When China Rules the World (73 page)

Sixth, Chinese modernity, like other East Asian modernities, is distinguished by the speed of the country’s transformation. It combines, in a way quite different from the Western experience of modernity, the past and the future at one and the same time in the present. In Chapter 5, I described the Asian tigers as time-compression societies. Habituated to rapid change, they are instinctively more at ease with the new and the future than is the case in the West, especially Europe. They embrace the new in the same way that a child approaches a computer or a Nintendo games console, with confidence and expectancy - in contrast to European societies, which are more wary, even fearful, of the new, in the manner of an adult presented with an unfamiliar technological gadget. The reason is that East Asian societies have not been through all the various sequential development stages - and their accompanying technological phases - that have been typical of Europe and North America, so the collective mind is less filled and formatted by older ways of doing things. China’s version of modernity, however, by virtue of the country’s size, must also be seen as distinct from those of other East Asian societies. While countries like Taiwan and South Korea took around thirty years to move from being largely rural to becoming overwhelmingly urban, around half of China’s population still live in the countryside some three decades after 1978, and it will be at least another twenty years before this figure declines to around 20 per cent. This makes China’s passage to modernity not only more protracted than that of its neighbours but also more complex, with various stages of development continuing to coexist over many decades as a result of the persistence of a large rural sector. This is reflected in the often sharp divergence in living standards between different provinces. This juxtaposition of different levels of economic development serves to accentuate the importance and impact of the past, the countryside providing a continuous feedback loop from history. It makes China, a country already deeply engaged with its own past, even more aware of its history.

Seventh, since 1949 China has been ruled by a Communist regime. Paradoxically, perhaps the two most significant dates of the last half-century embody what are seemingly entirely contradictory events: 1989, marking the collapse of European Communism and the demise of the Soviet bloc; and 1978, signalling not only the beginning of the most remarkable economic transformation in history but also one presided over by a Communist Party. The first represents the end of a momentous era, the second the beginning of what may prove to be an even more remarkable period. Given the opprobrium attaching to Communism in the West, especially after 1989, it is not surprising that this has greatly coloured Western attitudes towards the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Tiananmen Square suppression occurred in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, following the events of 1989, the Western consensus held, quite mistakenly, that the Chinese Communist Party was also doomed to fail. Western attitudes towards China continue to be highly influenced by the fact that it is ruled by a Communist Party; the stain seems likely to persist for a long time to come, if not indefinitely. In the light of recent Chinese experience, however, Communism must be viewed in a more pluralistic manner than was previously the case: the Chinese Communist Party is very different from its Soviet equivalent and, since 1978, has pursued an entirely different strategy. It has displayed a flexibility and pragmatism which was alien to the Soviet Party. Nor is it clear what the fate of the Chinese Party might be: could it metamor phose into something different (which to some extent it already has), to the point of even changing its name? Whatever the longer term may hold, the Chinese Communist Party, in presiding over the transformation of the country, will leave a profound imprint on Chinese modernity and also on the wider world. It has created and re-created the modern Chinese state; it reunited China after a century of disunity; it played the critical role in the defeat of Japanese colonialism; and it invented and managed the strategy that has finally given China the promise, after a century or more of decline, of restoring its status and power in the world to something resembling the days of the Middle Kingdom. In so doing, it has also succeeded in reconnecting China to its history, to Confucianism and its dynastic heyday. Arguably all great historical transformations involve such a reconnection with the past if they are to be successful. The affinities between the Communist conception of the state and the Confucian, as outlined earlier, are particularly striking in this respect. Given that Confucian principles had reigned for two millennia, the Chinese Communist Party, in order to prevail, needed, amongst other things, to find a way of reinventing and re-creating those principles.

Eighth, China will, for several decades to come, combine the characteristics of both a developed and a developing country. This will be a unique condition for one of the major global powers and stems from the fact that China’s modernization will be a protracted process because of the country’s size: in conventional terms, China’s transformation is that of a continent, with continental-style disparities, rather than that of a country. The result is a modernity tempered by and interacting with relative rural backwardness, and such a state of bifurcation will have numerous economic, political and cultural consequences. Chinese modernity cannot, and will not be able to, ignore the fact that a large segment of the country will continue to live in what is, in effect, a different historical period. We have already mentioned how this will bring China face to face with its own past for decades to come. But it also has implications for how China will see its own interests and its relationship with other countries. Of necessity, it will regard itself as both a developing and a developed country, with the interests of both. This will find expression in many areas, including the debate over China’s responsibilities concerning climate change. Over time, of course, the weight of the developing section of the economy, and the number of people that are employed in or dependent upon it, will decline, and China will increasingly behave as a developed country rather than a combination of the two. But for the next half-century it will continue to display the interests and characteristics of both, an outlook which is likely to be reinforced by the sense of grievance that China feels about its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of Japan and the Western powers, especially its experience of colonization. China, in fact, will be the first great power that comes from the ‘wrong’ side of the great divide in the world during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, a creature of the colonized rather than the colonizers, the losers rather than the winners. This experience, and the outlook it has engendered, will be an integral part of the Chinese mentality in the era of modernity, and will strongly influence its behaviour as a global power.

A broader point can be made in this context. If the twentieth-century world was shaped by the developed countries, then that of the twenty-first century is likely to be moulded by the developing countries, especially the largest ones. This has significant historical implications. There have been many suggestions as to what constituted the most important event of the twentieth century: three of the most oft-cited candidates are the 1917 October Revolution, 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 1945 and the defeat of fascism. Such choices are always influenced by contemporary circumstances; in the last decade of the last century, 1989 seemed an obvious choice, just as 1917 did in the first half of the century. As we near the end of the first decade of the new century another, rarely mentioned candidate now presents itself in the strongest possible terms. The rise of the developing world was only made possible by the end of colonialism. For the non-industrial world, the colonial era overwhelmingly served to block the possibility of their industrialization. The imperial powers had no interest in creating competition for their own industries. That does not mean that the effects of colonialism were entirely negative, though in some cases, notably that of Africa, they surely were. In East Asia, Japanese colonialism in the case of Korea and Taiwan, and Western colonialism in the instance of Hong Kong and the treaty ports, did at least demonstrate, however negatively, the possibilities offered by industrialization, and thereby helped to plant some of the seeds of their subsequent transformation. The end of colonialism was a precondition for what we are now witnessing, the growth of multiple modernities and a world in which they are likely to prove at some point decisive. With hindsight, the defeat of colonialism between 1945 and the mid sixties, the significance of which has been greatly underestimated in the West for obvious reasons, must rate as one of the great landmarks of the last century, perhaps the greatest.

In the light of these eight characteristics, it is clear that Chinese modernity will be very different from Western modernity, and that China will transform the world far more fundamentally than any other new global power in the last two centuries. This prospect, however, has been consistently downplayed. The Chinese, for their part, have wisely chosen to play a very long game, constantly seeking to reassure the rest of the world that China’s rise will change relatively little. The West, on the other hand, having been in the global driving seat for so long, finds it impossible to imagine or comprehend a world in which this is no longer the case. Moreover, it is in the nature of vested interests - which is what the West is, the United States especially - not to admit, even to themselves, that the world stands on the edge of a global upheaval the consequence of which will be to greatly reduce their position and influence in the world. China is the elephant in the room that no one is quite willing to recognize. As a result, an extraordinary shift in the balance of global power is taking place
sotto voce
, almost by stealth, except one would be hard-pressed to argue that any kind of deceit was involved either on the part of China or the United States. The contrast with previous comparable changes, for example the rise of Germany prior to 1914, the emergence of Japan in the interwar period, and the challenge of the Soviet Union, especially after 1945, is stark. Even though none carried anything like the ultimate significance of China’s rise, the threat that each offered at the time was exaggerated and magnified rather than downplayed, as in the case of China. The nearest parallel to China’s rise, in terms of material significance, was that of the United States, and this was marked by similar understatement, though this was mainly because it was the fortunate beneficiary of two world wars, which had the effect of greatly accelerating its rise in relation to an impoverished and indebted Western Europe. Even the rise of the US, however, must be regarded as a relatively mild phenomenon compared to that of China.

So far, China has appeared an outsider patiently and loyally seeking to become an insider. As a rising power, it has been obliged to converge with and adapt to the existing international norms, and in particular to defer to and mollify the present superpower, the United States, since the latter’s cooperation and tacit support have been preconditions for China’s wider acceptance. China has struggled long and hard since 1978 to become an accepted member of the international community with the privileges and advantages that this confers. In devoting its energies to economic growth, it came to the conclusion that it could not afford its attention and resources to be diverted towards what, at its present stage of development, it rightly deemed to be non-essential ends. In exercising such restraint and self-discipline, the Deng and post-Deng leaderships have demonstrated remarkable perspicacity, never losing sight of the long-term objective, never allowing themselves to be distracted by short-term considerations. China’s passage to modernity has set in motion similarly powerful convergent forces as the country has sought to learn from more advanced countries, compete successfully in global markets, attract foreign capital, assimilate the disciplines of stock exchanges and capital markets, and acquire the latest technology. In other words, the economic and technological demands of globalization, like the political imperatives described above, have constantly obliged China to imitate and converge in order to meet established international standards and adapt to existing norms. The fact that an increasing number of issues, most notably climate change, require global solutions with participation from all nations, especially the very largest, is acting as a further force for convergence.

Convergence, however, is only one side of the picture. Increasingly the rise of China will be characterized by the opposite: powerful countervailing pressures that push towards divergence from the established norms. In a multitude of ways, China does not conform to the present conventions of the developed world and the global polity. As a civilization-state masquerad ing in the clothes of a nation-state, its underlying nature and identity will increasingly assert itself. The present Westphalian system of international relations in East Asia is likely to be steadily superseded by something that resembles a modern incarnation of the tributary system. A nation that comprises one-fifth of the world’s population is already in the process of transforming the workings of the global economy and its structure of power. A country that regards itself, for both cultural and racial reasons, as the greatest civilization on earth will, as a great global power, clearly in time require and expect a major reordering of global relationships. A people that suffered at the expense of European and Japanese imperialism will never see the world in the same way as those peoples that were its exponents and beneficiaries. A state that has never shared power with any other class, group or institution, which has never been subject to popular sovereignty, which operates on a continental scale and which, to this day, is suffused with a Confucian outlook, albeit in a distinctive and modernized Communist form, stands in sharp contrast to the credo that informs Western societies and which has hitherto dominated the global community. While the West has been shaped by the Declaration of American Independence in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the British Industrial Revolution, the two world wars, the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of Communism in 1989, for China the great historical monuments are mostly very different: 221 BC and the beginnings of modern China; dynasties such as the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing; the Opium Wars; the 1911 Revolution; Japanese colonization between 1931 and 1945; the 1949 Revolution; and the 1978 reforms. The different historical furniture betrays a different history. China, then, if convergent is also manifestly divergent. While the rise of China since 1978 has been characterized by the predominance of convergent tendencies, well exemplified by China’s current desire to reassure the world that it is a ‘responsible power’, the divergent tendencies will in due course come to predominate as China grows more wealthy, self-confident and powerful. But all this lies well in the future; for the next twenty years or so, as China continues its modernization, it will remain an essentially status-quo power.