A new world with Chinese
characteristics By David Gosset
Not one single day goes by without news,
debates and comments on China: business deals,
trade negotiations, diplomatic summits, political
events, state visits, financial ups and downs,
societal trends ... the list goes on. Conferences,
forums, seminars, provocative articles, new papers
and the latest books keep China-watchers very
busy; but confronting such a profusion, one risks
taking short-term variations or insignificant
fluctuations for long-term tendencies and losing
any sense of pattern.
One question might
help us to focus on what really matters: Are
Westerners ready to adjust to the Chinese
civilization's re-
emergence as one of the main
sources of global order? In other words, is the
West prepared for a world with Chinese
characteristics?
This question reflects on
qualitative dimensions (values and identity) more
than on quantitative parameters. If, in the
21st-century global village, Sinicization does not
mechanically mean de-Westernization - because of
their purely quantitative territorial element,
various national liberations did engender
decolonization - it certainly means that the world
society will have Western and Chinese
characteristics. Complex and mainly invisible,
these dynamics provide a stimulating framework to
make sense of China's opening-up and
globalization.
No 'China fever', no
'China threat' but a 'China
factor' Fourteen years after the collapse
of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the writer Lu Xun
was asking: "When are we going to stop bringing
new bricks to the Great Wall?" (May 11, 1925,
Essays). A defensive construction built and
consolidated through the centuries to protect the
empire from the invasions of the nomads, the Great
Wall could also be seen as the symbol of an
immured Chinese mind.
Prague's genius
Franz Kafka, who did not know much about China but
experienced the depth of humans' labyrinthic soul,
captured this aspect in his The Great Wall of
China. In 1949, China recovered its
sovereignty; in 1978, Beijing adopted the
opening-up policy - today, the Great Wall is a
tourist attraction.
In a process of
unprecedented magnitude, one-fifth of mankind,
different from the mainstream (the West), is
entering the world stage. Czarist Russia's
emergence in the 18th-century European system and
the respective rises of Germany and Japan at the
end of the 19th century were comparatively of far
less magnitude. While Western scientific and
economic modernity will continue to have influence
on China - Beijing's overall strategic goal is
modernization - the Chinese world will have
considerable quantitative and qualitative impact
on the global village - in its civilizational
expression carried by the Chinese people, China
cannot be diluted in the globalization process.
Americanization was a distinctive feature
of the 20th century; the 21st-century global
citizen's identity will have Chinese
characteristics. The West, on the rise since the
15th century and which, through its American
version, still dominates world affairs, will have
difficulty conceiving and accepting that it will
not anymore unilaterally dictate the global
agenda; that it will have to adjust.
Can
we non-Chinese look at China without passion? The
Marco Polo syndrome - "one feels like in paradise
in Quinsai" (today's Hangzhou in the province of
Zhejiang) as reported by the citizen of Venice in
his Description of the World - an ancestor
of the "China fever", or the "yellow peril"
announcing current hysteria around the "China
threat" theme, do not facilitate our relation with
the Chinese world.
In "Does China matter?"
Gerald Segal asserted that "at best, China is a
second-rank middle power that has mastered the art
of diplomatic theater" (Foreign Affairs,
September-October 1999). At the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace in Washington, DC, Pei
Minxin saw China as being on a "Long March to
nowhere", stagnating in a "trapped transition"
(Financial Times, February 24). In Chinese
universities or think-tanks, it is not rare to
meet Chinese scholars who deride the "China fever"
of some Western - business, diplomatic but also
academic - circles.
True, the People's
Republic of China is a developing country that is,
as such, facing considerable challenges. China's
population - more than 1.3 billion - is
approximately the population of the European Union
plus the entire African continent, or more than
four times the US population. If one focuses
exclusively on what has yet to be done to catch up
with the developed world or on the various visible
signs of Westernization within China, the idea of
serious Chinese influence on the global village
can appear illusory.
However, if one
considers the scope of post-imperial China's
metamorphosis (the collapse of the Roman Empire in
the 5th century was followed by at least 300 years
of disorder in Western Europe) the speed of its
transformation since 1978 - per capita income
increased 10 times and foreign trade has boomed
from US$20 billion to the current $1 trillion -
while keeping in mind the Chinese empire's past
cultural, economic and political centrality in
Asia, the question of the Sinicization of the
world makes sense. It is not feverish speculation
or another version of 18th-century European
"chinoiserie" - reconstruction of China
disconnected from reality - but a phenomenon
already at work in the global community.
The presupposition of the "China threat"
leitmotif is precisely China's capacity to
influence on a massive scale our world system, but
it is also assuming that this impact will be
negative. Between two extremes, "China fever" or
"China threat", the analyst should stay rationally
within the limits of what can be called the "China
factor": China's opening-up means, to a certain
extent, Sinicization of the world, a process that
has to be integrated and explained and not adored
or condemned a priori.
In any case,
let us not take short-term variations (positive or
negative) for long-term tendencies. China's
foreseeable future will be made of successes,
failures and crises, but the play's plots will
take place on a stage whose backdrop is Chinese
civilization's re-emergence.
When
modernization does not mean cultural
alienation How could the global citizen be
in any way Sinicized if tomorrow's China is
radically Westernized?
Looking at the
young people in Dalian, Beijing, Shanghai,
Shenzhen or Chongqing, it seems that
Westernization is China's future. It gives Chinese
students "face" to speak some English - more
"face" if it is American English. On campus they
practice sports popular in the West, and after
graduation they would opt preferably for a career
in a joint venture where the corporate culture is
supposed to be Western - and the pay higher.
But it is necessary to put these trends
into historical perspective. In China, where the
present is to a certain extent history, snapshots
can be misleading; discourses should integrate
different "clocks" and be attentive, behind
shorter developments or even ephemeral fashions,
to very slow movements, what Fernand Braudel
(1902-85) called the longue duree.
Past interactions between China and what
was foreign to it show the unique resilience of
Chinese civilization: it has the ability to change
without losing itself; it could even be defined by
this singular capacity of renewal. It is why
China's unequaled civilizational duration stands
as a challenge to Paul Valery's comment inspired
by the European tragedy of World War I: "We
civilizations now know that we are mortal."
The Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367) and the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) were established respectively
by Mongols and Manchus (about 2 million Manchus
took power over 120 million Han Chinese in the
first half of the 17th century). However, the only
way for the "barbarians" - non-Han - to rule the
empire was to adopt largely elements of the
Chinese tradition. Immutable China is a myth - the
long history of China is a succession of clearly
distinct periods - but absolute discontinuity from
one time to another is also a narrative.
Revolutionary discourse on a new regime for a new
China was the most abstract intellectual
construction; in fact, China's history is a
continuity of relative discontinuities - it
combines permanent (Chinese characters for
example) and changing features.
Buddhism
and Christianity have also been testing Chinese
civilization's capacity to absorb exogenous
elements. Entering under the Han Dynasty (Eastern
Han, AD 25-220), Buddhism penetrated deeply into
the Chinese world under the Tang Dynasty
(618-907); but this penetration has seen the
transformation of original Buddhism to fit Chinese
philosophical and linguistic context.
Moreover, Song Dynasty neo-Confucianism
represented by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) was a
magisterial reinterpretation of the Chinese
classics in reaction against a Buddhist vision of
the world. Zhu Xi's scholasticism has been the
core of imperial state orthodoxy until the end of
the examination system in 1905.
In the age
of European expansion, Christian missionaries
spared no effort to convert Chinese people. The
Jesuits' approach initiated by Matteo Ricci
(1552-1610) was to engage as much as possible with
China's elites; no one has ever understood the
Chinese world better than the sinologists of the
Company of Jesus, but genuine European
intellectual excellence failed to change radically
the Chinese mind. How can one seriously believe
that current superficial material Westernization
in China - related with food or clothes, the
introduction of managerial skills, the
instrumental use of English, etc - is going to
affect essentially Chinese culture?
China's technical and economic
modernization does not mean cultural alienation.
China is once again translating into its own
context foreign practices and theories.
Democratization might be unavoidable for the
Chinese world - in fact, the process has already
begun - but it will be a democratization with high
Chinese characteristics.
Some external
forms of the translation process can be a
surprising accumulation of heterogeneous pieces.
Look at a Sichuan-cuisine restaurant with Rococo
furniture or at a Shanghai middle-class home where
reproductions of European impressionists co-exist
on the same wall with Chinese calligraphy. The
sociologist observing China's megasociety can
interpret these unusual combinations as parts of a
gigantic assimilation. One can also enjoy
completed translations where the "original" fits
perfectly in the evolving Chinese context; it is
often the case in architecture, in urbanism or in
design.
The resilience of Chinese culture
cannot be separated from China's demographic
vitality; they reinforce each other in what
constitutes a virtuous circle. The very fact that
China is the most populous country in the world is
highly significant. China's population has always
represented a quarter to a fifth of the global
population.
This constant feature of the
Chinese world is linked with invisible and almost
immemorial principles. The great and unorthodox
Dutch sinologist Robert H Van Gulik (1910-67)
concluded his work Sexual Life in Ancient
China (1961) by remarks on Chinese vitality:
"It was primarily the careful balancing of the
male and female elements that caused the
permanence of Chinese race and culture. It was
this balance that engendered the intense vital
power that from remote antiquity to the very
present has ever sustained and renewed the Chinese
race."
In the global community,
fundamentally optimistic and life-oriented China
will interact with various Western forms of
nihilism; life will quietly prevail.
China and globalization China
absorbs, translates and regenerates itself
vigorously. Last year, from Beijing to Singapore,
Chinese people celebrated the 600th anniversary of
the navigator Zheng He's (1371-1433) first travel.
These celebrations of the Ming Dynasty explorer,
Asia's Christopher Columbus, were also indicative
of China's current mindset: Chinese people can
also be extrovert and do not intend to witness
passively, beyond the Great Wall, the
reconfiguration of the world.
Forty years
after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution
nightmare, 28 years after Deng Xiaoping's decision
to reform and to open the People's Republic of
China (gaige kaifang), Chinese people are
embarking on their "Age of Discovery" - which
might well announce, as it did for 14th-century
Europe, a time of Renaissance.
In January
2004, Parisians looked at a red Eiffel Tower in
honor of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit,
which coincided with the "Year of China in
France". The event "China in London 2006" is the
largest celebration of Chinese culture ever seen
in the British capital. In 2007, Russia will hold
its "Year of China". It seems that the world is
preparing for a Chinese century. French journalist
Erik Izraelewicz can write a book titled When
China Changes the World (Quand la Chine
change le monde, 2005). China is succeeding in
having non-Chinese framing the debate in a way
that is advantageous to it.
Already 30
million non-Chinese are learning Mandarin. Beijing
has opened Confucius Institutes (following the
example of the Alliance Francaise, Goethe
Institutes or British Councils) both to teach
Chinese and to explain Chinese culture throughout
the world. Chinese is already the second language
on the Internet, with more than 100 million
Chinese netizens.
A global audience greets
Chinese artists. Movie director Zhang Yimou,
composer Tan Dun and cellist Ma Yoyo (born in
Paris and educated in the US) are internationally
acclaimed for their talent and creativity. Gong
Li, Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung have penetrated
European or American imagination. Chinese design
is enriching fashion. The idea behind Shanghai
Tang founded by Hong Kong businessman David Tang
Wing-Cheung is to "create the first global Chinese
lifestyle brand by revitalizing Chinese designs".
Chinese brands such as Lenovo, Haier and
Huawei are largely recognized worldwide. In the
2004-05 academic year, China sent more than
115,000 students abroad (62,000 in the United
States). The World Tourism Organization predicts
that by 2020, 100 million Chinese tourists will
travel the world: the global tourism industry will
have to adapt to Chinese characteristics.
China's direct investment overseas is
rising rapidly. Up to the end of 2004, China made
$45 billion direct investment in more than 160
countries; in 2004 alone, China's direct
investment overseas reached $5.5 billion, surging
93% over 2003. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics
and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo will reinforce
this momentum. Almost exactly 100 years after of
the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911), China will be
once again at the center of Asia, and in a
position to challenge US unilateral domination
over a world system in search of equilibrium.
The Chinese world is not only made of the
22 provinces - nine of them more populous than
France, with obviously many subcultures - five
autonomous regions, four municipalities, two
special administrative regions (Hong Kong and
Macau) of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan
and the highly Sinicized Singapore - the
city-state can certainly be considered a part of
Greater China - but it also includes in its
largest extension a Chinese diaspora active
worldwide.
The "Sons of the Yellow
Emperor" - in reference to Lynn Pan's History
of the Chinese Diaspora (1990) - estimated at
40 million people, are not just about Chinese
restaurants (although food and cooking are key
elements of culture) or Chinatowns (perfect
examples of Chinese culture resilience far away
from the Yellow River or the Yangzi); the notion
of Chinese diaspora indicates that China is not
only a political entity related to a territory
but, above all, a cultural expression already
having global reach.
Co-architect of
the 21st-century new world order? For the
West, necessary adjustment to the re-emergence of
the Chinese civilization requires modesty and
intellectual curiosity. Are we Westerners ready to
learn from Chinese civilization as Chinese people
are ready to learn from the West? This is the
precondition of a genuinely cooperative
relationship.
Seriously engaging China is
to accept the very possibility of Sinicization.
The West, in a position of scientific and economic
superiority since the Industrial Revolution, is
used to treating China as a product of
orientalism. For the majority of Westerners, China
is either a museum - hence the surprise of many
foreigners in China: "I was expecting something
else!" - or a classroom: one has to lecture
Chinese people on more advanced standards. The
West has to reflect on these prejudices and to
look at China as a living matrix of a civilization
that is already shaping our time.
If China
proves to be an integrator factor in a world
plagued by morally unacceptable exclusive
globalization, if China proves to be a laboratory
where cultures can cross-fertilize in a world
threatened by hatred between civilizations, one
should rejoice to find a co-architect of the
21st-century new world order.
David
Gosset is director of the Academia Sinica
Europaea, China Europe International Business
School, Shanghai.
