does not govern the barbarians. Those who come to him will not be rejected, and those who leave will not be pursued.”
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The objective was a compliant, divided periphery, rather than one directly under Chinese control.

The most remarkable expression of China’s fundamental pragmatism was its reaction to conquerors. When foreign dynasts prevailed in battle, the Chinese bureaucratic elite would offer their services and appeal to their conquerors on the premise that so vast and unique a land as they had just overrun could be ruled only by use of Chinese methods, Chinese language, and the existing Chinese bureaucracy. With each generation, the conquerors would find themselves increasingly assimilated into the order they had sought to dominate. Eventually their own home territories—the launching points for their invasions—would come to be regarded as part of China itself. They would find themselves pursuing traditional Chinese national interests, with the project of conquest effectively turned on its head.
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The Chinese have been shrewd practitioners of
Realpolitik
and students of a strategic doctrine distinctly different from the strategy and diplomacy that found favor in the West. A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe. There were too many potential enemies for the empire ever to live in total security. If China’s fate was relative security, it also implied relative insecurity—the need to learn the grammar of over a dozen neighboring states with significantly different histories and aspirations. Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.