Author: Jonathan Fenby
Publication: The Guardian
Date: May 8, 2006
We may find that 'the peaceful rise of China'
is a phenomenon visible only through rose-tinted spectacles.
China has always demonstrated wishful thinking,
from the Great Wall, which was never quite what it was imagined to be, to
the celebration of the supposedly caring, paternal nature of Mao Zedong.
This year we have had the demeaning example
of the mayor of London equating the Tiananmen Square massacre to the London
poll tax riots, while the former World Bank and Nobel prize-winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz has managed to conclude that a low-tax, low-welfare, privatising,
high-trading economy that has brought a steeply rising wealth gap and left
hundreds of millions by the wayside is somehow a panacea superior to the nostrums
of his favourite bugbear, the IMF. After President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington
last month, the new watchword is that China and the west must "get on".
The underlying assumption stems from a familiar mixture of western arrogance
and the comforting assumption that, whatever their differences, countries
really want to work together for the greater good of the planet; it takes
no account of the Chinese experience.
For most of its history, the country and its
rulers couldn't have cared less about the rest of the world; then they found
themselves getting a raw deal from foreigners, who imposed themselves by force
in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After this, when Chinese governments
sought to engage with the international system they found the experience far
from encouraging, from the discovery in 1919 that the allies had cut a secret
deal giving Japan Chinese territory to the abject failure of the League of
Nations to offer anything beyond words to halt Tokyo's aggression from 1931.
US policy in the second world war was another
big letdown, and the victorious communists of 1949 could hardly have had much
time for a US that had poured in help to their nationalist opponents.
Then came the Maoist era, meaning that it
was only towards the end of the century that a real engagement emerged through
trade between the mainland and the world.
China has made its way on its own terms over
the last two decades. Foreign investment has been important, but it operates
under terms set by Beijing. Exports remain worryingly important as a driver
of the country's growth because of the soggy state of domestic demand and
the high savings rate. The world, however, needs those exports as much as
China does, to keep down inflation and fund the US federal deficit and US
consumption.
Chinese buying of plant and machinery and
big-ticket infrastructure and transport items helps to fill order books for
western companies, and politicians and business leaders fall over themselves
to court Beijing; American high-technology firms play along with the cyber
censors in pursuit of the Chinese market. Beijing can only take all this as
deeply encouraging. Far from making concessions to western feelings, it has
no compunction about cosying up to nasty regimes, from Burma to Zimbabwe,
its security council veto a potential trump card for North Korea and Sudan.
And it plays the global energy game with a vengeance, from Venezuela to Nigeria
and Iran.
For the record, Beijing assures the world
that all it wants to see is the "peaceful rise of China". But that
peace is to be achieved, above all, by other powers not getting in its way.
Given the global impact of the mainland, as well as the areas for conflict,
the formula may turn out to be an oxymoron for our times. In the realm of
the national interest, there is nothing unusual in this - think of Britain
in the 19th century, Germany in the first half of the 20th and America for
much of the time from 1941. One should not expect China to act any differently,
particularly given its history since the first opium war, more than 150 years
ago.
Faced with a mountain of domestic challenges,
Beijing is simply looking after itself and asserting its status. It sees no
reason to adapt, and adopts a suitably high profile; its president is at ease
delivering a lecture on democracy to George Bush while supervising a new wave
of repression of anything approaching dissidence. This will be the shape of
the decades to come, and the west urgently needs to decide how it wants to
deal with a country that is pursuing old-fashioned great-power politics and
believes it is moving into the driving seat.
This is not to advocate a cold war crouch
in the west (and Japan), but simply to recognise the new reality in dealing
with a country whose leaders have no use for the rose-tinted spectacles the
west tends to don in looking at east Asia -at Japan, in the first half of
the 20th century, and then China, under Mao and later its new, managerial
rulers.
"Getting on" is a two-way process.
To assume that this is how Beijing thinks is to fall into yet another China
dream.
