When China Rules the World

12. Concluding Remarks: The Eight Differences that Define China

Broadly speaking, there have been two kinds of Western response to the rise of China. The first sees China more or less solely in economic terms. We might call this the ‘economic wow factor’. People are incredulous about the growth figures. They are in awe of what those growth figures might mean for China’s position in the world. Any undue concern about their implications, moreover, is calmed by the belief that China is steadily becoming more like us, possessed of the accoutrements — from markets and stock exchanges to cars and private homes — of a modern Western society. This response is guilty of underestimating what the rise of China represents. It is a victim of tunnel vision and represents a failure of imagination. Economic change, fundamental as it may be, can only be part of the picture. This view, blind as it is to the importance of politics and culture, rests on an underlying assumption that China, by virtue of its economic transformation, will, in effect, become Western. Consciously or unconsciously, it chimes with Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ view: that since 1989 the world has been converging on Western liberal democracy. The other response, in contrast, is persistently sceptical about the rise of China, always half expecting it to end in failure. In the light of Maoism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suppression of the students in Tiananmen Square, the argument runs, it is impossible for China to sustain its transformation without fundamental political change: unless it adopts the Western model, it will fail. The first view holds that China will automatically become Western, the second does not: but both share the belief that for China to succeed, it must, in effect, become Western.

This book is predicated on a very different approach. It does not accept that the ‘Western way’ is the only viable model. In arguing this, it should be borne in mind that the West has seen off every major challenge it has faced, culminating in the defeat after 1989 of its greatest adversary, Soviet Communism. It has a formidable track record of growth and innovation, which is why it has proved such a dynamic force over such a long period of time. Unlike the stark either/or alternatives of the great ideological era between 1917 and 1989, the choices are now more nuanced. The East Asian examples of modernization have all drawn from the Western experience, including China’s post-1978 transformation. But to suggest that this is the key to East Asia’s success or even amounts to the main story is a mistake. The reason for China’s transformation (like those of the other East Asian countries, commencing with Japan) has been the way it has succeeded in combining what it has learnt from the West, and also its East Asian neighbours, with its own history and culture, thereby tapping and releasing its native sources of dynamism. We have moved from the era of either/or to one characterized by hybridity.

Central to the book is the contention that, far from there being a single modernity, there will in fact be many. Until around 1970 modernity was, with the exception of Japan, an exclusively Western phenomenon. But over the last half-century we have witnessed the emergence of quite new modernities, drawing on those of the West but ultimately dependent for their success on their ability to mobilize, build upon and transform the indigenous. These new modernities are no less original for their hybridity; indeed, their originality lies partly in that phenomenon. Nor will hybridity remain an exclusively Asian or non-Western condition: in the face of the growing success of East Asian societies, the West will be obliged to learn from and incorporate some of their insights and characteristics. In a limited way this is already the case, with the West, for example, employing some of the innovations developed by the Japanese system of manufacturing — although, given that these are very much rooted in Japanese culture, usually with somewhat less success. A key question concerns which elements of the Western model are indispensable and which are optional. Clearly, all successful examples of economic transformation currently on offer are based upon a capitalist model of development, although their economic institutions and policies, not to mention their politics and culture, display very wide variations. However, the proposition that the inheritance must, as a precondition for success, include Enlightenment principles such as Western-style rule of law, an independent judiciary and representative government is by no means proven. Japan, which is at least as advanced as its counterparts in the West, is not based on the principles of the Enlightenment, nor does it embrace Western-style democracy, even though, since the early fifties, largely for reasons of political convenience, it has routinely been seen as doing so by the West. And even if China moves in the direction of more representative government and a more independent judiciary, as it probably will in the long term, it will surely do so in very much its own way, based on its own history and traditions, which will owe little or nothing to any Western inheritance.

The desire to measure China primarily, sometimes even exclusively, in terms of Western yardsticks, while understandable, is flawed. At best it expresses a relatively innocent parochialism, at worst it reflects an overweening Western hubris, a belief that the Western experience is universal in all matters of importance. This can easily become an excuse for not bothering to understand or respect the wisdom and specificities of other cultures, histories and traditions. The problem, as Paul A. Cohen has pointed out, is that the Western mentality — nurtured and shaped by its long-term ascendancy — far from being imbued with a cosmopolitan outlook as one might expect, is in fact highly parochial, believing in its own univeralism; or, to put it another way, its own rectitude and eternal relevance. [1334] If we already have the answers, and these are universally applicable, then there is little or nothing to learn from anyone else. While the West remained relatively unchallenged, as it has been for the best part of two centuries, the price of such arrogance has overwhelmingly been paid by others, as they were obliged to take heed of Western demands; but when the West comes under serious challenge, as it increasingly will from China and others, then such a parochial mentality will only serve to increase its vulnerability, weakening its ability to learn from others and to change accordingly.

The problem with interpreting and evaluating China solely or mainly in terms of the Western lexicon of experience is that, by definition, it excludes all that is specific to China: in short, what makes China what it is. The only things that are seen to matter are those that China shares with the West. China’s history and culture are dismissed as a blind alley or merely a preparation for becoming Western, the hors d’oeuvres before the Western feast. Such an approach is not only demeaning to China and other non-Western cultures, it also largely misses the point. By seeing China in terms of the West, it refuses to recognize or acknowledge China’s own originality and, furthermore, how China’s difference might change the nature of the world in which we live. Since the eighties and nineties, the heyday of the ‘globali zation as Westernization’ era, when the Asian tigers, including China, were widely interpreted in these terms, there has been a dawning realization that such a huge country embodying such a rich history and civilization cannot be so summarily dismissed. We should not exaggerate — the Western consensus still sees history as a one-way ticket to Westernization — but one can detect the beginnings of a new Western consciousness, albeit still weak and fragile, which is more humble and realistic. As China grows increasingly powerful — while remaining determinedly different — the West will be forced, however reluctantly, to confront the nature and meaning of that difference. Understanding China will be one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century.

What then will be the key characteristics of Chinese modernity? They are eight in all, which for the deeply superstitious Chinese happens to be their lucky number. In exploring these characteristics, we must consider both the internal features of China’s modernity and, given China’s global importance, how these might impact upon and structure its global outlook and relations.

First, China is not really a nation-state in the traditional sense of the term but a civilization-state. True, it describes itself as a nation-state, but China’s acquiescence in the status of nation-state was a consequence of its growing weakness in the face of the Western powers from the late nineteenth century.

The Chinese reluctantly acknowledged that China had to adapt to the world rather than insisting, in an increasingly utopian and hopeless mission, that the rest of the world should adapt to it. That cannot hide the underlying reality, however, that China is not a conventional nation-state. A century might seem a long time, but not for a society that consciously thinks of itself as several millennia old. Most of what China is today — its social relations and customs, its ways of being, its sense of superiority, its belief in the state, its commitment to unity — are products of Chinese civilization rather than its recent incarnation as a nation-state. On the surface it may seem like a nation-state, but its geological formation is that of a civilization-state.

It might be objected that China has changed so much during the period of its accommodation to the status of nation-state that these lines of continuity have been broken and largely erased. There was the failure of the imperial state to modernize, culminating in its demise in the 1911 Revolution; the failure of the nationalist government to modernize China, unify the country, or defeat the occupying powers (notably Japan), leading to its overthrow in the 1949 Revolution; the Maoist period, which sought to sweep away much of imperial China, from Confucius and traditional dress to the old patterns of land tenure and the established social hierarchies; followed by the reform period, the rapid decline of agriculture, the rise of industry and the growing assertion of capitalist social relations. Each of these periods represents a major disjuncture in Chinese history. Yet much of what previously characterized China remains strikingly true and evident today. The country still has almost the same borders that it acquired at the maximum extent of the Qing empire in the late eighteenth century. The state remains as pivotal in society and as sacrosanct as it was in imperial times. Confucius, its great architect, is in the process of experiencing a revival and his precepts still, in important measure, inform the way China thinks and behaves. Although there are important differences between the Confucian and Communist eras, there are also strong similarities. This not to deny that China has changed in fundamental ways, but rather to stress that China is also marked by powerful lines of continuity — that, to use a scientific analogy, its DNA remains intact. This is a country, moreover, which lives in and with its past to a greater extent than any other: tormented by its failure to either modernize or unify, China possesses a past that casts a huge shadow over its present, to the extent that the Chinese have lived in a state of perpetual regret and anguish. But as China finally circumnavigates its way beyond the ‘century of humiliation’ and successfully concludes its 150-year project of modernization, it will increasingly search for inspiration, nourishment and parallels in its past. As it once again becomes the centre of the world, it will luxuriate in its history and feel that justice has finally been done, that it is restoring its rightful position and status in the world. [1335]

When China was down, it was obliged to live according to the terms set by others. It had no alternative. That is why it reconciled itself to being a nation-state, even if it never really believed this to be the case. It was a compromise borne of expediency and necessity. But as China arrives at modernity and emerges as the most powerful country in the world, it will no longer be bound by such constraints and will in time be in a position to set its own terms and conditions. It will feel free to be what it thinks it is and act according to its history and instincts, which are those of a civilization-state.

Second, China is increasingly likely to conceive of its relationship with East Asia in terms of a tributary-state, rather than nation-state, system. The tributary-state system, as we saw in Chapter 9, lasted for thousands of years and only finally came to an end at the conclusion of the nineteenth century. Even then, it was not entirely extinguished but continued — as a matter of habit and custom, the product of an enduring history — in a submerged form beneath the newly dominant Westphalian system. Up to a point, then, it never completely disappeared, even when China was a far less important actor in East Asia than it had been prior to the mid nineteenth century. The fact that the tributary-state system prevailed for so long means that it is deeply ingrained in the way that both China and East Asian states think about their relationship. As a consequence, any fundamental change in the position of China in the region, and the consequent balance of power between China and its neighbouring states, could well see a reversion to a more tributary-state relationship. The tributary system was undermined by the emergence of the European powers, together with Japan, as the dominant presence in the region, and by the remorseless decline of China. The European powers have long since exited the region; their successor power, the United States, is now a declining force; and Japan is rapidly being overshadowed by China. Meanwhile, China is swiftly resuming its position as the fulcrum of the East Asian economy. In other words, the conditions that gave rise to the dominance of the nation-state system in East Asia are crumbling, while at the same time we are witnessing the restoration of the circumstances that underpinned the tributary-state system.

The tributary-state system was characterized by the enormous inequality that existed between China on the one hand and its neighbouring states on the other, together with a mutual belief in the superiority of Chinese culture. John K. Fairbank suggests in The Chinese World Order that: ‘If its belief in Chinese superiority persists, it seems likely that the country will seek its future role by looking closely at its own history.’ [1336] Given that the idea of Chinese superiority remains firmly in place, China ’s growing economic strength, together with its enormous population, could return the region to a not dissimilar state of affairs to that which existed in the past. China is in the process of becoming the most important market for virtually every single East Asian country. Nor is the huge imbalance in power necessarily one that other states in the region will baulk at or resist, with the possible exception of Japan; indeed, all bar Japan and, until very recently, Taiwan have consciously sought to move closer to China during the course of its rise rather than hedge with the United States against it. This is partly based on the habit and experience of history and partly on an accommodation with what these countries view as an inevitable and irresistible process. The rise of China and a return to something more akin to a tributary-state system will not necessarily be distinguished by instability; on the contrary, the tributary-state system was highly stable, rooted as it was in China ’s dominance and a virtually unchallenged hierarchical pattern of relationships. It would be wrong, however, to see any return to a tributary-style relationship as a simple rerun of the past — with, for example, the presidents and prime ministers of neighbouring states making ritualized trips to Beijing bearing gifts in recognition of the greatness of the Chinese president and the superiority of the latter-day Celestial Kingdom. Rather it is likely to be defined by an acceptance that East Asia is essentially a Chinese-centric order; that it embodies an implicit hierarchy in which China ’s position of ascendancy is duly acknowledged; and that there is underlying recognition and acceptance of Chinese superiority.

To what extent will any quasi-tributary system be confined to East Asia? Could it find echoes in other parts of the world? There is, of course, no tradition of a tributary-state system elsewhere: it was only present in East Asia. That, however, was when the Middle Kingdom regarded the world as more or less coterminous with East Asia. If China approaches other parts of the world with a not too dissimilar mindset, and its power is sufficiently overwhelming, could the same kind of hierarchical system be repeated elsewhere? Could there even be a global tributary system? The sphere to which it is least likely to extend is the West, at least as represented by the United States and Europe. They enjoy too much power; and it should not be forgotten that it was Europe which forced China, against its wishes, to forsake the tributary system in favour of the Westphalian system in the first place. It is not inconceivable, however, that in the long run Australia and New Zealand might enter into some elements of a tributary relationship with China given their relative proximity to it and their growing dependence on the Chinese economy. A tributary dimension might also emerge in China’s relations with Central Asia. It would not be difficult to imagine echoes of the tributary system being found in China’s relationship with Africa, given the enormous imbalance of power between them; perhaps in Latin America also, and South Asia, though not India. In each case, the key features would be China’s overweening power, the dependency of countries in a multitude of ways on China, and an implicit acceptance of the virtues, if not the actual superiority, of Chinese civilization. But geographical distance in the case of Africa and Latin America, for example, will be a big barrier, while cultural and ethnic difference in all these instances will prove a major obstacle and a source of considerable resentment.

Third, there is the distinctively Chinese attitude towards race and ethnicity. The Han Chinese conceive of themselves as a single race, even though this is clearly not the case. What sustains this view is the extraordinarily long history of Chinese civilization, which has enabled a lengthy process of melding and fusing of countless different races. The sacrosanct and inviolable nature of Chinese unity is underpinned by the idea that the Han Chinese are all of one race, with even the non-Han Chinese being described in terms of separate nationalities rather than races. There is, furthermore, a powerful body of opinion in China that believes in polygenism and holds that the origins of the Chinese are discrete and unconnected with that of other branches of humankind. In other words, the notion of China and Chinese civilization is bolstered by a widespread belief that the difference between the Chinese and other peoples is not simply cultural or historical but also biological. The non-negotiable nature of the Chinese state’s attitude towards race is eloquently illustrated by its approach towards the ‘lost territories’ and the belief that Hong Kong and Taiwan are inseparable from China because their populations are Chinese: any idea that there might be a distinct Taiwanese identity is summarily dismissed. The Chinese attitude towards race and what constitutes being Chinese, as we noted in Chapter 8, is diametrically opposed to that of other highly populous nations such as India, Indonesia, Brazil and the United States, which explicitly recognize their multiracial and multi-ethnic character and, in varying degrees, celebrate that fact.

It would be wrong to describe the Chinese attitude towards race as an ideological position, because it is simply too old and too deeply rooted in Chinese history for that to be the case. Certainly it went through a profound change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its antecedents lie deep in the long history of Chinese civilization. Nor is the attitude towards race and identity reducible to the Chinese state or government: rather, it is ingrained in the Chinese psyche. To give one contemporary illustration: support for the return of Taiwan amongst the Chinese people is, if anything, even stronger than it is at a governmental level. Given this, any democratically elected government — admittedly, a most unlikely occurrence in the next twenty years — will almost certainly be more nativist and essentialist in its attitude towards Chinese identity than the present Communist government, which, by virtue of its lack of electoral accountability, enjoys a greater independence from popular prejudices. Nor should we anticipate any significant change in Chinese attitudes on race and ethnicity. It is true that they may have been accentuated by centuries of relative isolation from the rest of the world and China ’s growing integration may, as a consequence, help to weaken prejudices based on the ignorance of isolation, but the fundamental roots of Chinese attitudes will remain untouched. In fact, rather than being confined to a particular period of history, China ’s isolation is fundamental to understanding what I have described as the Middle Kingdom mentality. China saw itself as above, beyond, separate from and superior to the rest of the world. ‘Isolation’, in this sense, was integral to the Chinese world-view, even during the periods, like the Song dynasty or early Ming, when China was not isolationist in policy and outlook. It helps to explain why, for example, China has had such a different attitude from the major European states towards those who settled in other lands. Europeans viewed their settlers and colonizers as an integral part of the national civilizing mission and as still belonging to the homeland; the imperial dynasty, on the other hand, viewed those who departed the Middle Kingdom with relative and continuing indifference, as if leaving China was a step down and outside civilization. This point provides us with a way of understanding the terms on which China ’s growing integration with the rest of the world in the twenty-first century will take place. China is fast joining the world but, true to its history, it will also remain aloof, ensconced in a hierarchical view of humanity, its sense of superiority resting on a combination of cultural and racial hubris.

Fourth, China operates, and will continue to operate, on a quite different continental-sized canvas to other nation-states. There are four other states that might be described as continental in scale. The United States has a surface area only marginally smaller than that of China, but with a population only a quarter of the size. Australia is a continent in its own right, with a surface area around 80 per cent of China ’s, yet its population is a meagre 21 million, less than that of Malaysia or Taiwan, with the vast majority living around its coastal perimeter. Brazil has a surface area of around 90 per cent of China ’s, but a much smaller population of 185 million. Perhaps the nearest parallel to China is India, with a population of equivalent size, but a surface area only a third of that of China ’s. Thus, although China shares certain similarities with each of these countries, its particular combination of population size and surface area is unique. Chinese modernity will come continental-sized, in terms of both population and physical size. This has fundamental implications not only for the way in which China has worked in the past but also for how it will work in the future. A continental-sized country is an utterly different kind of proposition to a conventional nation-state unless its population is tiny like Australia’s, or it started off life as a settler-colony — as in the case of United States and Australia, which were essentially European transplants — with the homogeneity this implies. When a country is as huge as China in both physical scale and population, it is characterized by great diversity and, in certain respects, can be thought of as, in effect, a combination of several, even many, different countries. This is not to detract from the point made throughout this book about the centripetal forces that hold China together, but rather serves to make this unity an even more extraordinary phenomenon. We are dealing with a state that is at one and the same time a country and a continent — in other words, which is both national and multinational — and which therefore must be governed, at one and the same time, according to the imperatives of both a country and a multiplicity of countries.

For these reasons, amongst others, the Chinese state operates in an atypical way in comparison with conventional nation-states. The feedback loops, for example, are different. What might seem a logical consequence of a government action in an ordinary nation-state may not follow at all in China; in a country of such huge scale, furthermore, it is possible to conduct an experiment in one city or province without it being introduced elsewhere, which is what happened with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, even though they could hardly have been more fundamental or far-reaching in their effect. It is possible, in this context, to imagine democratic reforms being introduced in one relatively advanced province or municipality — Zhejiang or Shanghai, for example — but not others. As we saw in Chapter 7, the civilization-state embraces the concept of ‘one civilization, many systems’, which was introduced to the wider world in 1997 with the handover of Hong Kong to China under the formula ‘one country, two systems’; but the idea of systemic differences within China’s borders, in fact, has a very long history. It is conventional wisdom in the West that China should become ‘democratic’ in the West’s own image. The democratic systems that we associate with the West, however, have never taken root on anything like such a vast scale as China, with the single exception of India: indeed, apart from India, the only vaguely comparable example is that of a multinational institution like the European Union, and this has remained determinedly undemocratic in its constitution and modus operandi. One day China may well move, in its own fashion, towards something that resembles democracy, but Western calls that it should do so more or less forthwith glibly ignore the huge differences that exist between a vast continental-sized civilization-state like China and the far smaller Western nation-states. The fact that China ’s true European counterpart, the European Union, is similarly without democracy only serves to reinforce the point.

Fifth, the nature of the Chinese polity is highly specific. Unlike the Western experience, in particular that of Europe, the imperial dynasty was neither obliged, nor required, nor indeed desired to share power with other competing institutions or interest groups, such as the Church or the merchant class. China has not had organized religion in the manner of the West during the last millennium, while its merchants, for their part, instead of seeking to promote their interests by means of a collective voice, have sought favour through individual supplication. The state did not, either in its imperial nor in its Communist form, share power with anyone else: it presided over society, supreme and unchallenged. The Confucian ethos that informed and shaped it for some two millennia did not require the state to be accountable to the people, but instead insisted on its loyalty to the moral precepts of Confucianism. The imperial bureaucracy, admission to which represented the highest possible achievement for anyone outside the dynastic circle, was schooled in Confucian morality and ethics. The efficacy of this system was evident for all to see: for many centuries Chinese statecraft had no peers in terms of efficiency, competence or its ability to undertake enormous public projects. There was just one exception to the absence of any form of popular accountability: in the event of severe popular unrest and disillusionment it was deemed that the mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn and legitimacy lay on the side of the people rather than the incumbent emperor. Apart from this in extremis scenario, the people have never enjoyed sovereignty: even after the fall of the imperial system, the dynastic state was replaced not by Western-style popular sovereignty but by state sovereignty.

Little has changed with Communist rule since 1949. Popular accountability in a recognizable Western form has remained absent. During the Maoist period, the legitimacy of the state was expressed in terms of a new class system in which the workers and peasants were pronounced as the new rulers; during the reform period this has partly been superseded by a de facto results-based compact between the state and the people, in which the state is required to deliver economic growth and rising living standards. As testament to the historical continuity of the Chinese state, the same key elements continue to define the nature of the Chinese polity. There is the continuing absence of any form of popular accountability, with no sign or evidence that this is likely to change — apart from the election of Hong Kong ’s chief executive, which may be introduced in 2012, and the present election of half its Legislative Council. Notwithstanding the convulsive changes over the last century following the fall of the imperial state, with nationalist government, warlordism, partial colonization, the Maoist state and the present reform period, the state remains venerated, above society, possessed of great prestige, regarded as the embodiment of what China is, and the guarantor of the country’s stability and unity. It is the quintessence of China in a way that is not true of any Western society, or arguably any other society in the world. Given its remarkable historical endurance — at least two millennia, arguably much longer — this characteristic must be seen as part of China ’s genetic structure. The legitimacy of the Chinese state, profound and deeply rooted, does not depend on an electoral mandate; indeed, even if universal suffrage was to be introduced, the taproots of the state’s legitimacy would still lie in the country’s millennial foundations. The Chinese state remains a highly competent institution, probably superior to any other state-tradition in the world and likely to exercise a powerful influence on the rest of the world in the future. It has shown itself to be capable not only of extraordinary continuity but also remarkable reinvention. The period since 1949 has seen this happen twice, initially in the form of the Maoist state, with the Communist Party providing the embryo of the new state, and acting to restore China ’s unity; followed by the renewal and revitalization of the state during the reform era, leading to the economic transformation of the country. In the absence of any formal mechanism of popular accountability, it is reasonable to surmise that something like the mandate of Heaven still operates: should the present experiment go seriously wrong — culminating, for example, in escalating social unrest as a result of widening inequalities, or serious unemployment — then the hand of history might come to rest on the Communist Party’s shoulder and its time be called.

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.

There are two powerful forces that will serve to promote the steady reconfiguration of the world on China ’s terms. The fact that China is so huge means that it exercises a gravitational pull on every other nation. The nearest parallel is the United States, but the latter is on a much smaller scale. Size will enable China to set the terms of its relationships with other countries: hitherto that has been limited by China ’s level of development, but its gravitational power will grow exponentially in the future. China ’s mass will oblige the rest of the world largely to acquiesce in China ’s way of doing things. Moreover China ’s size, combined with its remorseless transformation, means that time is constantly on its side. It can afford to wait in the knowledge that the passage of time is steadily reconfiguring the world in its favour. Take its relationship with Japan: on the assumption that China ’s rapid growth continues, Japan will ultimately be obliged to accept China ’s leadership of East Asia. The same can be said, albeit less starkly, of China ’s relationship with the United States and Europe. With the rise of China, indeed, time itself takes on a new and different meaning: timescales are, in effect, elongated. We have become used to thinking in terms of the converse: the ever-shortening sense of time. The template for this is provided by the United States, a country with a brief history, a short memory, and a constant predilection for remaking itself. China is the opposite. It is possessed of a 5,000-year history and an extremely long memory, and unsurprisingly conceives of the future in terms of protracted timescales. As a result, it is blessed with the virtue of patience, confident in the belief that history is on its side. If that has been the Chinese mentality since time immemorial, in the twenty-first century it will come to fruition.

So how will China act as a great power, once it is no longer confined to the straitjacket of modernization? It would be wrong to assume that it will behave like the West; that cannot be discounted, but history suggests something different. While Europe, and subsequently the United States, have been aggressive and expansionist, their tentacles reaching all over the world, China ’s expansion has been limited to its continent and although, in the era of globalization, that will change, there is little reason to presume that it will be a West Mark 2. Many in the West are concerned about the absence of Western-style democracy in China, but over the last thirty years the country has become significantly more transparent and its leadership more accountable. This process is likely to continue and at some point result in a much bigger political transformation, though any democratic evolution is likely to take a markedly different form from that of the West. For the foreseeable future, however, given the success of the period since 1978, there is unlikely to be any great change. The greatest concern about China as a global power lies elsewhere, namely its deeply rooted superiority complex. How that will structure and influence Chinese behaviour and its attitudes towards the rest of the world remains to be seen, but it is clear that something so entrenched will not dissolve or disappear. If the calling card of the West has often been aggression and conquest, China ’s will be its overweening sense of superiority and the hierarchical mentality this has engendered.

The arrival of China as a major power marks the end of Western universalism. Western norms, values and institutions will increasingly find themselves competing with those of China. The decline of Western universalism, however, is not solely a product of China ’s rise, because the latter is part of a much wider phenomenon, an increasingly multipolar economic world and the proliferation of diverse modernities. Nor will the decline of the Western world be replaced in any simplistic fashion by a Sinocentric world. The rise of competing modernities heralds a quite new world in which no hemisphere or country will have the same kind of prestige, legitimacy or overwhelming force that the West has enjoyed over the last two centuries. Instead, different countries and cultures will compete for legitimacy and influence. The Western world is over; the new world, at least for the next century, will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one was Western. We are entering an era of competing modernity, albeit one in which China will increasingly be in the ascendant and eventually dominant.

But all this lies some way off. For the time being, the world is preoccupied by the onset of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. At the time of writing, the consequences of this remain unknown. Depressions are a bit like wars: they test societies in a way that normal periods of prosperity and growth do not. They reveal weaknesses and vulnerabilities that otherwise remain concealed. They give rise to new political ideologies and movements, as the world learnt to its great cost in the interwar years. On the face of it, China is much better equipped to deal with this crisis than the West. Its financial sector is in a much superior condition to that of the West, having avoided the hubristic risk-taking that hobbled the Western banks; nor is China confronted with the kind of de-leveraging which threatens deflation and a major shrinkage of demand in the West and Japan. While the developed world faces the prospect of shrinking economies for perhaps two or more years, China is still looking forward to considerate growth, albeit of uncertain magnitude. The unknown for China is the effect that a growth rate which falls below 8 per cent, perhaps to 6 per cent or much lower even, would have in terms of unemployment and social unrest. This will prove to be by far the biggest test Chinese society has faced since 1989. The world is entering a new political era. Despite regular Western warnings that the Chinese model was unsustainable and needed to be Westernized, the financial crisis in 2008 marked the demise of neo-liberalism and the failure of the Western free-market model as practised since the late seventies: the Chinese rather than the Western approach has been affirmed. [1337] At the same time, the departure of George Bush and his replacement by Barack Obama has kindled enormous global interest, not least in the developing world, which should serve to increase the standing of the United States in the eyes of many. But it is the effect of the global recession that is likely to have the most serious impact. If China continues to grow at 6–8 per cent and can avoid debilitating social unrest, while the Western economy enters a period of negative or near zero economic growth, then the global recession is likely to significantly accelerate the trends discussed in this book and result in an even more rapid shift of power to China.

It has become evident that China is prepared to take a more proactive and interventionist role in international financial affairs. Given that the global financial crisis is presently at the top of every agenda and that reform of the existing global financial order is now irresistible, this has far-reaching implications: China will be a central player in whatever new architecture emerges from the present crisis. This represents an extraordinary change even compared with two years ago, let alone five years ago, when China was not even included in discussions on such matters. But it also has a much wider significance. The rise of China and the decline of the United States will, at least during this period, be enacted overwhelmingly on the financial and economic stage. And China is demonstrating that it intends to be a full-hearted participant in this process. It is not difficult to predict some of the likely consequences: the G20 will effectively replace the G8 and the IMF and the World Bank will be subject to reform, with the developing countries acquiring a greater say.

The most audacious proposal that has so far emanated from Beijing is the suggestion for a new de facto global currency based on using IMF’s special drawing rights, which might in time replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Whether such a proposal would ever see the light of day, or indeed work, given that reserve currencies hitherto have always depended on a powerful sovereign state, it offers an insight into the strategic financial thinking that informs the Chinese government’s approach. It suggests that the Chinese recognize that the days of the dollar as the dominant global currency are now numbered. At the same time, the Chinese government is actively seeking ways to progressively internationalize the role of the renminbi. It recently concluded a number of currency swaps with major trading partners including South Korea, Argentina and Indonesia, thereby widening the use of the renminbi outside its own borders. It is also in the process of taking steps to increase the renminbi’s role in Hong Kong, which is significant because of the latter’s international position, and has announced its intention of making Shanghai a global financial centre by 2020. There are, thus, already strong indications that China ’s rise will be hastened by the global crisis.