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LAND IN
THE MIDDLE
Another China: The awakened
giant
By Francesco Sisci
 BEIJING - For the first
time in its millennia-old history, China now
acknowledges the existence of a world outside that it
must confront.
Up to the mid-19th century - the time of the
Opium Wars - China perceived itself as a world apart, a
perfect and self-sufficient universe. Contacts with the
European colonial powers and Japanese expansionism
caused a shock. Feelings of frustration and humiliation
ran to the ends of the empire, from the Opium War
against the British (1840-42) through the clash with the
colonial empires between the two centuries, the birth of
the republic (1911) and the time of the warlords (in the
1930s), until the Japanese invasion, World War II and
the advent of communism with the defeat of Chiang
Kai-shek's Nationalists in 1949.
Under Mao
Zedong and his successors the People's Republic of China
remained a country closed to the outside - and thus
exotic to Western eyes - conceding at the most to a few
games with the Soviets or the Americans (president
Richard Nixon's triangular diplomacy in the 1970s). It
was only in the 1990s that Jiang Zemin's China emerged
as a regional power with global ambitions capable of
playing on all the chessboards and crisis areas from the
Balkans to the Middle East.
Without this
historical parable that over 150 years marked the
decline and renaissance of China, it is impossible to
gauge the significance of its current and tumultuous
economic development and the vision of the world of the
leadership that is preparing to take over power after
the Communist Party's Congress in November. Chinese
national pride is rooted in the memory of an immense
country that, for most of its existence, considered
itself so wealthy that it did not need to trade with the
Western powers. It was nearly able to deny the existence
of the rest of the world. Indeed, at the end of the 18th
century a third of the world's population and nearly
half its wealth were Chinese. Other peoples were
considered barbarians or minor civilizations with which
it was not worth having relations. China was
Tianxia ("All That Is Under the Sky").
The first cracks in this peculiar Chinese
consciousness emerged with the arrival of the Catholic
missionaries. When the Jesuits landed in China in 1583,
Matteo Ricci (1522-1610) started to convert the imperial
elite, convinced that it would produce a domino effect
and convert from above the Chinese people - wrongly so,
as the following centuries proved. Jesuit propaganda
clashed with three central aspects of the Chinese way of
life: the question of Chinese "rites", or reverence for
Confucius and one's family ancestors, the name of "God",
and local sexual habits, tending toward concubines
rather than monogamous marriage. However, it was under
Ricci that the first world maps with China at their
center were produced, a revolutionary geopolitical
representation that allows for the existence of an
"other" world - the world outside - hierarchically
subordinated to China. In the course of the 17th
century, Zhongguo ("the Land in the Middle") was
born from Tianxia. To this day Chinese maps
follow that model.
Outside China no one seems to
consider the Middle Empire as central. The People's
Republic of China is not the cornerstone of the global
balance. However, recently some in what is
universally recognized as the Middle Empire - ie, the
United States - have started to fear that by the middle
of this century or even before, China could actually
become what the maps portray it as. Even the fight
against terrorism, according to some White House
advisers, is seen in this light: as a preface to the
real clash that within a couple of decades will pit the
US against China.
What is certain is that only
in the second half of the 1990s did the Chinese
leadership feel that it could finally close the long
parenthesis of decline that had been inaugurated by the
Opium War and return Beijing to the center of the global
game. Not (yet) primi inter pares, but pares
inter primos. Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch who took
China beyond Maoism's horrors, expressed an approach
that was in essence subservient to the United States.
Only his successor Jiang Zemin started to accept the
idea of a competitive cooperation with the Stars and
Stripes superpower.
On the economic front, the
divergence of interests between a more assertive China
and a United States triumphant in the Cold War are
visible especially in the US attempt to invade the
Chinese market with low-cost products without giving
away its high-tech know-how. On the strategic and
geopolitical front, the Chinese leadership is rightly
convinced that some in Washington love China enough to
want three or four Chinas. This type of fragmentation
could indeed emerge from the growing gap between the
regions that are more developed and open to the West and
the more isolated and backward regions, as well as
through the explosion of regionalism and of some
geopolitical issues largely of an ethnic-religious type
(Xinjiang, Tibet). Finally, fragmentation could follow a
possible war between Beijing and Taipei.
China's
shift toward the external world was marked by the Asian
economic crisis of 1997. Jiang Zemin resisted the
temptation to devalue the yuan and offered a safety net
to the rapidly falling Asian economies, by replacing the
US capital that had fled from Asia. With its trade
agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), its entry into the World Trade
Organization, the proposal of an Asian Monetary Fund,
its support of the Thai-sponsored Asian Cooperation
Dialogue, and its participation in the Shanghai Group
(which aims to counterbalance US strategic influence in
the region), Beijing is becoming a big regional power at
the heart of the Asian continent: a benign power,
integrated but not hegemonic, the pole of a system of
global balance currently tipped too far toward the
United States. This idea is visible, for example, in the
official photographs of the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) summit held in Shanghai last
November: all leaders - from US President George W Bush
to Russian President Vladimir Putin to Jiang Zemin -
wore the traditional dress of the Tang period. The
message from the new China was clear: We no longer are
the whole world, but we are inferior to no one.
This geopolitical representation is accompanied
by a rapid process of modernization that is also a form
of Westernization of China, from the economic point of
view - it has one of the most deregulated production
systems of the world - but especially from the social
point of view. Anyone comparing today's China to that of
20 or even just 10 years ago is shocked by the enormous
changes, visible in the way one opens a bank account,
how one is treated at a restaurant, or in fashion, care
for the body or sexual customs. The Western way of life
(xifang) is synonymous with "modern"
(xiandai), and thus progressive.
To
accept such opening toward the world with a strong
awareness of itself means having to face the question of
relations with the United States. Against the
expectations of many, the US bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the spy-plane incident
on Hainan in 2001 did not ruin the relations between
Beijing and Washington. At the moment the power
relations between the two will not allow China to break
off, for it would be very inconvenient for the
Americans. The ties between the two economies are too
tight to risk a crisis that could threaten the many US
investments in China. And the United States cannot give
up on the vast and expanding Chinese market. While the
US economy has been stuttering over the past three
years, China's continues to grow. Perhaps the real
growth rate is below the official one of 7-8 percent a
year, but even a gross domestic product (GDP) growth of
about 5-6 percent a year, the figure most skeptical
European observers believe, means a growth rate about
five times that of Europe. The Chinese market counts
today about 300 million individuals of a population of
about 1.3 billion: these figures are enough to give an
idea of the potential development of the domestic
market. Everyone can feel the expansion of the Chinese
economy in the region, especially in South Korea and in
Thailand.
Geopolitical stability is the
condition for China to have more influence in the world
and to continue modernizing its economy. From this point
of view the Chinese leadership is still uncertain. Fears
of socio-economic cleavages, ethno-religious
differences, and possible external (US) influences
interested in accentuating these potential fractures of
the Middle Empire, all condition Chinese policies. They
also support the self-legitimacy of the Chinese
Communist Party, understood more in terms of nationalism
than ideology. The communist lineage is a kind of
dynasty, which will soon be placed next to the Qing and
the Ming. Its legitimacy derives from its imperial
history, not from Marx.
The self-legitimization
of the Party can work as long as the economy continues
to grow. It will then be necessary that the various
centers of power that have grown in the shade of the
Party do not start fighting one another. These are the
issues that the new leader, Hu Jintao, will have to
face. Once the Party was the dragon hovering above
everyone; now it is only the umpire, among various
groups and power centers.
The match is open.
There are regional powers, lobbies and even very
ambitious mafia-type groups that tend to take influence
away from official power. Pressure groups also cut
across the government.
At some point, issues
related to the rule of law and democracy will become
unavoidable. Of course, China is likely to become a
sui generis democracy - as all existing
democracies are, after all. A neat transition from the
Party's absolutism to the "one man, one vote" criterion
is unthinkable. It would be far more reasonable to aim
for the development of an acceptable rule of law
starting from a system of rules that can assimilate
China to the largest industrial countries. It would be
hard to hope for foreign capital entering the country
without a civil code protecting fully the right to
private property.
China has sought to use the
fight against terrorism to convince the United States
that it does not want to become an enemy. September 11,
2001, should have made the Americans understand the
origin of threats - whence the attempt to develop all
possible avenues to build confidence, starting from the
confidential information given on Afghanistan during the
war last autumn. This approach was confirmed to
Heartland during a Euro-Sino-American conference held in
Rome on May 10-11 on "geopolitical black holes". The
seminar was organized by Heartland together with
Washington's National Security Information Center and
the Chinese think-tank Strategy and Management, and was
dedicated in particular to identifying a common approach
between the Chinese and Americans on northern Myanmar, a
land governed by traffickers and mafias.
More
than one year after the September 11 attacks, Beijing
found that the United States did not respond very
satisfactorily to Chinese openings. Of course, some
signals from Washington were considered favorable: the
inclusion of the Liberation Front of East Turkestan on
the list of terrorist groups published by the US
government; the arrest of some Xinjiang Muslims present
in Afghanistan who were immediately imprisoned in
Guantanamo, Cuba; and especially the intervention to
placate the drift toward independence of Taiwanese
President Chen Shui-bian in July.
But the
Chinese are still skeptical of the US approach to the
fight against terrorism. Afghanistan and Central Asia
have not been stabilized yet. And China cannot remain
indifferent to this climate in its back yard, especially
as US soldiers are deployed there in large numbers. On
this aspect there are two schools of thought in Beijing:
those who view the US military penetration in the region
with fear and suspicion and those who believe that a few
military bases are not sufficient to establish a
permanent influence in the area. In any case, the
geopolitical compromise between Russia and the United
States on Central Asian transport routes for energy
cannot avoid taking Chinese interests into account.
Beijing is fundamental in any equation of Asian power.
Even the Americans cannot ignore China.
War
against Iraq is another story altogether. Having
insisted at length that the issue go through the United
Nations Security Council, Beijing cannot directly oppose
an attack against Baghdad. There are not vital Chinese
interests at risk in Iraq. On the contrary, the risk is
of inflaming the Islamic world and destabilizing
Pakistan - China's historical partner.
Sooner or
later the war against terrorism will end. Or rather the
Americans will decree that it is over. At that point we
will all return to focus on the real core of global
geopolitics: the relationship between China and the
United States.
(© Heartland. This version has
been edited by Asia Times Online.)
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