When China Rules the World

Fourth, China operates, and will continue to operate, on a quite different continental-sized canvas to other nation-states. There are four other states that might be described as continental in scale. The United States has a surface area only marginally smaller than that of China, but with a population only a quarter of the size. Australia is a continent in its own right, with a surface area around 80 per cent of China ’s, yet its population is a meagre 21 million, less than that of Malaysia or Taiwan, with the vast majority living around its coastal perimeter. Brazil has a surface area of around 90 per cent of China ’s, but a much smaller population of 185 million. Perhaps the nearest parallel to China is India, with a population of equivalent size, but a surface area only a third of that of China ’s. Thus, although China shares certain similarities with each of these countries, its particular combination of population size and surface area is unique. Chinese modernity will come continental-sized, in terms of both population and physical size. This has fundamental implications not only for the way in which China has worked in the past but also for how it will work in the future. A continental-sized country is an utterly different kind of proposition to a conventional nation-state unless its population is tiny like Australia’s, or it started off life as a settler-colony – as in the case of United States and Australia, which were essentially European transplants – with the homogeneity this implies. When a country is as huge as China in both physical scale and population, it is characterized by great diversity and, in certain respects, can be thought of as, in effect, a combination of several, even many, different countries. This is not to detract from the point made throughout this book about the centripetal forces that hold China together, but rather serves to make this unity an even more extraordinary phenomenon. We are dealing with a state that is at one and the same time a country and a continent – in other words, which is both national and multinational – and which therefore must be governed, at one and the same time, according to the imperatives of both a country and a multiplicity of countries.

For these reasons, amongst others, the Chinese state operates in an atypical way in comparison with conventional nation-states. The feedback loops, for example, are different. What might seem a logical consequence of a government action in an ordinary nation-state may not follow at all in China; in a country of such huge scale, furthermore, it is possible to conduct an experiment in one city or province without it being introduced elsewhere, which is what happened with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, even though they could hardly have been more fundamental or far-reaching in their effect. It is possible, in this context, to imagine democratic reforms being introduced in one relatively advanced province or municipality – Zhejiang or Shanghai, for example – but not others. As we saw in Chapter 7, the civilization-state embraces the concept of ‘one civilization, many systems’, which was introduced to the wider world in 1997 with the handover of Hong Kong to China under the formula ‘one country, two systems’; but the idea of systemic differences within China’s borders, in fact, has a very long history. It is conventional wisdom in the West that China should become ‘democratic’ in the West’s own image. The democratic systems that we associate with the West, however, have never taken root on anything like such a vast scale as China, with the single exception of India: indeed, apart from India, the only vaguely comparable example is that of a multinational institution like the European Union, and this has remained determinedly undemocratic in its constitution and modus operandi. One day China may well move, in its own fashion, towards something that resembles democracy, but Western calls that it should do so more or less forthwith glibly ignore the huge differences that exist between a vast continental-sized civilization-state like China and the far smaller Western nation-states. The fact that China ’s true European counterpart, the European Union, is similarly without democracy only serves to reinforce the point.