When China Rules the World

In their heyday the major European nations sought to impose their designs on the rest of the world. Expansion by means of colonialism was at the heart of the European project, wedded to an aggressive mentality that stemmed from Europe ’s own seemingly perpetual habit of intra-European wars. Not surprisingly, the United States inherited important parts of this legacy, though its very different geopolitical circumstances, ensconced as it was in its own continent, also bred a powerful insularity. The United States, which was founded on the missionary zeal of the Pilgrim Fathers and their contemporaries, and later articulated in a constitution that embodied an evangelizing and universalistic credo, was possessed of a belief in its manifest destiny and that its spiritual purpose was to enlighten the rest of the world. [1279] This history of manifest destiny (an expansionist ideology that dates from the original settlers), the destruction of the Amerindians, and the restless desire to expand westwards, helps us to understand the behaviour of the United States as a global superpower. What, then, of China, whose origins and history could hardly be more different?

There are two factors that have to be considered. The first, associated with the so-called realist school of international relations, lays emphasis on the importance of interests and therefore stresses how great powers tend to behave in a similar fashion in the same circumstances. [1280] ‘Rising powers,’ as Robert Kagan argues, ‘have in common an expanding sense of interests and entitlement.’ [1281] Accordingly China will, in this view, tend to behave like any other global superpower, including the United States. The second factor, in contrast, emphasizes how great powers are shaped by their own histories and circumstances and therefore behave in distinct ways. As in the case of the United States, these two different elements – the one convergent and the other divergent – will combine to shape China ’s behaviour as a superpower. The convergent pressure is obviously a familiar one, but the divergent tendency, a product of Chinese particularism, is less knowable and more elusive.

The historian William A. Callahan argues, in this context, that there are four different narratives present within Chinese civilization. [1282] The first is what he describes as zhongguo, or China as a territorial state. The obvious metaphor for this is the Great Wall – the desire to keep barbarians out – linked to the nativist sentiment, a constantly recurring theme in Chinese history, as evident in the Boxer Rebellion and continuing resentment towards foreign influences, notably American and Japanese. This view appeals to a defensive and inward-looking sense of Chineseness. It might crudely be described as China ’s equivalent of American insularity. The second is da zhongguo, a metaphor of conquest. This has been intrinsic to the expansion ary dynamic of the Chinese empire, as we saw in Chapter 8. In the conquest narrative, Chinese civilization is constantly enlarging and annexing new territory, seeking to conquer, subdue and civilize the barbarians on its borders. In the contemporary context, the conquest narrative aims first at restoring the ‘lost territories’ and then seeking to reverse the ‘century of humiliation’. Yan Xuetong, a leading Chinese intellectual cited earlier, sees this in relatively benign terms: ‘the Chinese regard their rise as regaining China’s lost international status rather than obtaining something new… the Chinese consider the rise of China as a restoration of fairness rather than as gaining advantages over others.’ [1283] However, the conquest narrative also clearly lends itself to a much less benign and more expansionist and imperialist interpretation. The third narrative is da zhonghua, or conversion. This strand is as fundamental as that of conquest: the belief in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization and the desire to convert others to its ways. To quote Mencius, the disciple of Confucius: ‘I have heard of the Chinese converting barbarians but not of their being converted by barbarians.’ [1284] The key issue here is neither conquest nor recovery but rather defining and spreading the characteristics of Chinese civilization. As we have seen, this is implicitly, sometimes explicitly, linked to race. Cultural China, as Callahan describes it, is an open and expansive concept, resembling the notion of soft power but not reducible to it. The fourth and final narrative is that of the Chinese diaspora, of the notion of Greater China as reflected in the continuing sense of Chinese identity embodied in the diaspora. Each of these narratives is present in, and serves as a continuing influence on, contemporary Chinese attitudes. Which of the first three – which are the relevant ones here – might predominate in the future, or at any one time, is a matter of conjecture.