When China Rules the World

The problem with interpreting and evaluating China solely or mainly in terms of the Western lexicon of experience is that, by definition, it excludes all that is specific to China: in short, what makes China what it is. The only things that are seen to matter are those that China shares with the West. China’s history and culture are dismissed as a blind alley or merely a preparation for becoming Western, the hors d’oeuvres before the Western feast. Such an approach is not only demeaning to China and other non-Western cultures, it also largely misses the point. By seeing China in terms of the West, it refuses to recognize or acknowledge China’s own originality and, furthermore, how China’s difference might change the nature of the world in which we live. Since the eighties and nineties, the heyday of the ‘globali zation as Westernization’ era, when the Asian tigers, including China, were widely interpreted in these terms, there has been a dawning realization that such a huge country embodying such a rich history and civilization cannot be so summarily dismissed. We should not exaggerate – the Western consensus still sees history as a one-way ticket to Westernization – but one can detect the beginnings of a new Western consciousness, albeit still weak and fragile, which is more humble and realistic. As China grows increasingly powerful – while remaining determinedly different – the West will be forced, however reluctantly, to confront the nature and meaning of that difference. Understanding China will be one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century.

What then will be the key characteristics of Chinese modernity? They are eight in all, which for the deeply superstitious Chinese happens to be their lucky number. In exploring these characteristics, we must consider both the internal features of China’s modernity and, given China’s global importance, how these might impact upon and structure its global outlook and relations.

First, China is not really a nation-state in the traditional sense of the term but a civilization-state. True, it describes itself as a nation-state, but China’s acquiescence in the status of nation-state was a consequence of its growing weakness in the face of the Western powers from the late nineteenth century.

The Chinese reluctantly acknowledged that China had to adapt to the world rather than insisting, in an increasingly utopian and hopeless mission, that the rest of the world should adapt to it. That cannot hide the underlying reality, however, that China is not a conventional nation-state. A century might seem a long time, but not for a society that consciously thinks of itself as several millennia old. Most of what China is today – its social relations and customs, its ways of being, its sense of superiority, its belief in the state, its commitment to unity – are products of Chinese civilization rather than its recent incarnation as a nation-state. On the surface it may seem like a nation-state, but its geological formation is that of a civilization-state.