When China Rules the World (26 page)

The Age of the West was not only marked by economic and military dominance but by Western ascendancy in more or less every field, from culture and ideas to science and technology, painting and language to sport and medicine. Western hegemony meant anything associated with the West enjoyed a prestige and influence that other cultures did not. White skin colour has been preferred globally - in East Asia too, as we saw earlier in this chapter - because it was synonymous with Western power and wealth. Western-style clothes have been widely adopted for the same reason. English is the global lingua franca because of the overweening importance of the United States. The history of the West - in particular, the United States and Western Europe - is far more familiar to the rest of the world than that of any other country or region because the centrality of the West has meant that everyone else is obliged, or desires, to know about it. Western political values and ideas are the only ones that enjoy any kind of universalism for a similar reason. But now that the West is no longer the exclusive home of modernity, with the rest of the world cast in a state of pre-modernity, the global equation changes entirely. Hinduism will no more be a byword for backwardness. Nor will Indian clothes. It will no longer be possible to dismiss Chinese political traditions as an obsolete hangover from the days of the Middle Kingdom, nor equate the Western family with modernity and dismiss those of India and China as remnants of an agrarian age. To growing numbers of people outside the West, Chinese history will become as familiar as Western history is now, if not more so. The competition, in other words, between the West and the rest will no longer be fundamentally unequal, pitting modernity against tradition, but will take place on something that will increasingly resemble a level playing field, namely between different modernities. We can already see this in the corporate world, where Korean, Japanese and Chinese companies, bearing the characteristics of the cultures from which they emanate, compete with their rather different Western counterparts, often with considerable success.

The twentieth century was characterized by the ideological cleavage between socialism and capitalism, an era ushered in by the October Revolution in 1917 and which found expression in the onset of the Cold War after 1945, until finally coming to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. That world, where every conflict and division was refracted through the prism of this wider ideological schism, then proceeded to evaporate with great speed. American neo-conservatives believe that the new global divide is the war on terror - what they like to describe as the Fourth World War (the third having been the Cold War) - but this represents a basic misreading of history. The era we are now entering, in fact, can best be described as one of
contested modernity
. Unlike the Cold War, it is not defined by a great political or ideological divide but rather by an overarching cultural contest. The emergence of new modernities not only means that the West no longer enjoys a virtual monopoly on modernity, but that the histories, cultures and values of these societies will be affirmed in a new way and can no longer be equated with backwardness or, worse still, failure. On the contrary, they will experience a new sense of legitimacy and, far from being overawed by or deferential towards the West, will enjoy a growing sense of self-confidence.

Hitherto the world has been characterized by Western hubris - the Western conviction that its values, belief systems, institutions and arrangements are superior to all others. The power and persistence of this mentality should not be underestimated. Western governments feel no compunction or restraint about lecturing other countries on the need for, and overwhelming virtue of, their versions of democracy and human rights. This frame of mind is by no means confined to governments, who, for the most part, simply reflect a popular cultural consensus. Many Western feminists, for example, tend to assume that gender relations in the West are more advanced than elsewhere, and that they are more liberated and independent than women from other cultures. There is a deeply embedded sense of Western psychological superiority which draws on powerful economic, political, ideological, cultural and ethnic currents. The rise of a world of multiple modernity challenges that mentality, and in the era of contested modernity it will steadily be eroded and undermined. Ideas such as ‘advanced’, ‘developed’ and ‘civilized’ will no longer be synonymous with the West. This threatens Western societies with an existential crisis of the first order, the political consequences of which we cannot predict but will certainly be profound. The assumptions that have underpinned the attitudes of many generations of Westerners towards the rest of the world will become increasingly unsustainable and beleaguered. The West has thought itself to be universal, the unquestioned model and example for all to follow; in the future it will be only one of several possibilities. This is a scenario that, at least until very recently,
¹²⁰
the West has been almost entirely unprepared for, as Paul A. Cohen, cited at the very beginning of this chapter, suggests. In future it will be required to think of itself in relative rather than absolute terms, obliged to learn about, and to learn from, the rest of the world without the presumption of underlying superiority, the belief that ultimately it knows best and is the fount of civilizational wisdom. The bearer of this change will be China, partly because of its overwhelming size but also because of the nature of its culture and outlook. China, unlike Japan, has always regarded itself as universal, the centre of the world, and even, for a millennium and more, believed that it actually constituted the world. The emergence of Chinese modernity immediately de-centres and relativizes the position of the West. That is why the rise of China has such far-reaching implications.

The Age of China

Although parts of China are already prosperous and developed, around half of the population still lives in the countryside. China remains very much a developing country. As a consequence, Chinese modernity can only be regarded as work in progress. Some of its characteristics are already evident, others are only in embryonic form, while others still are not yet visible. It is abundantly clear, however, that Chinese modernity will differ markedly from Western modernity. The reasons for this lie not only in the present, but even more tellingly in the past. China has little in common with the West. It comes from entirely different cultural coordinates. Its politics, its state and its moral outlook have been constituted in a highly singular way, likewise its relationship with its neighbours. The fact that for many centuries the Chinese regarded themselves as constituting the world, as ‘all land under Heaven’, only serves to underline the country’s unique character. Unlike most developing countries, furthermore, China was never colonized, even though many of its cities were. Colonization was a powerful means by which countries were Westernized, but in China its absence from vast swathes of the country meant this never happened in the same manner that it did in India or Indochina, for example. The sheer size of China, both as a continental land mass and, more importantly, in terms of population, were, of course, indispensable conditions for enabling the Chinese to think in such autarchic and universalist terms. It might be argued that all these considerations lie in the past, but it is history that shapes and leaves its indelible mark on the present. Modernity is not a free-floating product of the present, but a function of what has gone before.

The fact that China, ever since 1949, but more significantly since 1978 and the beginning of the reform period, has been single-mindedly focused on the task of modernization - and, with remarkable self-discipline, allowed itself no distractions - has served to emphasize the extent to which China’s modernization is convergent with the West rather than divergent. Here, China’s experience closely resembles that of its more developed East Asian neighbours. But as China progresses further down the road of modernization, it will find itself less constrained by the imperatives of development, increasingly at ease with the present, and anxious to find inspiration from its past for the present.

6

China as an Economic Superpower

In August 1993, I visited Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong, for the first time. The experience is engraved on my memory. The road from Shenzhen to Guangzhou (the provincial capital, known as Canton in colonial times) was sometimes made up, occasionally little more than a mud track. Although we were in the middle of the countryside, the road was overflowing with pedestrians and vehicles of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans, pick-ups, lorries and minibuses, and in the fields by the side of the road peasants working their small paddy fields with water buffalo. It was as if two hundred of years of history had been condensed into one place in this single moment of time. It was a country in motion, its people living for the present, looking for and seizing the opportunity, as if it might never be offered again. I was engulfed by an enormous torrent of energy, creativity and willpower. The British Industrial Revolution must have been a bit like this: speculative, chaotic, dynamic - and a complete bloody mess. Guangdong was certainly a mess. Everywhere you looked there was construction - seemingly everything was in the process of being changed: the half-made road along which we were travelling, the countless half-finished buildings, the land being cleared as far as the eye could see. Guangdong was like a huge construction site.

Just over two years later I tried to retrace my steps with a television crew. There was not a single familiar sight I could find. The dynamic chaos had given way to order. There were brand-new motorways, bridges, factories, warehouses, and a lot more cars; and little sign of the juxtaposition of eras that had so fascinated me two years earlier. I enlisted the help of a couple of officials, but as I described the scenes I wanted to recapture on film they shrugged as if to suggest that they lay in the distant past. For me it was just two years ago; for them it could have been a different century. Guangdong, the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping, was well on the way to becoming the industrial centre of China, full of factories, many Hong Kong-owned, making cheap, mass-produced goods for the global market. This is how and where China’s economic transformation started.

Now Guangdong, just fifteen years after that first volcanic eruption, is turning over a new page in its history. It can no longer sustain its old comparative advantage. Labour has become too expensive, too demanding, the expectations of its people transformed. Its factories are no longer able to compete with those in Vietnam or Indonesia. In 2007 alone, no less than 1,000 shoe factories closed in Guangdong, one-sixth of the total.
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Their owners are moving production to the interior provinces, where living standards are as low as they once were in Guangdong, if not lower. And in their place, Guangdong is seeking to move up the value ladder, develop its service industries and shift into new areas of production that rely on design and technology rather than the perspiration of its people and the migrant workers from faraway provinces. Shenzhen and Guangzhou, like many cities in Guangdong, now look prosperous and well maintained, a far cry from former days when they resembled China’s Wild West. Shenzhen may not yet enjoy Hong Kong’s Western-style living standards, but it has significantly closed the gap. In little more than two decades, Guangdong has gone from the early days of the Industrial Revolution to something not too far short of the less developed parts of Western Europe.

At the time of Mao’s death in 1976, who would have predicted that China stood on the eve of a most remarkable period of economic growth that would entirely transform the face and fortunes of the country? Virtually nobody. It was as unpredictable and unpredicted as another enormously significant event - 1989 and the collapse of European Communism. China had been torn apart by the Cultural Revolution, in which the cadre that had largely steered the party through the 1950s and early 1960s had been vilified and banished by a ‘popular’
coup d’état
staged at Mao’s behest, involving the mobilization of tens of millions of young people in the Red Guard. The movement was opposed to privilege - whether by virtue of family history or Party position - and super-egalitarian in its philosophy: a very Chinese phenomenon with echoes of the Taiping Uprising in the mid nineteenth century. By the time of Mao’s death, the Cultural Revolution had subsided and stood largely discredited, but the country’s future direction remained deeply uncertain. The vacuum created by Mao’s death was soon filled by the return of those same old leaders who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm. They were confronted by the economic ravages and political dislocation that were the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, but free at last to pursue their instincts and inclinations, unimpeded by the wild extremes and excesses of Mao, albeit in a situation where the party faced a severe crisis of legitimacy.

There was one favourable omen. By the end of the seventies China’s relatively modest growth rate constituted something of an exception in East Asia. Many countries in the region were on the economic move: Japan was booming; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong had already experienced take-off; Malaysia, Thailand and others were in its early stages. The Chinese diaspora - centred on Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also in Singapore and Malaysia - were key players in this economic transformation. There were, in other words, examples around China’s borders of the possibilities that now beckoned. The country’s East Asian hinterland was being transformed by a region-wide economic revolution based on catch-up. Of course China faced unique problems, in particular its vastness and diversity, together with the legacy of civil war, turmoil and occupation. In addition it had been isolated, a condition partly self-imposed and partly a result of an American embargo (involving a total ban on all transactions with China until 1971), plus the withdrawal of all Soviet aid and personnel in 1959. The challenges facing the new Chinese leadership, therefore, were far more formidable than those that had confronted Taiwan or South Korea, especially as these had enjoyed considerable American patronage and munificence during the Cold War.