I have a long and earnest interest in China. I have my reasons, good reasons, I believe. Part of it goes way back to my days of military service during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when I was trained and worked as a Chinese crytologic linguist under one of our national intelligence services. Part of it is my general interest in Chinese art and history which I explore through a group I belong to in Naples. China has a long, fascinating, and impressive history of unique achievement. But most important is the ascendant, global economic and geopolitical profile of a country that is already a force to be reckoned with in the world, the trajectory of which is toward greater, possibly dominating global influence.
I often don't understand why others don't share my depth of interest and concern. The result is that I sometimes find myself in passing conversations in which I am eagerly trying to relate my understandings. But in trying to share them in a short discussion, I can err on the side of passion, and fail to convey a properly qualified and measured summary explanation. In these situations, I can be a poor emissary for those understandings and concerns. Allow me to try to do better here.
As I have said, I am something of a student of China, or at least a China junkie. I read everything I can in both the Chinese and Western press, and in the most respected journals I can find. And in recent years I have had and spent more time indulging that interest. But now, my more recent and continuing readings on China's dynastic history have given me a new perspective on their most recent "lost century," followed by their stunning ascendency of the last 30 years. I now understand that China has many times reshaped or restructured itself over periods of at least a century--or much longer--in the 4800-year history of a continuing Chinese polity and culture. In the long view, I've come to see China's newest ascendency as just China recreating itself again, a view also shared by some China analysts and historians. And the substantial, increasing number of educated Chinese in the PRC, and there leaders, are well aware of their illustrious dynastic history and, like their forbears, are by temperament or discipline given to taking the long view.
If this assessment is at all true and fair, the prospects for China--and for America in a world with China so dramatically ascendant--should be sobering to us. We can continue to be a successful, powerful, and respected world player, but only if we understand the new game we are now playing and the new and changing contours of the field we are playing on. It is a world of evolving multilateralism and increasing collaboration--a world of more shared global decision-making and accountability. And China will be offered its place among the leaders, or it will ascend to it by virtue and authority of its increasing global economic strength and the mutual dependency of the US, the West and China upon each other. It appears an inevitability; its just a matter of how constructively, how wisely we move more toward that relationship.
The best informed analysts and commentators I have read suggest that we must understand China well, and also understand our well-considered goals and related needs for the future. Then we must devote the best of our creative, industrious capability and work effort to collaborate, partner with China wherever common national and international interests are found and allow. Their consensus view is that to compete with China from a zero-sum posture for command of environmental technology or global natural resources, for example, will prove a costly miscalculation and mistake, one which will cause all to lose. In both those areas, but particularly in environmental technology, China is already well ahead of us both in investment and progress--and they have extended to us the invitation to join them in sharing information and working collaboratively in the future. But our response has been tepid, and those who have reponded meaningfully at all appear to be a few companies, a think tank or two and NGOs, but not the government.
And then there is my respectful view of the Chinese people. That view holds that they have substantial capacity and potential to continue their evolving and quickly advancing societal and economic ascendency. This is often an unwelcome view; it can sound too strong, too unqualified, and carry too much the ring of destiny for most American tastes. Some people are uncomfortable with the notion of genetic determinism, with its inherited prescriptions and predispositions; they like even less cultural or conditioned determinism, that we are to some extent also a product of our environment. Yet there is a strong measure of scientific reality to both. And the question is usually, rightly posited in terms of whether nature or nurture is more dominant in explaining individual, societal or cultural behavioral--not whether either is an invalid or inoperative factor in explaining that behavior. One would have a hard time challenging the tested conclusion that the Chinese people as a whole, the dominant Han people, are an intrinsically intelligent people. And they have millenia of continually layered culture, successful culture in governance, bureaucracy, the arts, military arts and conquest, and yes, inventiveness, even creativity.
It is also important to observe that there were occasions when failed Chinese leadership, financial mismanagement, or social instability so weakened them that they were "conquered"--by Western tribal powers, by nomads of the Mongolian steppes (Genghis Khan), and the last dynasty, the Qing, was led by the Manchus from the far Northeast. So, what did that mean for the coninuity of Chinese civilization, identity and potential?
The most interesting thing is that, in each instance, dynastic China continued on with the conquerors taking the throne as Chinese emperors, and continuing the Chinese civilization! The Chinese scholar-leader-bureaucrats most often continued to be employed in shared or supporting leadership roles. The military was rebuilt and reshaped to serve the new merged dynasty. They took a Chinese dynastic name to designate the period of their reign. And they eventually became de facto Chinese!
So the Mongols ruled over the Yuan dynasty, and the Manchus over the Qing. It is a fair observation, with the course of history to substantiate it, that China absorbed all people, ideas, religions and philosophies that entered into Chinese civilization--even those who entered by invasion--and made them Chinese. They accepted them, but changed them, and absorbed them into what is Chinese. Buddhism brought from India was merged with Taoist ideas and produced Chan Buddhism, which when exported to Japan was called Zen. Only Confucianism--really more a philosophy and ethic for personal and leadership behavior--and Daoism are indigenous philosophy/spiritualities in China. The Chinese civilization is really the long-term amalgamation of many peoples and ideas.
I would also suggest that in the same way China has taken all that comes into its civilization and made it Chinese, it is also internalizing and fashioning its own Chinese approach to an internal market economy and competing in global markets--it's market socialism or state capitalism, as it is called. We'll just have to see how effective their uniquely Chinese approach will prove. But so far they appear to have gotten the world's attention, and their economic progress has been impressive.
Yet, we have not seen as much of that inventiveness and creativity out of China in the last century or so--but that likely had more to do with the repressive, increasingly anti-intellectual, anti-mercantile, anti-modernity climate moving from the Nationalist Revolution to the Communist Revolution and to the Cultural Revolution. For the last 30 years, they have been lifting themselves out of that cultural, intellectual, economic and geopolitical abyss. And now, they have emerged again on the world stage. I expect their historical inventiveness and creativity will continue to emerge as well.
Of course, as some observe, each new generation, each new era is...well, new. And a new Chinese generation in a new era, especially a new and advancing technological era, a more global, multilateral era, would arguably be cutting more from whole cloth, beginning anew, especially coming out of their "lost century." That would also imply a steep, daunting learning curve. Fair point, and doubtless valid in many respects and effects, as far as it goes. But there is something important to be recognized and appreciated about the power and contribution of a deep and long cultural history, especially a history that experienced many amazing expansions and contractions, ascending again and again to the heights of global culture. It must be observed that the current situation falls consistently on China's multimillenial trend line, one which reflects the many times China has come out of a failed political or economical situation, followed by a warring and fragmenting century or longer, only to restructure and reinvent itself, and ascend still higher ground of societal, military and economic advancement.
This time may be different. China surely has many daunting challenges. It is possible they may be too great to overcome. But I wouldn't look at those challenges as welcome or calming justifications to discount China's potential, for failing to take them seriously enough, for not understanding and respecting their history. The US has the potential to do that. There is a certain amount of American arrogance and triumphalism--sometimes just rank demogoguery and jingoism--that does not recognize shifting sands and the realities of a new environment. And our fledgling experience with democracy, a relative newcomer by historical standards, is as vulnerable as it is resilient. And it sometimes can prove near dysfunctional--or at the least very slow to act, and then to act only incrementally. Now appears to be such a time. Of course, historically we have always risen to the occasion in the face of threats to our people and way of life. But international economic competition and geopolitical maneuvering seldom appear as overtly and immediately threatening to us, not to the public, not in the same way as the military aggression of Germany and Japan before WWII, or of al Qaida on 9/11. And with the PRC, China, that is where the game is being played: global economic strength and power, and geopolitical influence.
Our government agencies (certainly the State Department and CIA) and the think tankers understand all this well enough, and likely much more. But most Americans do not. It would appear that many of our politicians do not either--or at least what we hear from them or their cable media proxies (and that's often all some people hear) appears filtered through the distorting prism of their ideological bias and/or their true lack of knowledge or understanding. For China's is a more responsive, effective and efficient governmental process than ours. Totalitarian governments can move more decisively, more quickly. It may or may not be as "good," depending on your definitions, your social values and goals. For it is unapologetically undemocratic, and its people are clearly less free; I wouldn't want to live there. But it is nonetheless very efficient, very effective. And their 30-year success in venturing into competitive, global markets is impressive--and their trajectory continues ascendant.
My concern is simply this: we should not underestimate the Chinese people or the Chinese government--and likewise we should not overestimate ourselves, especially in a weakened and confused time. Rather, let China's ascendancy be as a wake-up call for America, a challenge to claim and move to new, higher ground ourselves. Let us invite China to more meaningfully join in shared global leadership, responsibility and accountability. And if we would claim democracy as the high ground of social and economic advancement and potential, now is our time to bring out our best and prove it.
I just wanted you to understand.
