When China Rules the World

Hong Kong used to be a byword for cheap labour and cheap goods. It lost that reputation when its employers started to shift their operations north of the border into the similarly Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province. Hong Kong had moved too far up the value chain: the expectations of its workers had become too great to tolerate miserable working conditions, indecently long hours and poverty wages. The old textile factories decamped north along with everything else that required the kind of unskilled labour which Hong Kong once possessed in abundance and which China, as it finally opened its borders, now enjoyed in seemingly limitless numbers. The checkpoints and fences that were thrown up around the new towns in Guangdong were eloquent testimony to the countless rural labourers who were willing to leave their villages, whether they were nearby or in a distant interior province, for the bright lights of the city and what seemed to them, though no longer those over the border in Hong Kong, like untold riches.

Guangzhou railway station was crammed with such bounty-hunters, a human tide of migrants, from morning to night, 24/7. This was the Wild East. No matter the pitiful wages and terrible conditions, welcome to the province of opportunity. Young migrant girls barely out of school, often hundreds, even thousands, of miles from home, would work crazy hours performing the simplest of repetitive tasks, making clothes, toys or fireworks for Western markets that they could not even imagine, and then retire for a few hours’ sleep in their floor-to-ceiling bunk beds in cubby-hole-sized rooms in drab factory dormitories before resuming the drudgery on the morrow. But for them it was far better than eking out a much smaller pittance working the land from which they came.

Just as Hong Kong had earlier climbed the value escalator and seen living standards transformed in just a few decades, the same now began to happen in Guangdong. The expectations of locals grew and their opportunities expanded. From the most humble of beginnings, people began to make their way up their version of the career ladder. Meanwhile, as China ’s own standards and expectations changed, there was growing unease about the merciless exploitation of unskilled workers and migrant labour. They enjoyed no legal protection, with the official trade unions shackled and ineffectual. After years of discussion and debate, a labour law was finally introduced in 2008. It was bitterly resisted by many employers, who claimed that it would make their firms uncompetitive and drive them out of business.

Hong Kong employers were particularly prominent amongst these. Astute businessmen, enormously hard-working and pitiless to boot, they did not cross the border to escape the rising labour costs in Hong Kong in order to find themselves hamstrung by an armful of new regulations and a clutch of new expectations in southern China. Of an estimated 90,000 factories in the Pearl Delta region, nearly 60,000 are Hong Kong-owned. Many mainland Chinese employers supported them. Dubbed the country’s richest woman entrepreneur, Zhang Yin, chairwoman of Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, one of the world’s biggest paper-making and recycling firms, complained that workers were being given an ‘iron rice bowl’, a reference to the workers’ contract under Mao. The powerful All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce joined the opposition, warning of more labour disputes and companies going out of business. American firms with factories in China expressed their concern; the reason why they had gone there in the first place, after all, was the dirt-cheap labour. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions finally found a voice and rejected any concessions to the employers.

The new law is a sign of changing times. China, just like Hong Kong, will not always be a byword for cheap goods, even cheaper labour and miserable working conditions. The universal desire to improve one’s lot spells the eventual demise of an economic regime based on the cheapest labour in the world, wholly unprotected either by trade unions or the law, and exposed to the most brutal market forces. China is in the process of moving to a new stage in its development and its political world is beginning to reflect this. Laissez-faire attitudes are being replaced by the recognition that workers’ rights need to be protected.

There is still a widespread view in the West that China will eventually conform, by a process of natural and inevitable development, to the Western paradigm. [589] This is wishful thinking. And herein lies the nub of the Chinese challenge. Apart from Japan, for the first time in two centuries — since the advent of industrialization — one of the great powers will be from a totally non-Western history and tradition. It will not be more of the same — which is what the emergence of the United States largely represented in the late nineteenth century. To appreciate what the rise of China means, we have to understand not only China ’s economic growth, but also its history, politics, culture and traditions. Otherwise we will be floundering in the dark, unable to explain or predict, constantly disconcerted and surprised. The purpose of this chapter is to explain the nature of China ’s political difference. It is a task that is going to occupy, and tax, the Western mind for the next century.

A CIVILIZATION-STATE

China, by the standards of every other country, is a most peculiar animal. Apart from size, it possesses two other exceptional, even unique, characteristics. China is not just a nation-state; it is also a civilization and a continent. In fact, China became a nation-state only relatively recently. One can argue over exactly when: the late nineteenth century perhaps, or following the 1911 Revolution. In that sense — in the same manner as one might refer to Indonesia being little more than half a century old, or Germany and Italy being not much more than a century old — China is a very recent creation. But, of course, that is nonsense. China has existed for several millennia, certainly for over two, arguably even three, thousand years, though the average Chinese likes to round this up to more like 5,000 years. In other words, China’s existence as a recognizable and continuing entity long predates its status as a nation-state. Indeed it is far and away the oldest continuously existing country in the world, certainly dating back to 221 BC, perhaps rather longer. This is not an arcane historical detail, but the way the Chinese — not just the elite, but taxi drivers too — actually think about their country. As often as not, it will crop up in a driver’s conversation, along with references to Confucius or Mencius, perhaps with a little classical poetry thrown in. [590] When the Chinese use the term ‘China’ they are not usually referring to the country or nation so much as Chinese civilization — its history, the dynasties, Confucius, the ways of thinking, their relationships and customs, the guanxi (the network of personal connections), [591] the family, filial piety, ancestral worship, the values, and distinctive philosophy. The Chinese regard themselves not primarily in terms of a nation-state — as Europeans do, for example — but rather as a civilization-state, where the latter is akin to a geological formation in which the nation-state represents no more than the topsoil. There are no other people in the world who are so connected to their past and for whom the past — not so much the recent past but the long-ago past — is so relevant and meaningful. Every other country is a spring chicken by comparison, its people separated from their long past by the sharp discontinuities of their history. Not the Chinese. China has experienced huge turmoil, invasion and rupture, but somehow the lines of continuity have remained resilient, persistent and ultimately predominant, superimposing themselves in the Chinese mind over the interruptions and breaks.

The Chinese live in and through their history, however distant it might be, to a degree which is quite different from other societies. ‘Of what other country in the world,’ writes the historian Wang Gungwu, ‘can it be said that writings on its foreign relations of two thousand, or even one thousand, years ago seem so compellingly alive today?’ [592] The Chinese scholar Jin Guantao argues that: ‘[China ’s] only mode of existence is to relive the past. There is no accepted mechanism within the culture for the Chinese to confront the present without falling back on the inspiration and strength of tradition.’ [593] The Chinese scholar Huang Ping writes:

China is… a living history. Here almost every event and process happening today is closely related to history, and cannot be explained without taking history into consideration. Not only scholars, but civil servants and entrepreneurs as well as ordinary people all have a strong sense of history… no matter how little formal education people receive, they all live in history and serve as the heirs and spokesmen of history. [594]

The author Tu Wei-ming remarks:

The collective memory of the educated Chinese is such that when they talk about Tu Fu’s (712- 70) poetry, Sima Qian’s (died c. 85 BC) Historical Records [the first systematic Chinese historical text, written between 109 and 91 BC, recounting Chinese history from the time of the Yellow Emperor until the author’s own time], or Confucius’s Analects, they refer to a cumulative tradition preserved in Chinese characters… An encounter with Tu Fu, Sima Qian, or Confucius through ideographic symbols evokes a sensation of reality as if their presence was forever inscribed in the text. [595]

The earliest awareness of China as we know it today came with the Zhou dynasty, which grew up along the Yellow River Valley at the end of the second millennium BC. Already, under the previous Shang dynasty, the foundations of modern China had begun to take shape with an ideographic language, ancestor worship and the idea of a single ruler. Chinese civilization, however, still did not have a strong sense of itself. That was to happen a few centuries later through the writings of Master Kong, or Confucius (to use his Latinized name). [596] As discussed in Chapter 4, by this time the Chinese language was used for government and education, and the idea of the mandate of Heaven as a principle of dynastic governance had been firmly established. Confucius’s life (551–479 BC) preceded the Warring States period (403 BC- 221 BC), when numerous states were constantly at war with each other. The triumph of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) brought that period to an end and achieved a major unification of Chinese territories, with the emergence of modern China typically being dated from this time. [597] Although Confucius enjoyed little status or recognition during his lifetime, after his death he was to become the single most influential writer in Chinese history. For the next two thousand years China was shaped by his arguments and moral precepts, its government informed by his principles, and the Analects became established as the most important book in Chinese history. Confucianism was a syncretic mode of thinking which drew on other beliefs, most notably Taoism and Buddhism, but Confucius’s own ideas remained by far the most important. His emphasis on moral virtue, on the supreme importance of government in human affairs, and on the overriding priority of stability and unity, which was shaped by his experience of the turbulence and instability of a divided country, have informed the fundamental values of Chinese civilization ever since. [598] Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did his influence begin to wane, though even during the convulsions of the twentieth century — including the Communist period — the influence of his thinking remained persistent and tangible. Ironically it was Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader most hostile to Confucius, who was to pen the Little Red Book, which in both form and content clearly drew on the Confucian tradition. [599]

Two of the most obvious continuities in Chinese civilization, both of which can be traced back to Confucius, concern the state and education. The state has always been perceived as the embodiment and guardian of Chinese civilization, which is why, in both the dynastic and Communist eras, it has enjoyed such huge authority and legitimacy. Amongst its constellation of responsibilities, the state, most importantly of all, has the sacred task of maintaining the unity of Chinese civilization. Unlike in the Western tradition, the role of government has no boundaries; rather like a parent, with which it is often compared, there are no limits to its authority. Paternalism is regarded as a desirable and necessary characteristic of government. Although in practice the state has always been rather less omnipotent that this might suggest, there is no doubting the reverence and deference which the Chinese display towards it. [600] Similarly, the roots of China ’s distinctive concept of education and parenting lie deep in its civilizational past. Ever since Mencius (372–289 BC), a disciple of Confucius, the Chinese have always been optimistic about human nature, believing that people were essentially good and that, by bringing children up in the right manner through the appropriate parenting and education, they would acquire the correct attitudes, values and self-discipline. In the classroom, children are expected to look respectfully upwards towards the teacher and, given the towering importance of history, reverentially backwards to the past in terms of the content of their learning. Education is vested with the authority and reverence of Chinese civilization, with teachers the bearers and transmitters of that wisdom. A high priority is placed on training and technique, as compared with the openness and creativity valued in the West, with the result that Chinese children often achieve a much higher level of technical competence at a much younger age in music and art, for example, than their Western counterparts. Perhaps this stems partly from the use of an ideographic language, which requires the rote learning of thousands of characters, and the ability to reproduce those characters with technical perfection. [601]

In stressing the continuity of Chinese civilization, it can reasonably be objected that over a period of more than two millennia, it has been through such huge and often violent disruptions and discontinuities that there can be little resemblance between China now and two millennia ago. At one level, of course, this is true. China has changed beyond recognition. But at another level the lines of continuity are stubborn and visible. This is reflected in the self-awareness of the Chinese themselves: the way in which Chinese civilization — as expressed in history, ways of thinking, customs and etiquette, traditional medicine and food, calligraphy, the role of government and the family — remains their primary point of reference. [602] Wang Gungwu argues that ‘what is quintessentially Chinese is the remarkable sense of continuity that seems to have made the civilization increasingly distinctive over the centuries. ’ [603] Given that since 221 BC China has been unified for 1,074 years, partially unified for 673 years, and disunited for 470 years, while experiencing several major invasions and occupations over the last millennium, this is, to put it mildly, remarkable. [604] Yet the very nature of those occupations points to the strength of Chinese culture and its underlying resilience and continuity: the proto-Mongol Liao dynasty (AD 907- 1125) was the first non-Chinese dynasty in north China; the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) were Mongol; the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) were also Mongol and the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) were Manchu, but they all sooner or later went native and were Sinicized. In each instance Chinese culture enjoyed very considerable superiority over its invaders. Even the earlier Buddhist ‘invasion’ from India in the first century AD was to culminate in the Sinification of Buddhist teachings over a period of hundreds of years. [605]

The challenge of the West from around 1850 was an entirely different proposition: key aspects of Western culture, notably its scientific orientation and knowledge, were patently superior to traditional Confucianism and plunged it into a deepening crisis as the Chinese reluctantly sought some kind of reconciliation between traditional and Western values. Between 1911 and 1949 virtually no institution of significance (constitution, university, press, Church, etc.) lasted in its existing form for more than a generation, such was the gravity and enduring nature of China ’s impasse. The Western challenge de-centred Chinese assumptions. Eventually, when all else had failed, the Chinese turned to Communism, or more specifically Maoism, which involved the explicit rejection of Confucianism. Yet during the Maoist period, Confucian values and ways of thinking continued to be influential, albeit in a subterranean form, remaining in some measure the common sense of the people. Even now, having succeeded in reversing its decline and in the midst of modernization, China is still troubled by the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures and the degree to which it might find itself Westernized, as we saw in the discussion amongst the students in Chapter 5. Somehow, however, through the turbulence, carnage, chaos and rebirth, China remains recognizably and assuredly Chinese. As it moves once more into the ascendant, its self-confidence inflated by its recent achievements, China ’s search for meaning is drawing not simply on modernity, but also, and as always, on its civilizational past. Confucian ways of thinking, never extinguished, are being actively revived and scrutinized for any light that they might throw on the present, and for their ability to offer a moral compass.

For many developing countries, the process of modernization has been characterized by a crisis of identity, often exacerbated by the colonial experience, a feeling of being torn between their own culture and that of the West, linked to an inferiority complex about their own relative backwardness. The Chinese certainly felt a sense of humiliation, but never the same kind of overwhelming and hobbling inferiority: they have always had a strong sense of what it means to be Chinese and are very proud of the fact. Such is the strength of Chineseness, indeed, that it has tended to blur and overshadow — in contrast to India, for example — other powerful identities such as region, class and language. This sense of belonging is rooted in China ’s civilizational past, [606] which serves to cohere an enormous population otherwise fragmented by dialect, custom, ethnic difference, geography, climate, level of economic development and disparate living standards. ‘What binds the Chinese together,’ Lucian Pye argues, ‘is their sense of culture, race, and civilization, not an identification with the nation as a state.’ [607]

To describe China in terms of a nation-state, thus, is largely to miss the point. ‘ China is a civilization pretending,’ Pye argues, ‘to be a nation-state.’ [608] The consequences of the fact that China is really a civilization-state are manifold. [609] The civilization-state generates, as we shall see later, a very different kind of politics from that of a conventional nation-state, with unity, rooted in the idea of civilization rather than nation, the overriding priority. As a civilization-state, China embodies and allows a plurality of systems, as exemplified by Hong Kong, that is alien to the nation-state, which demands and requires a much greater degree of homogeneity. The civilization-state has engendered distinctively Chinese notions of race and ethnicity, with the Han race regarded as more or less coterminous with ancient Chinese civilization, as we shall see in the next chapter. The civilization-state embodies a far more intimate relationship not simply with China’s relatively recent history, as in the case of the average nation-state, but, most strikingly, with at least two millennia of history, such that the latter is constantly intervening in and acting as a guide and yardstick in the present. And it is the civilization-state which serves as a continuous reminder that China is the Middle Kingdom, thereby occupying, as the centre of the world, a quite different position to all other states. The term ‘civilization’ normally suggests a rather distant and indirect influence and an inert and passive presence. In China ’s case, however, it is not only history that lives but civilization itself: the notion of a living civilization provides the primary identity and context by which the Chinese think of their country and define themselves.

Table 2. Characteristics of China’s provinces in 2005.

CHINA AS A CONTINENT

If the notion of civilization helps to explain how China ’s past bears on its present, the fact that it is a continent in size and diversity is critical to understanding how the country functions in practice. There is an essential coherence to the life of the great majority of nation-states that is not true of China. Something major can happen in one part of the country and yet it will have little or no effect elsewhere, or on China as a whole. Major economic changes may appear to have few political consequences and vice versa. The traumatic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example, had surprisingly little impact on the country as a whole. Of course, there are always effects, but the country is so huge and complex that the feedback loops work in strange and unpredictable ways. That is why it is so difficult to anticipate what is likely to happen politically. [610] It also perhaps helps to explain a particularly distinctive feature of modern Chinese leaders like Mao and Deng. Whereas in the West consistency is regarded as a desirable characteristic of a leader, the opposite is the case in China: flexibility is seen as a positive virtue and the ability to respond to the logic of a particular situation as a sign of wisdom and an indication of power. Such seeming inconsistency is a reflection of the sheer size of the country and the countless contradictions that abound within its borders. It also has practical benefits, enabling leaders to experiment by pursuing an ambitious set of reforms in a handful of provinces but not elsewhere, as Deng did with his reform programme. Such an approach would be impossible in most nation-states.

Instead of seeing China through the prism of a conventional nation-state, we should think of it as a continental system containing many semi-autonomous provinces with distinctive political, economic and social systems. There are huge variations between what are, in terms of population, nation-sized provinces. The disparity between the per capita incomes of different provinces is vast, the structure of their economies varies greatly — for example, in their openness to the outside world and the importance of industry — their cultures are distinct, and the nature of their governance is more diverse than one might expect. [611] In many respects, the provinces should be seen as akin to nation-states. [612] In fact China ’s provinces are far more differentiated than Europe’s nation-states, even when Eastern Europe and the Balkans are included.

Map 9. China’s Provinces

It would be impossible to run a country the size of China by centralized fiat from Beijing. In practice, the provinces enjoy great autonomy. Governance involves striking a balance between the centre and the provinces. Of course everyone recognizes that ultimate power rests with Beijing: but this often means little more than feigned compliance. [613] The provinces and cities accept Beijing ’s word, while often choosing to ignore it, with central government fully aware of this. [614] Although China has a unitary structure of government, in reality its modus operandi is more that of a de facto federal system. [615] This is true in terms of important aspects of economic policy and is certainly the case with the maintenance of social order: the regime expects each province to be responsible for what happens within its borders and not to allow any disruption to cross those borders. The fundamental importance of the relationship between Beijing and the provinces is well illustrated by the fact that the dominant fault line of Chinese politics is organized not around the idea of ‘progress’ — which is typically the case in the West, as evinced by the persistent divide between conservatives and modernizers — but around the question of centralization and decentralization. [616] Whether or not to allow greater freedom to the media, or to expand or restrict the autonomy of the provinces, is the dominant pulse to which Beijing beats. One of the key reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping, as discussed in the last chapter, was to grant more freedom to provincial and local governments as a means of encouraging greater economic initiative. The result was a major shift in power from Beijing to the provinces which, by the nineties, had become of such concern to central government that it was largely reversed. [617]

THE NATURE OF CHINESE POLITICS

The most impoverished area of debate on China concerns its politics. Any discussion is almost invariably coloured by a value judgement that, because China has a Communist government, we already know the answers to all the important questions. It is a mindset formed in the Cold War that leaves us ill-equipped to understand the nature of Chinese politics or the current regime. In the post-Cold War era, China already presents us with an intriguing and unforeseeable paradox: the most extraordinary economic transformation in human history is being presided over by a Communist government during a period which has witnessed the demise of European Communism. More generally, it is a mistake to see the Communist era as some kind of aberration, involving a total departure from the continuities of Chinese politics. On the contrary, although the 1949 Revolution ushered in profound changes, many of the underlying features of Chinese politics have remained relatively unaffected, with the period since 1978, if anything, seeing them reinforced. Many of the fundamental truths of Chinese politics apply as much to the Communist period as to the earlier dynasties. What are these underlying characteristics?

Politics has always been seen as coterminous with government, with little involvement from other elites or the people. This was true during the dynastic Confucian era and has remained the case during the Communist period. Although Mao regularly mobilized the people in mass campaigns, the nature of their participation was essentially instrumentalist rather than interactive: top-down rather than bottom-up. In the Confucian view, the exclusion of the people from government was regarded as a positive virtue, allowing government officials to be responsive to the ethics and ideals with which they had been inculcated. We should not dismiss these ideas, inimical as they are to Western sensibilities and traditions: the Confucian system constituted the longest-lasting political order in human history and the principles of its government were used as a template by the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese, and were closely studied by the British, French and, to a lesser extent, the Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. Elitist as the Confucian system clearly was, however, it did contain an important get-out clause. While the mandate of Heaven granted the emperor the right to rule, in the event of widespread popular discontent it could be deemed that the emperor had forfeited that mandate and should be overthrown. [618]

The state has consistently been seen as the apogee of society, enjoying sovereignty over all else. In European societies, in contrast, the power of government has historically been subject to competing sources of authority, such as the Church, the nobility and rising commercial interests. In effect government was obliged to share its power with other groups and institutions. In China, at least for the last millennium, these either did not exist (there was no organized and powerful Church) or were regarded, and saw themselves, as subordinate (for example, the merchant class); the idea that different sources of authority could and should coexist was seen as ethically wrong. [619] The nearest to an exception were the great teachers and intellectuals who, though always marginal to the centre of power, could, under certain circumstances, be more influential than ministers, acting as the cultural transmitters and guardians of the civilizational tradition and the representatives of the people’s well-being and conscience — even, in tumultuous times, as the emissaries and arbiters of the mandate of Heaven. Only two institutions were formally acknowledged and really mattered: one was the government and the other the family. The only accepted interest was the universal interest, represented by a government informed by the highest ethical values, be it Confucian teaching or later Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In reality, of course, different interests did exist but they were not politically recognized and did not press to be so recognized: rather they operated out of the limelight and on an individualistic basis, lobbying government and seeking personal (rather than corporate or collective) favours which might give them exemption or advantage. Not even the merchant class were an exception to this. In the Confucian order they ranked last in the hierarchy and in practice have never sought to break ranks and organize collectively. That apolitical tradition remains true to this day. They have seen themselves as a bulwark of government rather than as an autonomous interest seeking separate representation. This was the case during the Nationalist period, following the Tiananmen Square tragedy, and is exemplified by the manner in which they have been indistinguishable from government — indeed, an integral part of it — in post-handover Hong Kong. Given this lack of any kind of independent tradition of organization either in the Confucian period or more recently in the Communist period, it is hardly surprising that China has failed to develop a civil society. [620] That may slowly be changing but the burden of history weighs heavily on the present, whatever political changes we may see.

Throughout the debate and struggles over modernization, from the late nineteenth century until today, the Chinese have sought to retain the fundamental attributes of their political system above all else; indeed, the political system has proved more impervious than any other sphere of society to Westernizing influence, both in the imperial and Communist periods. This is in contrast to most developing societies, where government has often been strongly linked to modernizing impulses and leaders were frequently drawn from the Westernized elite — as in India, for example, with the Nehru family. That was never the case in China, with leaders like Mao and Deng having had very little contact with the West. To this day, even over the last three decades, the ability of China ’s political world, unlike other institutions, to survive relatively unchanged is remarkable, a testament to its own resilience and the place it occupies in the Chinese psyche.

Chinese politics has traditionally placed a very high premium on the importance of moral persuasion and ethical example. Public officials were required to pass exams in Confucian teaching. They were expected to conform to the highest moral standards and it was to these, rather than different interest groups or the people, that they were seen as accountable. In the Communist period, Confucian precepts were replaced by Marxist (or, more accurately, Maoist) canons, together with the iconic heroes of the Long March and socialist labour. This commitment to ethical standards as the principle of government has combined with a powerful belief in the role of both family and education in the shaping and moulding of children. By the standards of any culture, the highly distinctive Chinese family plays an enormously important socializing role. It is where Chinese children learn about the nature of authority. The word of the parents (traditionally, the father’s) is final and never to be challenged. In the family, children come to understand the importance of social hierarchy and their place with it. Through a combination of filial piety, on which the Chinese place greater stress than any other culture, a sense of shame, and the fear of a loss of face, children learn about self-discipline. [621] In a shame (rather than a Christian guilt) culture, Chinese children fear, above all, such a loss of face. The Chinese family and Chinese state are complementary, the one manifestly a support for the other. It is not insignificant that the Chinese term for nation-state is ‘nation-family’. As Huang Ping suggests, in China ‘many would take for granted that the nation-state is an extended family’. [622]

Whereas in the West the idea of popular sovereignty lies at the heart of politics, it remains largely absent in China. The concept of the nation-state was imported from Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century, with a section of the Chinese elite subsequently becoming heavily influenced by European nationalism. There was, though, a fundamental difference in how national sovereignty was interpreted. In the case of European nationalism, national sovereignty was closely linked to the idea of popular sovereignty; in China the two were estranged. While national sovereignty was accorded the highest importance, popular sovereignty was replaced by state sovereignty. [623] That was not surprising. First, as we have seen, there was a very powerful tradition of state sovereignty in China but no tradition of popular sovereignty. Second, nation-statehood was acquired at a time when China was under threat from the Western powers and Japan. In such circumstances, the overwhelming priority was national sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. The birth of the Chinese nation-state took place in entirely different conditions from those of Europe. The European nation-states were never obliged to contend with a threat to their national sovereignty from outside their continent, as China, in common with more or less every country outside Europe, faced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Predictably, the colonial threat served to reinforce and accentuate China ’s enduring strong-state complex. [624] The imperialist threat and the domestic political tradition thus combined to infuse China ’s emergence into nationhood with the twin concepts of national sovereignty and state sovereignty.

One of the most fundamental features of Chinese politics concerns the overriding emphasis placed on the country’s unity. This remains by far the most important question in China ’s political life. Its origins lie not in the short period since China became a nation-state, but in the experience and idea of Chinese civilization. [625] The fact that China has spent so much of its history in varying degrees of disunity, and at such great cost, has taught the Chinese that unity is sacrosanct. The Chinese have an essentially civilizational conception of what constitutes the Chinese homeland and the nature of its unity: indeed, there is no clearer example of China ’s mentality as a civilization-state. The Chinese government has attached the highest priority to the return of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, even though they had passed out of Chinese hands (in the case of Macao and Hong Kong) a very long time ago. Furthermore, little or no weight has been given to the preferences of the people who live there. [626] Their belonging to China is seen exclusively in terms of an enduring and overriding notion of Chineseness that goes back at least two millennia if not longer: all Chinese are part of Chinese civilization, and therefore China. [627] Choice is not an issue.

Great weight is also accorded to political stability. Like Confucius indeed, Deng Xiaoping, as cited in the last chapter, was in no doubt about its importance: ‘[China ’s] modernization needs two prerequisites. One is international peace, and the other is domestic political stability… A crucial condition of China ’s progress is political stability.’ [628] The priority attached to political stability is reflected in popular attitudes. [629] In a recent survey, stability was ranked as the second most important consideration, far higher than in any other country. [630] The priority given to stability is understandable in the light of China ’s history, which has regularly been punctuated by periods of chaos and division, usually resulting in a huge number of deaths, both directly through war and indirectly through resulting famines and disasters. The country lost as much as a third of its population (around 35 million people dead) in the overthrow of the Song dynasty by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. It has been estimated that the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century cost China around one-sixth of its population (25 million dead). The civil unrest in the first half of and mid nineteenth century, including the Taiping Uprising, resulted in a population decline of around 50 million. Following the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was continuing turbulence and incessant civil war, with a brief period of relative calm from the late twenties until the Japanese invasion, and then, after the defeat of the Japanese, a further civil war culminating in the 1949 Revolution. [631] Given this history, it is not surprising that the Chinese have a pathological fear of division and instability, even though periods of chaos have been almost as characteristic of Chinese history as periods of order. [632] The nearest parallel in Europe was the desire that consumed the continent after 1945 never to wage another intra-European war. The huge price China has paid in terms of death and bloodshed is in part perhaps the cost of trying to make a continent conform to the imperatives of a country, while Europe has paid a not dissimilar price for the opposite, namely bitter national rivalry and an absence of continent-wide identity and cohesion.

CHINA AND DEMOCRACY

In Western eyes, the test of a country’s politics and governance is the existence or otherwise of democracy, with this defined in terms of universal suffrage and a multi-party system. The last fifty years have seen a huge increase in the number of countries that boast some kind of democracy, though important areas of the world, notably the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and, of course, China, are still, at least in practice, exceptions. There is little doubt that some kind of democracy is a desirable system if the circumstances are ripe and if it can take serious root in a culture. If, however, democracy amounts to little more than an alien transplant, as has been the case in Iraq, where it was imposed via the barrel of an Anglo-American gun, then the cost of that imposition, for example in terms of resistance, alienation or ethnic conflict, is likely to turn out to be far higher than any benefits it may yield. Democracy should not be regarded as some abstract ideal, applicable in all situations, whatever the conditions, irrespective of history and culture, for if the circumstances are not appropriate it will never work properly, and may even prove disastrous. Nor should it be seen as more important than all the other criteria that should be used to assess the quality of a country’s governance. For developing countries in particular, the ability to deliver economic growth, maintain ethnic harmony (in the case of multi-ethnic societies), limit the amount of corruption, and sustain order and stability are equally, if not rather more, important considerations than democracy. Democracy should be seen in its proper historical and developmental context: different societies can have different priorities depending on their circumstances, histories and levels of development. [633]

Very few countries, in fact, have combined democracy as it is now understood with the process of economic take-off. [634] Britain ’s Industrial Revolution took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even by 1850, however, only around one-fifth of men had the right to vote. It was not until the 1880s that most men gained the right, and not until 1918, over 130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that women (over thirty) won the same right. Broadly speaking this picture applies to other West European countries, all of which experienced take-off without democracy. In fact the most common form of governance during Europe ’s industrial revolutions was the monarchical state, absolutist or constitutional. The American experience was significantly different. By 1860 a majority of white men enjoyed the right to vote, but most blacks did not acquire it, in practice, until 1965, while women only won it in 1920: during America ’s economic take-off, thus, only a minority enjoyed the right to vote. In Japan, universal male suffrage was not introduced until 1925, well after the economic take-off that followed the Meiji Restoration. [635] In sum, the right to vote was not established in the developed world, except for a very small and privileged minority, until well after their industrial revolutions had been concluded (white men in the United States constituting the nearest to an exception). The European powers, furthermore, never granted the vote to their colonies: it was still seen as entirely inappropriate for the vast tracts of the world that they colonized, even when it had become an accepted fact at home. The only exceptions in the British case were the so-called dominions like Australia and Canada, where shared racial and ethnic characteristics were the underlying reason for the display of latitude. It was not until after the great majority of former colonies gained independence following the Second World War that they were finally able to choose their form of governance. Much hypocrisy, it is clear, attaches to the Western argument that democracy is universally applicable whatever the stage of development.

Some form of democratic governance is now universal in the developed world, where economic take-off was achieved a century or more ago. In contrast, the picture predictably remains uneven in the developing world, with democracy for the most part either unusual or, at best, somewhat flawed. A similar pattern concerning democracy and levels of development broadly prevails in East Asia. Japan, as we have seen, did not achieve anything like widespread suffrage until well after its economic take-off. None of the first Asian tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — achieved take-off under democratic conditions: South Korea and Taiwan were governed by far-sighted military dictatorships, Hong Kong was a British colony devoid of democracy, while Singapore enjoyed what might be described as a highly authoritarian and contrived democracy. All, though, were blessed with efficient and strategic administrations. As developmental states, the legitimacy of their governments rested in large part on their ability to deliver rapid economic growth and rising living standards rather than a popular mandate. Each of these countries has now achieved a level of development and standard of living commensurate with parts of Western Europe. Hong Kong, under Chinese rule since 1997, enjoys very limited elements of democracy; Singapore ’s governance remains a highly authoritarian democracy; while South Korea and Taiwan have both acquired universal suffrage and multi-party systems. These last examples, together with Japan, confirm that industrialization and economic prosperity generally provide more propitious conditions for the growth of democratic forms.

In this light it seems misconceived to argue that China is now ready for, and should become, more or less forthwith, a multi-party democracy based on universal suffrage. The country is only halfway through its industrial revolution, with over 50 per cent of the population still living and working in the countryside. It is true that India remains much less developed than China and yet possesses what, by historical standards, is a remarkable democracy; but in this respect India has so far been history’s great exception. An interesting example is Indonesia, which, though an extremely diverse archipelago, now enjoys a fragile democracy. China ’s overriding priority at present is economic growth. It is determined to allow nothing to distract it from this goal. By seeking to avoid getting into an unnecessary conflicts and pursuing good relations with the United States, its foreign policy since 1980 has been directed towards ensuring that all its energy is focused on this objective. There is also a more general point. There is an inherent authoritarianism involved in the process of take-off and modernization — the need to concentrate society’s resources on a single objective — which, judging by history, people are prepared to tolerate because their own lives are dominated by the exigencies of economic survival and the desire to escape from poverty. In a sense, the attitude of the people mirrors that of government: political authoritarianism complements the authoritarian and compulsive circumstances of everyday life, with its inherent lack of choice. This helps to explain why authoritarianism rather than democracy has been the normal characteristic of economic take-off. As many have observed, there is little demand for democracy from within China. Indeed, if anything, there has been a turn away from democracy since Tiananmen Square. A combination of a fear of instability following the events of 1989, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and what are seen as the difficulties experienced by Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan as democracies — and also the Philippines and India — have reinforced the view of many Chinese that this is not an immediate issue: that, on the contrary, it is liable to represent a distraction from the main task of sustaining the country’s economic growth. [636] Implicit in this is the not misplaced view that any move towards democracy is likely to embroil the country in considerable chaos and turmoil.

Those Westerners — what we might call the ultra-democrats — who believe that democracy is more important at all times than any other matter, would, of course, take issue with this. Bruce Gilley, for example, argues that Russia could end up better off, at least in the long run, than China because it has already addressed the issue of democracy. Given China ’s hugely more impressive economic growth and Russia ’s somewhat precarious democracy, this judgement seems tenuous to say the least. Gilley also suggests that: ‘Debates about issues like compulsory voting, fair electoral systems, money in politics, judicial review, and the like will be the dominant “historical” issues of our time.’ [637] Major issues in the West, for sure, but in a world grap pling with the problem of one superpower, increasingly preoccupied with how to handle the rise of China, and also perhaps India, where ethnic conflict often presents nation-states with their greatest challenge and where for many the task of economic take-off remains all-consuming, the idea that a cluster of issues revolving around democracy will be the dominant global issue of our time betrays a highly parochial Western mentality.

While there is little sign of any significant pressure in China for what might loosely be described as Western-style democracy, there is, nonetheless, a continuing and growing demand for the accountability of government at local, provincial and national levels. So how should we approach the question of democracy in China? China is roughly at the halfway point of its economic take-off, perhaps beyond. Even twenty years hence, it is estimated that around 20 per cent of its population will still work on the land. There are many imponderables, but assuming that economic growth continues at a relatively rapid rate and political stability is broadly maintained, then it seems reasonable to expect serious moves towards democratization within that kind of timescale, possibly less. [638] In developmental terms, this would still be rather sooner than was the case with the other Asian tigers or the West. It should also be borne in mind that the political traditions of China are neither favourable nor orientated towards democracy. There is a very weak tradition of popular accountability, and state sovereignty has been preferred to popular sovereignty: government is, in effect, answerable to itself via the feedback loop of ethical norms. This is reflected in the central values that govern political behaviour, which can be summarized as sincerity, loyalty, reliability and steadfastness, [639] all of which derive from the influence of Confucianism, and, to a lesser extent, Communism. In contrast, the equivalent Western values are accountability, representation and participation. There is, moreover, as we have seen, no tradition of independent organization and only a very weak notion of civil society. Power resides overwhelmingly in the state. Interest groups, rather than aspiring to represent themselves collectively, seek to advance their claims by private lobbying and achieving some kind of accommodation with the state. Instead of making demands on or confronting government, interest groups prefer to associate with power on an individual basis.

What serves to greatly complicate the question of democracy is that China has the size and diversity of a continent, although the site of democracy, globally speaking, has always been, and remains, exclusively the nation-state. There are no multinational, regional or global institutions that could be described as democratic. [640] Their invocation to a modicum of representivity is invariably via the nation-states that comprise them. The classic example of this phenomenon is the European Union, which makes no real claim to be democratic other than by virtue of its member-states — the European Parliament being elected but largely powerless. One of the reasons that democracy has worked in India, which is also of a continental scale, might in part be because it is far looser and more decentralized than China, so that individual states can act, in some degree, like quasi nation-states. This is certainly not the case in China, which for thousands of years has prided itself on its centralized and unitary status, even though, as we have seen, this has in practice involved a high degree of negotiated decentralization. While the more developed provinces, notably those on the eastern and southern seaboard, may already be in a position to embrace a more democratic form of polity, their progress in that direction is bound to be constrained by the far less developed condition of the majority of the country. It is possible, however, that more developed cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai may be allowed to introduce democratic reforms in advance of the rest of the country. In 2008 the Shenzhen mayor Xu Zongheng claimed that direct voting would in future account for 70 per cent of the city’s residential and village committees. [641] Meanwhile, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress issued a ruling at the end of 2007 that it would consider allowing direct elections for Hong Kong ’s leader in 2017; at present half its Legislative Council is elected. As a civilization-state that has always allowed and been characterized in practice by considerable diversity, such a development is not inconceivable.

Finally, we should bear in mind that China is the home of Confucian thought and practice, and consequently has experienced Confucianism in a more complete and doctrinaire form than Japan and Korea, where it was a Chinese import and therefore never enjoyed quite the same degree of overweening influence as in China. As a result, it was easier for these countries to embrace democracy by, in effect, adding a new political layer to coexist along with the older Confucian traditions and practices. It will certainly be possible for China to do the same, but the weight of what might be described as Confucian orthodoxy is likely to make it more difficult. [642]

In the long run it seems rather unlikely, given the underlying pressures for democracy that exist within increasingly sophisticated, diverse and prosperous societies, that China will be able to resist the process of democratization. The interesting question is what democracy might look like in China. There is a strong tendency in the West to view democracy in terms of a ‘one size fits all’ approach. In fact, the form of democracy varies greatly according to the history, traditions and culture of a society. There is no reason to believe, except on grounds of Eurocentrism, that the very specific conditions that shaped European society (and European-derived nations like the United States), and therefore European democracy, will result in the same kind of democratic structures elsewhere. [643] This is abundantly clear in the case of Japan. It certainly possesses some of the trappings of democracy that we are familiar with in the West — not surprisingly, given that the US authored Japan ’s post-war constitution following its defeat — most notably universal suffrage and a multi-party system. Yet it is immediately evident that in practice the system works very differently. The Liberal Democrats have been almost continuously in power since the mid fifties. The other parties, apart from the occasional period of coalition government, have found themselves in permanent opposition and wield rather less power and enjoy rather less importance in the political life of the country than the various factions within the Liberal Democrats. Moreover, as Karel van Wolferen has observed, much of the real power is vested in the civil service, especially in particular ministries, rather than in the government itself: in other words, in that part of the state that is permanently constituted rather than in that part that is elected. The cabinet, for example, barely meets and when it does its business is largely ceremonial. [644] Given these underlying continuities, the significance that attaches to elections — and, therefore, popular sovereignty — is much less than in the Western case. Reflecting the hierarchical character of society and Confucian influence, power has a permanent and unchanging quality that is relatively unaffected by the electoral process.

Whatever democratic political system evolves in China will bear the heavy imprint of its Confucian past. It is more difficult to judge the longer-term impact of Communism because its duration will have been far more limited. There are, though, important continuities between Confucianism and Communism — for example, in the notion of a special caste of political leadership, Confucian in the one case, Leninist in the other. [645] In North-East Asia — for these purposes, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam — the continuing influence of the Confucian tradition is palpable in the emphasis on education, the structure of the family, the central role of the bureaucracy and the commitment to harmony. [646] Because of the presence of a Communist government, this was, until 1978, perhaps less apparent in China, but there has been a marked revival in Confucian influence since then, a process initiated by the government during the nineties, [647] but which has increasingly acquired a momentum of its own. [648] Reflecting Confucian influence, an editorial in the People’s Daily argued that in order to build a market economy, it was necessary to promote ‘the rule of virtue while developing the rule of law’. [649] In March 2007 the prime minister Wen Jiabao remarked: ‘From Confucius to Sun Yat-sen, the traditional culture of the Chinese nation has numerous precious elements, many positive aspects regarding the nature of the people and democracy. For example, it stresses love and humanity, community, harmony among different viewpoints, and sharing the world in common. ’ [650] Communist Party officials in Henan province are now, amongst other things, assessed on the basis of Confucian values such as filial piety and family responsibility, while secondary school children are once more being taught the Confucian classics [651] and Confucius’s birthday is again being celebrated. [652] On a practical level, the Party is now placing a new kind of emphasis on the importance of the obligations and duties shown by its cadres towards the people they represent. As part of their training, they are given test cases in which they are expected not just to consult their superiors as before, but also, more importantly, to listen to the people. This new attitude has been reflected in the way in which public officials have apologized for their failures in the Sichuan earthquake and milk scandal — in a manner reminiscent of the behaviour of shamed Japanese government and corporate leaders — and resigned. Significantly, the government has chosen to use the name Confucius Institutes for the numerous Chinese cultural and language centres which it has been establishing around the world. With the decline of Marxism, the turn towards Confucius in a country so steeped in its ethical and moral discourse is predictable. [653] It can be argued, in any case, that those parts of Marxism that have had most impact in China were the ones that most chimed with the Confucian tradition — for example, self-criticism (mirroring the Confucian idea that one should direct criticism at oneself before others), the idea that rulers should be morally upright and the invoking of model workers as an example to others; by the same token, those Marxist ideas that failed were those that were most inimical to Confucianism. Even the fact that Chinese political leaders dye their hair black can be traced back to the Mencian proposition that white-haired people should be cared for rather than engaged in heavy work. Most importantly of all, Confucian ideas remain embedded in the fabric of the culture: filial piety is still widely practised and endorsed, including the legal requirement that adult children care for their elderly parents. A favourite theme of Chinese soaps concerns relationships with elderly parents. An obvious and striking characteristic of Chinese restaurants, in contrast to Western ones, is the frequency with which one sees the extended family eating together, a tradition reflected in the ubiquity of the large circular table. [654]

Confucianism should not be seen as a fixed entity, having been through many mutations during its history. Like all philosophies and religions, its longevity has depended in part upon its ability to adapt to changing circumstances and times. [655] The fact that Confucianism is a syncretic tradition has served to enhance its flexibility and adaptability. One of the most outstanding examples was the manner in which the Neo-Confucians of the Song period (AD 960-1279) assimilated Buddhism and Taoism, which were then sweeping China. [656] It would be wrong, moreover, to regard Confucianism as entirely inimical to democratic ideas. For example, Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the 1911 Revolution and the founding father of the Republic of China, said: ‘Our three-min principles [nationalism, citizen rights and the welfare of human beings] originate from Mencius… Mencius is really the ancestor of our democratic ideas.’ [657] The mandate of Heaven, in recognizing the right of the people to rebel if the emperor failed them, was certainly a more democratic idea than its European counterpart, the divine right of kings. [658] The emperor was required to rule in a virtuous and benign way according to the ethical strictures that constituted the guidelines for his conduct, while the hierarchical structure demanded a certain degree of reciprocity, suggesting implied rights as well as duties. [659] The government was expected to grant society considerable independence from the state, and in important respects this was the case — not least in the economic sphere, as the early development of a sophisticated market illustrates. Although civil society remains very weak in China, there is a powerful tradition of min-jian society, or folk culture, composed of age-old Chinese customs and support systems, which to this day still represents an important area of autonomy from government. [660] In sum, Confucianism certainly lends support and succour to an authoritarian system of government, but it is also imbued with democratic and popular elements. [661]

There are a number of ways in which Confucian ideas are likely to inform a democratic China: [662] the nodal role of the state and its bureaucracy; the centrality of the family, and extended networks like clans (which help, for example, to relieve the state of some of the tasks of social welfare); the importance of guanxi (the web of personal relationships which informs Chinese society); the Confucian preference for resolving conflicts by mediation rather than litigation, suggesting that the resort to law and the judicial process will always be far less significant in China (and Japan) than it is in the West; and the significance that is attached to values and morality as the lodestar of people’s behaviour. [663] These age-old belief systems have a profound effect on the way a society operates. China, like Japan and Korea, has a quite different sense of public order and behaviour compared with the norms that prevail in the West, a situation reflected in the much lower levels of crime in these societies. Indeed, these deeper societal traditions have undoubtedly helped China — and other East Asian societies — to cope with the combined vicissitudes of globalization and modernization, in effect acting as shock absorbers. [664]

Chinese democracy will share certain universal characteristics with democracies elsewhere, but will also of necessity be highly distinctive, expressive of its roots in Chinese society and traditions. Given the cultural context of Confucianism and Communism, together with the extraordinary demands of governing a continent, the invention and evolution of Chinese democracy will require enormous novelty and ingenuity. [665] There is no reason to believe, in a country which is home to the world’s oldest and most sophisticated statecraft, that this will prove impossible. But there seems little reason to believe that this process is in any way imminent. Nor will innovation in governance be a matter of one-way traffic. Just as China can learn from the American federal system and the European Union (in which it is presently showing growing interest) in governing such a vast country, so China, accounting for one-fifth of the world’s population, can also offer the rest of the world a model for large-scale governance, which is likely to become increasingly important in a globalized world.

COMMUNIST RULE

The coincidence of the collapse of Soviet Communism with the suppression in Tiananmen Square persuaded most Western observers that the Chinese Communist Party would meet a similar fate. They could not have been more wrong. In contrast to Soviet Communism, which suffered from a growing state of paralysis and ossification, the Chinese party, under Deng Xiaoping, displayed great creativity and flexibility, responding to the crisis it inherited from Mao by initiating a process of reform that has transformed the living standards of the great majority of the people. The rule of the Communist Party is no longer in doubt: it enjoys the prestige that one would expect given the transformation that it has presided over. The feel-good factor, and a concomitant mood of confidence that has been engendered, is clear from Figure 22. The uncertainties of 1989 are now a distant memory. The nature of the Party’s support and legitimacy has changed in the process: this is no longer primarily a function of ideology but depends increasingly on its ability to deliver economic growth. In that sense, China has come to resemble other East Asian developmental states, though in all these cases, as discussed in Chapter 5, the nature of governmental authority is also deeply embedded in the culture. Even though support for the Communist Party is now more contingent, there is little cause to believe that it is fragile or vulnerable. On the contrary, it is reasonable to presume that its rule is rather more secure than it has been at any time since the death of Mao, which is not surprising given its success as a governing party, and is reflected in the fact that over the last decade 20 million people have applied to join annually, even though only 2 million have been admitted each year. There is pressure for more radical political reform, as illustrated by the Charter 08 manifesto, but it remains relatively isolated and heavily policed by the state.

If the reform process has been characterized by the boldness of its economic measures, it has also been distinguished by the relative conservatism of the political changes. This is not to underestimate them. There has been the gradual spread of competitive elections to the great majority of villages and to some towns, for example in Guangdong and Fujian, where mayoral elections have been held. [666] There has been reform of the civil service, the decentralization of power to local government, and a limited rejuvenation of national and local parliaments. There has been a growing trend, largely as a result of economic necessity, towards rule by law (that is, the determination of issues according to a legal code) and, to a far lesser extent, towards the rule of law (that the law applies irrespective of the view of government), [667] which, according to one Chinese expert, applies in only 10–20 per cent of instances. [668] Given that the latter would require the Party’s power to be constitutionally limited, thereby necessitating a fundamental change in its role, its significant extension remains both problematic and unlikely. There has been a formalization of procedures such that, for example, the president can now only serve for two terms. Relations between the military and civil power have been normalized. Compared with the pre-reform period, there is far greater political space for open discussion and serious critique, [669] with the internet now the most important arena for public debate, greatly exceeding what is possible in the conventional media. [670] There have also been major reforms within the Party. Leaders are now required to retire rather than being allowed to die in office. The Sixteenth Congress in 2002 saw the first orderly transfer of power, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. Contested elections for delegates to the Party congress take place in some provinces. [671] The Party has broadened its membership, most notably, following Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents reform, to include private capitalists. And the party leadership at all levels, including the top, is more professional and better educated than it was previously. [672]

Figure 22. Percentage of population dissatisfied/satisfied with the condition of their country.

China ’s political reform has occurred gradually and incrementally. Unlike the economic reforms, the intention has never been to effect a systemic change, and certainly not to introduce Western-style democracy — rejected as incompatible with both China ’s traditions and present needs in the White Paper on Democracy published in 2005 [673] — but rather to modernize and codify political and administrative processes, thereby seeking to promote efficiency while maintaining political stability. The purpose of village elections, for example, has been good governance and functional efficiency rather than any move towards a wider process of democratization. [674] On the other hand, there has been a major expansion in civil liberties and human rights. Hong Kong opinion, which has traditionally been very sensitive to the lack of such rights in China, has become increasingly positive about trends to the north. In a 2008 survey in Hong Kong on the anniversary of the crack-down in Tiananmen Square, 85 per cent of respondents believed that human rights in China had improved since 1989, up from 78 per cent a year earlier. And the proportion who thought that they would improve further in the following three years rose to 77 per cent from 67 per cent a year earlier. Only 2 per cent thought that China ’s human rights record had worsened since 1989. [675] The boundaries of what it is now possible to say and do in China have expanded greatly, unless they concern the most sensitive subjects like Taiwan, Tibet, the Falun Gong religious sect, or the role of the Communist Party. This is most clearly apparent on the internet, which, although heavily policed in a manner that contradicts the utopian idea of the internet as a censorship-free zone, still allows a wide-ranging and frank discussion on all but the most delicate topics. [676]

There is also growing pressure for accountability with regard to the conduct of officials. In 2005 there were 87,000 ‘mass incidents’ (demonstrations, strikes, occupations, etc.) recorded by the Ministry of Public Security, many of which concerned the appropriation of land from farmers through sweetheart deals between developers and local government, from which officials benefited financially. Although these cases usually have little or nothing to do with the national authorities, the government has been seeking, in the face of gathering unrest, to strengthen farmers’ land rights in order to prevent such seizures. Details of a proposed new rural reform package that were divulged in October 2008 suggested that the rights of farmers would be strengthened by enabling them to trade in their thirty-year land-use contracts, a move which ought to have the effect of bolstering their security of tenure. [677] Similarly, in an attempt to improve labour conditions, the government introduced a new labour law in 2008 which enhanced the role of labour unions and made it harder for employers to fire workers or rely on casual labour; it was widely expected that the new laws would significantly improve workers’ wages and conditions. Meanwhile the government has predictably resisted the formation of independent labour associations.

The Maoist period involved the politicization of more or less the whole of society. The old Maoist slogan of ‘politics in command’ aptly summed up the nature of Communist rule until Mao’s death in 1976, with its constant calls for mass campaigns, symbolized most dramatically by the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, during the reform era there has been a steady process of depoliticization, accompanied by a steep decline in the importance of ideology. The highly politicized and obtrusive Maoist state has given way to what now looks more like a technocratic state, in the manner of other East Asian developmental states, [678] although the powers of the Chinese state remain wide-ranging, from the one-child policy and internal migration to history books and the media. [679] As the Party has shifted from ideological to instrumental rule, from a political to a technocratic approach, its relationship with the people has become less intrusive. There is, in effect, a new kind of social compact between the Party and the people: the task of the Party is to govern, while the people are left free to get on with the business of transforming their living standards. [680] Far from interesting themselves in politics, people have increasingly retreated into a private world of consumption. Money-making, meanwhile, has replaced politics as the most valued and respected form of social activity, including within the Party itself. The Party has actively encouraged its officials to enter business, not least as a means of galvanizing and mobilizing society. ‘Political loyalty’ has in some degree been replaced by ‘money’ as the measure of the political worth of Party cadres, resulting in a decline in the Party’s identity, a loss of its spiritual appeal and a process of internal decay. [681]

The Party has increasingly sought to transform itself from a revolutionary organization into a ruling administrative party. [682] It prioritizes technical competence, entrepreneurship and knowledge over, as previously, revolutionary credentials, military record and class background, with a technocratic class rather than revolutionaries now in charge of the Party. [683] There have been drastic changes in the social composition of the Party leadership over the last twenty years. Between 1982 and 1997 the proportion of the central committee who were college-educated rose from 55.4 per cent to 92.4 per cent. By 1997 all seven members of the standing committee of the central committee’s political bureau (the top leadership) were college-educated in technical subjects like engineering, geology and physics, while eighteen of the twenty-four political bureau members were also college-educated. [684] The Party has opened its doors to the new private capitalists in an effort to widen its representativeness and embrace the burgeoning private sector. By 2000 20 per cent of all private entrepreneurs were members of the Party. [685] This is not surprising given that by 1995 nearly half of all private capitalists had previously been Party and government officials. [686] The large-scale shift of Party and government officials into the private sector has almost certainly been the biggest single reason for the enormous increase in corruption, as some of them exploited their knowledge and connections to appropriate state property, gain access to cash reserves, and line their own pockets. The problem poses a grave challenge to the Party because, if unchecked, it threatens to undermine its moral standing and legitimacy. Despite a series of major, high-profile campaigns against corruption, of which the most prominent casualty so far has been the former Communist Party chief in Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, the evidence suggests that the problem remains huge and elusive because its roots lie deep within the Party itself and the myriad of guanxi connections. [687]

As the country gravitates towards capitalism, changes are also taking place in China ’s class structure that are bound, in the longer term, to have far-reaching political implications. For the time being, however, the technocratic leadership will continue to dominate both the Party and the government, with little immediate prospect of a challenge to their position. The peasantry, though increasingly restive in response to the seizure of their land, remain weak and marginalized. [688] The working class has seen a serious diminution in its status and influence, with its protests limited to piecemeal, factory-by-factory action. The new class of private entrepreneurs, meanwhile, seems to be conforming to the traditional role of merchants, seeking an accommodation with, and individual favours from, the government, rather than an independent role of its own. [689]

In the longer run there are four possible political directions that Chinese politics might take. [690] The first is towards a multi-party system. This, for the time being, seems the least likely. The second would be the de facto recognition of factions within the Party. To some extent this process has, at least tacitly, been taking place, with former general secretary Jiang Zemin’s power base resting on what came to be known as the Shanghai faction, who were associated with super-growth, privatization, pro-market policies and private entrepreneurs, in contrast to Hu Jintao’s constituency, which has given greater priority to sustainable growth, social equality, environmental protection, and state support for education, health and social security. [691] The third would be reforms designed to instil more life and independence into the People’s Congress and the People’s Consultative Conference, which are state rather than Party institutions. If all three of these directions were followed, they would result in an outcome not dissimilar from that in Japan, where there is a multi-party system in which only one party matters, where the various factions within the Liberal Democrats count for rather more than the other political parties, and where the diet enjoys a limited degree of autonomy. Another possible scenario, in this same context, is that of Singapore — in whose arrangements Deng Xiaoping showed some interest [692] — where the ruling party dominates an ostensibly multi-party system, with the opposition parties dwarfed, harassed and hobbled by the government. The fourth direction, which has been advocated by the Chinese intellectual Pan Wei, puts the emphasis on the rule of law rather than democracy, on how the government is run rather than who runs it, with state officials required to operate according to the law with legal forms of redress if they do not, and the establishment of a truly independent civil service and judiciary, a proposal which, overall, bears a certain similarity to governance in Singapore and Hong Kong. [693] Should this route be pursued then it would mark a continuing rejection of any form of democratic outcome and an affirmation of a relatively orthodox Confucian tradition of elitest government committed to the highest ethical standards.

None of these scenarios seems particularly imminent. For the foreseeable future the most likely outcome is a continuation of the process of reform already under way, notwithstanding the growing problems of governance consequent upon social unrest and chronic corruption. [694] The worst-case scenario for both China and the world would be the collapse and demise of the Communist Party in the manner of the Soviet Union, [695] which had a disastrous effect on Russian living standards for over a decade. The ramifications, nationally and globally, of a similar implosion in China, which has a far bigger population, a much larger economy and is far more integrated with the outside world, would be vastly greater. A period of chaos would threaten the country’s stability, usher in a phase of uncertainty and conflict, threaten a premature end to its modernization, and potentially culminate in a return to one of China ’s periodic phases of introspection and division. The best prospect for China, and the world, is if the present regime continues to direct the country’s transformation on a similar basis of reform and mutation until such time as there can be a relatively benign transition to a different kind of era. Given China ’s huge success over the last thirty years, this remains by far the most likely scenario.

CHINA AS A DIFFERENT KIND OF STATE

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which marked the end of the Thirty Years War and initiated a new order in Central Europe based on state sovereignty), the European nation-state slowly emerged as the dominant unit in the international system. The rise of China poses an implicit challenge to this idea. For the West the key operational concept is the nation-state, but for the Chinese it is the civilization-state. At a minimum this will present the world with formidable problems of mutual understanding. This can be illustrated by the linguistic differences: whereas in English there are different words for nation, country, state and government, these are not only relatively recent in Chinese, but the Chinese still largely use the same character for ‘country’ and ‘state’. [696] The real difficulty, of course, lies not in linguistic differences but in the different cultural assumptions and meanings that are attached to those words in the two languages. The same word can have a very different meaning for an American or a French person in contrast to a Chinese, even though they might appear to be singing from the same sheet. Huang Ping believes that this cultural difference ‘is going to be a huge problem’. [697] In a world hitherto dominated by Western concepts, values, institutions and propositions, to which China has been obliged to adapt, this has been a far bigger problem for China than for the West. But fast-forward to the future and it becomes clear that, as China ’s power and influence grow apace, it will become the West’s problem more than China ’s. [698]

In such circumstances it is pointless to think that China is going to change and adopt Western cultural norms: the practices and ways of thinking are simply too old and too deeply rooted for that to happen. Far from China converging on the Western model and thereby conforming to the established patterns of the nation-state, there is likely to be a rather different scenario. This is not necessarily because China will want to change things: on the contrary, it has been at pains to assure the global community that it certainly does not see itself as an agent of change anxious to overthrow the established international order. But countries naturally and inevitably see the world according to their own history and experiences, an outlook that is tempered only by the constraints of geopolitics and realpolitik. The European powers, the major architects of the international system as we know it today, brought their own traditions and history to bear on the shaping and design of that system, at the core of which lay the nation-state, a European invention. The way in which the United States sees the world reflects both its European ancestry and the specific characteristics of its own formation and growth. The fact that it expanded by a continuous process of conquest and that, as a settler-nation, it had to invent itself from scratch has imbued the country with a universalizing and missionary conception of its role. [699] The rules that govern the international system may be universal in application, but that does not mean that they were universal in creation, that they emerged magically out of the international ether: on the contrary, they were the invention of those nations that were strong and dominant enough to enforce their will and to ensure that their interests were those that triumphed. As China becomes a global power, and ultimately a superpower, probably in time the dominant superpower, then it, like every other previous major power, will view the world through the prism of its own history and will seek, subject to the prevailing constraints, to reshape that world in its own image. Above all, that means that China will see the world in terms of its identity and experience as a civilization-state, with its attendant characteristics and assumptions, rather than primarily as a nation-state.

There is another related sense in which China’s emergence is bound to change the international system as we know it. The European nation-states that constituted the original founding core of the international system were all, roughly speaking, of a similar kind: namely, in global terms, small to medium sized. Following the Second World War, the number and diversity of nation-states was dramatically transformed as a result of decolonization (and then again after 1989 with the break-up of the USSR). The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the US and the USSR, which were both far larger than even the biggest European nation-states. Partly as a result, the West European states were encouraged to combine their power in what we now know as the European Union, a grouping of nation-states. It has become common to see such unions of nation-states as the way forward, ASEAN and Mercosur (a regional trade agreement between four South American countries) being further examples, though neither as yet involves any pooling of sovereignty. The American perspective, for obvious reasons, has invariably placed the major emphasis on the nation-state. But the rise of China and India threatens to transform the picture again. In one sense, of course, it marks the reassertion of the nation-state. These are no ordinary nation-states, however, but states on a gargantuan scale. If this century will increasingly belong to China and India, in conjunction with the United States, then it should also be seen as the Age of the Megastate. [700] This does not mean that unions of nation-states will go out of fashion, but their primary raison d’être is likely to be as a counterweight to the megastate, both the old (the United States) and especially the new (China and India).

Quite where this will leave the old Westphalian system is difficult to say. States of the scale, size and potential power of China and India will dwarf the vast majority of other countries. This will not be an entirely new phenomenon. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both established unequal relations with their subordinate allies to an extent which frequently undermined or greatly detracted from the sovereignty of the latter. This is the case, in varying degrees, of the US ’s present relationship with many countries. But China and India are on a different scale even to the United States: China has more than three times the population and between them India and China comprise around 38 per cent of the world’s population. As both are still only at the earliest stages of their transformation, it is impossible at present to conceive what this might mean in terms of their relationship with other states. The Westphalian system may well survive the emergence of China and India as global powers, but it will certainly look very different from any previous stage in its history.

There is one other aspect of China’s emergence as a global power that is also novel. Hitherto, ever since the onset of industrialization in the late eighteenth century, the most powerful countries in the world have shared two characteristics. First, they have enjoyed one of the highest (if not the highest) GDPs of their time. Second, they have also had an extremely high GDP per head: the richest nations have also had the richest populations. That was true — in rough chronological order — of Britain, France, Germany, the United States and Japan. The only exception, arguably, was the USSR. That situation is about to change: China will share only one of these characteristics, not both. It already has a high GDP — the third highest in the world measured by market exchange rates. But even when it overtakes the United States in 2027, as predicted by Goldman Sachs, it will still have a relatively low GDP per head, and even in 2050 it will still only belong to the ‘upper middle group’ rather than the ‘rich club’ (see Figure 23). Welcome to a new kind of global power, which is, at one and the same time, both a developed — by virtue of the size of its GDP — and a developing country — by virtue of its GDP per capita.

Figure 23. Future income per capita of major countries.

The implications of a potential superpower being both a developed and a developing country are profound and multifarious. Previously the distinction between developed and developing countries was clear and unambiguous. Indeed between 1900 and 1960 there was a fundamental cleavage between those countries that industrialized in the nineteenth century and those that did not, a situation which persisted until the rise of the Asian tigers from the late fifties. This distinction between developing and developed will in future be more shaded. The continental-sized states, namely China and India, are likely to belong to both categories for many decades: their huge populations mean that they will continue to embrace very diverse levels of development and living standards within their borders. And they are in the process of being joined by other more populous developing countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, with Russia already belonging in this category.

The fact that China and India will be both developed and developing countries suggests that they will also enjoy diverse interests, namely the motives and concerns of both developed and developing countries: in effect, they will have a foot in both camps. Hitherto, trade relations have been dominated by the interests of the developed world on the one hand and the developing world on the other. Where will China and India fit in this game? Will they lean towards the developed world or the developing world, or both, depending on the issue involved? [701] It is reasonable to assume that over the next twenty years or so, both will frequently make common cause with the developing world: this can already be seen in the role of and cooperation between China, India, Brazil and South Africa in the World Trade Organization.

In the longer run, though, this will change. Assuming that both China and India continue to enjoy rapid growth for some time to come, the centre of gravity of their interests and concerns is likely to shift steadily over time from the ‘developing’ sectors of their economies to the ‘developed’, a process which will be accompanied by the growing power of those associated with the more modern parts of their economies. This is already evident in China with the increasing power of entrepreneurs and the steady decline of the farmers. A byproduct of these trends might be to embed fundamental divisions in these countries between the developed and developing parts, disparities that are a function of historic differences, reinforced and accentuated by their relationship to the inequalities and dynamics of the global economy.

China will also share another characteristic with India as a major power. China was partially colonized and India was completely colonized. The club of advanced countries — those that began their industrialization in the nineteenth century or, in the case of Britain, earlier — were those that did the colonizing. The United States, of course, also started life as a colony, but because its settler population consisted of migrants from Europe, especially Britain, its relationship to Britain as an imperial power was very different to those colonies whose people were of a different race and culture. [702] The US, moreover, was also later to acquire its own colonies. China and India will be the first major powers that were previously colonized and are composed of non-white races and cultures. In other words, China and India can identify with those who have been colonized in a way that the imperialist powers obviously cannot. This has greatly assisted China in its courtship of Africa, as we shall see in Chapter 9. Here is another powerful change in the texture and symbolism of global politics represented by the rise of China and, in this case, especially India. [703]