When China Rules the World

It is important to bear in mind the difference historically between Western and Chinese patterns of behaviour. The former have long sought to project their power overseas to far-flung parts of the world, commencing with the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish; the Chinese, in contrast, have no tradition of expansion other than continental-based territorial incremental-ism. The Europeans, perhaps conditioned by the maritime experience of the Mediterranean, were, from the late fifteenth century, seeking to expand across the oceans. China, in contrast, has always seen itself as a land-based continental power and has never regarded itself or sought to become a maritime power with overseas ambitions. The very different purposes of the voyages of Zheng He on the one hand and the great European explorers on the other are an illustration of this. To this day, the Chinese have never sought to project themselves outside their own land mass. [1285] Even now, the Chinese have failed to develop a blue-water navy. This does not mean that the Chinese will not seek in future to project their power into distant oceans and continents, but there is no tradition of this. It is reasonable to assume that China, as a superpower, will in due course acquire such a capability but, unlike the West, it has hitherto not been part of the Chinese way of thinking and behaving.

There is another factor that may reinforce this historical reserve. Although the ‘century of humiliation’ is often seen as a reason why China might seek to extract some kind of historical revenge – one might recall Germany and the Treaty of Versailles – it could also act as a constraining factor. The experience of invasion and partial colonization, the fact that China suffered for so long at the hands of the Western powers and Japan, is likely to counsel caution: the German example, in other words, is entirely inappropriate – including the timescales involved, which are of an entirely different order. China will be the first great power that was a product of colonization, the colonized rather than a colonizer. As a result, China may act with considerable restraint for long into the future, even when its own power suggests to the contrary. The evidence for this lies in the present. The Chinese have gone to great lengths to act with circumspection and to reassure the world that they do not have aggressive intentions, the only exception being their attitude towards Taiwan. It is true that over the last half-century China has been involved in wars with the Soviet Union, India and Vietnam, but the first two were border disputes. This relative restraint touches on another dimension of the Chinese mentality, namely a willingness to be patient, to operate according to timescales which are alien to the Western political mind. This is eloquently summed up by former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s reported response to Henry Kissinger’s question in 1972 about the consequences of the French Revolution: ‘It is too early to say.’ Such thinking is characteristic of a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. And it is clearly reflected in Figure 47.

Figure 47. Response of Chinese youth to the question, ‘How many years do you believe it will take for China’s comprehensive national power to catch up with Western developed nations?’