On China (67 page)

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Authors: Henry Kissinger

BOOK: On China
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The cultivation of harmony did not preclude the pursuit of strategic advantage. At a July 2009 conference of Chinese diplomats, Hu Jintao delivered a major speech assessing the new trends. He affirmed that the first twenty years of the twenty-first century were still a “strategic opportunity period” for China; this much, he said, had not changed. But in the wake of the financial crisis and other seismic shifts, Hu suggested that the
shi
was now in flux. In light of the “complex and deep changes” now underway, “there have been some new changes in the opportunities and challenges we are facing.” The opportunities ahead would be “important”; the challenges would be “severe.” If China guarded against potential pitfalls and managed its affairs diligently, the period of upheaval might be turned to its advantage:
Since entering the new century and the new stage, internationally there has been a series of major events of a comprehensive and strategic nature, which have had a significant and far-reaching influence on all aspects of the international political and economic situation. Looking at the world, peace and development are still the main theme of the times, but the competition for comprehensive national power is becoming more intense; the demands of an expanding number of developing countries to participate equally in international affairs are growing stronger by the day; calls to bring about the democratization of international relations are becoming louder; the international financial crisis has caused the current world economic and financial system and the world economic governance structure to receive a major shock; the prospects for global multipolarity have grown clearer; the international situation has produced some new features and trends worthy of extremely close attention.
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With world affairs in a state of flux, China’s task was to dispassionately analyze and navigate the new configuration. Out of the crisis, opportunities might arise. But what were these opportunities?
The National Destiny Debate—The Triumphalist View
China’s encounter with the modern, Western-designed international system has evoked in the Chinese elites a special tendency in which they debate—with exceptional thoroughness and analytical ability—their national destiny and overarching strategy for achieving it. The world is witnessing, in effect, a new stage in a national dialogue about the nature of Chinese power, influence, and aspirations that has gone on fitfully since the West first pried open China’s doors. China’s previous national-destiny debates occurred during periods of exceptional Chinese vulnerability; the current debate is occasioned not by China’s peril but by its strength. After an uncertain and sometimes harrowing journey, China is finally arriving at the vision cherished by reformers and revolutionaries over the past two centuries: a prosperous China wielding modern military capacities while preserving its distinctive values.
The previous stages of the national-destiny debate asked whether China should reach outward for knowledge to rectify its weakness or turn inward, away from an impure if technologically stronger world. The current stage of the debate is based on the recognition that the great project of self-strengthening has succeeded and China is catching up with the West. It seeks to define the terms on which China should interact with a world that—in the view of even many of China’s contemporary liberal internationalists—gravely wronged China and from whose depredations China is now recovering.
As the economic crisis spread across the West in the period after the Olympics, new voices—both unofficial and quasi-official—began to challenge the thesis of China’s “peaceful rise.” In this view, Hu’s analysis of strategic trends was correct, but the West remained a dangerous force that would never allow China to rise harmoniously. It thus behooved China to consolidate its gains and assert its claims to world power and even superpower status.
Two widely read Chinese books symbolize that trend: an essay collection titled
China Is Unhappy: The Great Era, the Grand Goal, and Our Internal Anxieties and External Challenges
(2009), and
China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era
(2010). Both books are deeply nationalistic. Both start from the assumption that the West is much weaker than previously thought, but that “some foreigners have not yet woken up; they have not truly understood that a power shift is taking place in Sino-Western relations.”
15
In this view, it is thus up to China to shake off its self-doubt and passivity, abandon gradualism, and recover its historic sense of mission by means of a “grand goal.”
Both books have been criticized in the Chinese press and in anonymous postings on Chinese websites as irresponsible and not reflecting the views of the great majority of Chinese. But both books made it past governmental review and became best-sellers in China, so they presumably reflect the views of at least some portion of China’s institutional structure. This is particularly true in the case of
China Dream,
written by Liu Mingfu, a PLA Senior Colonel and professor at China’s National Defense University. The books are presented here not because they represent official Chinese government policy—indeed, they are contrary to what President Hu has strongly affirmed in his U.N. address and during his January 2011 state visit in Washington—but because they crystallize certain impulses to which the Chinese government has felt itself obliged to respond.
A representative essay in
China Is Unhappy
sets out the basic thesis. Its title posits that “America is not a paper tiger”—as Mao tauntingly used to call it—but rather “an old cucumber painted green.”
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The author, Song Xiaojun, starts from the premise that even under the present circumstances, the United States and the West remain a dangerous and fundamentally adversarial force:
Countless facts have already proven that the West will never abandon its treasured technique of “commerce at bayonetpoint,” which it has refined over the course of several hundred years. Do you think it is possible that if you “return the weapons to the storehouse and put the war-horses out to pasture”
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that this will convince [the West] to simply drop their weapons and trade with you peacefully?
18
After thirty years of rapid Chinese economic development, Song urges, China is in a position of strength: “more and more of the masses and the youth” are realizing that “now the opportunity is coming.”
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After the financial crisis, he writes, Russia has become more interested in fostering its relations with China; Europe is moving in a similar direction. American export controls are now essentially irrelevant because China already possesses most of the technology it needs to become a comprehensively industrialized power and will soon have an agricultural, industrial, and “post-industrial” economic base of its own—in other words, it will no longer be reliant on the products or the goodwill of others.
The author appeals to the nationalist youth and masses to rise to the occasion, and he contrasts the current elites unfavorably with them: “What a good opportunity to become a comprehensively industrialized country, to become known as a country that wants to rise and change the world’s unjust and irrational political and economic system—how is it that there are no elites to think of it! ”
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PLA Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu’s 2010
China Dream
defines a national “grand goal”: to “become number one in the world,” restoring China to a modern version of its historic glory. This, he writes, will require displacing the United States.
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China’s rise, Liu prophesies, will usher in a golden age of Asian prosperity in which Chinese products, culture, and values set the standard for the world. The world will be harmonious because China’s leadership will be wiser and more temperate than America’s, and because China will eschew hegemony and limit its role to acting as
primus inter pares
of the nations of the world.
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(In a separate passage, Liu comments favorably on the role of traditional Chinese Emperors, whom he describes as acting as a kind of benevolent “elder brother” to smaller and weaker countries’ kings.)
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Liu rejects the concept of a “peaceful rise,” arguing that China cannot rely solely on its traditional virtues of harmony to secure the new international order. Due to the competitive and amoral nature of great power politics, he writes, China’s rise—and a peaceful world—can be safeguarded only if China nurtures a “martial spirit” and amasses military force sufficient to deter or, if necessary, defeat its adversaries. Therefore, he posits, China needs a “military rise” in addition to its “economic rise.”
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It must be prepared, both militarily and psychologically, to struggle and prevail in a contest for strategic preeminence.
The publication of these books coincided with a series of crises and tensions in the South China Sea, with Japan, and over the borders of India, in such close succession and of a sufficiently common character as to prompt speculation whether the episodes were the product of a deliberate policy. Though in each case there is a version of events in which China is the wronged party, the crises themselves constitute a stage in the ongoing Chinese debate about China’s regional and world role.
The books discussed here, including the criticisms of China’s supposedly passive “elites,” could not have been published or become a national cause célèbre had the elites prohibited publication. Was this one ministry’s way of influencing policy? Does it reflect the attitudes of the generation too young to have lived through the Cultural Revolution as adults? Did the leadership allow the debate to drift as a kind of psychological gambit, so that the world would understand China’s internal pressures and begin to take account of them? Or is this just an example of China becoming more pluralistic, allowing a greater multiplicity of voices, and of the reviewers happening to be generally more tolerant of nationalist voices?
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Dai Bingguo—A Reaffirmation of Peaceful Rise
China’s leaders decided to take a hand in the debate at this point, to demonstrate that the published triumphalism is far from the mood of the leadership. In December 2010, State Councilor Dai Bingguo (the highest-ranking official overseeing China’s foreign policy) entered the lists with a comprehensive statement of policy.
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With the title “Persisting with Taking the Path of Peaceful Development,” Dai’s article may be seen as a response both to foreign observers concerned that China harbors aggressive intentions, and to those within China—including, one posits, some in the Chinese leadership structure—who argue that China
should
adopt a more insistent posture.
Peaceful development, Dai argues, is neither a ruse by which China “hides its brightness and bides its time” (as some non-Chinese now suspect) nor a naive delusion that forfeits China’s advantages (as some within China now charge). It is China’s genuine and enduring policy because it best serves Chinese interests and comports with the international strategic situation:
Persisting with taking the path of peaceful development is not the product of a subjective imagination or of some kind of calculations. Rather, it is the result of our profound recognition that both the world today and China today have undergone tremendous changes as well as that China’s relations with the world today have also undergone great changes; hence it is necessary to make the best of the situation and adapt to the changes.
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The world, Dai observes, has grown smaller, and major issues now require an unprecedented degree of global interaction. Global cooperation is, therefore, in China’s self-interest; it is not a strategy for advancing a purely national policy. Dai continues with what could be read as a standard affirmation of the demand of the people of the world for peace and cooperation—though in context, it is more likely a warning about the obstacles a militant China would face (probably it is addressed to both audiences):
Because of economic globalization and the in-depth development of informatization, as well as the rapid advances in science and technology, the world has become increasingly “smaller” and has turned into a “global village.” With the interaction and interdependence of all countries as well as the intersection of interests reaching an unprecedented level, their common interests have become more extensive, the problems which require them joining hands to address them have multiplied, and the aspirations for mutually beneficial cooperation have grown stronger.
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China, he writes, can thrive in such a situation because it is broadly integrated into the world. In the past thirty years it has grown by linking its talents and resources to a broader international system, not as a tactical device but as a means of fulfilling the necessities of the contemporary period:
Contemporary China is undergoing broad and profound changes. Following more than 30 years of reform and opening up, we have shifted from “class struggle as the key” to economic construction as the central task as we comprehensively carry out the cause of socialist modernization. We have shifted from engaging in a planned economy to promoting reform in all aspects as we build a socialist market economic system. We have shifted from a state of isolation and one-sided emphasis on self-reliance to opening up to the outside world and development of international cooperation.
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These “earthshaking” changes require that China abandon the vestiges of Mao’s doctrine of absolute self-reliance, which would isolate China. If China fails to correctly analyze the situation and, as Dai insists, “very satisfactorily manage our relations with the external world,” then the chances offered by the current strategic opportunity period “may likely be lost.” China, Dai emphasizes, “is a member of the big international family.” Beyond representing simply moral aspirations, China’s harmonious and cooperative policies “are what are most compatible with our interests and those of other countries.”
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Lingering beneath the surface of this analysis, though never stated directly, is the recognition that China has a host of neighbors with significant military and economic capacities of their own, and that China’s relations with almost all of them have deteriorated over the past one to two years—a trend the Chinese leadership is seeking to reverse.

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