When China Rules the World (47 page)

While Hong Kong is still recognizably Hong Kong, economically it has been remade by China, the size of its stock exchange now comfortably surpassed by Shanghai’s. Who now would choose to go to Hong Kong when you can find the real thing in Beijing or Shanghai? For more than a decade Taiwan has needed China more than China has needed Taiwan, with its economy suffering increasingly from its relative isolation from China. Meanwhile the reversal of the lines of causation between China on one hand and Hong Kong and Taiwan on the other are being repeated on a far grander scale across the region. Everywhere the magnet is China. Where previously the story was outside China, now all roads lead to China. China’s growth and dynamism are spilling over its borders, infecting countless other countries far and wide, from Laos and Cambodia
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to South Korea and Japan, from Indonesia and Malaysia to the Philippines and even Australia. East Asia is being reconfigured by China’s rise. The agenda of the region is being set in Beijing.

The rise of China is best seen not from the vantage point of the United States or Europe, or for that matter Africa or Latin America, but East Asia. It is in China’s own backyard that the reverberations of its rise are already being felt most dramatically and in the most far-reaching ways. If we want to understand China’s rise, and what it might mean for the world, then this should be our starting point. The way in which China handles its rise and exercises its growing power in the East Asian region will be a very important indicator of how it is likely to behave as a global power.
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It is difficult to achieve the status of a global power without first becoming the dominant power in one’s own region. Britain is unusual in this respect: it acquired global hegemony in the nineteenth century even though it didn’t succeed in achieving a decisive pre-eminence in Europe. In contrast, the United States, confronted with no serious rivals, achieved overwhelming dominance in the Americas prior to becoming a global superpower in the second half of the twentieth century. China faces a far more formidable task in seeking to become the premier power in East Asia. The region accounts for one-third of the world’s population and China has to contend with two rivals, namely Japan and the United States, which stand in the way of its ambitions. Japan is the most advanced as well as largest (as measured by GDP according to exchange rates) economy in the region, while the United States, by virtue of its military alliances, bases and especially naval presence, remains the most powerful military force in East Asia. Furthermore, China shares borders with Russia to its north and India to its south-west, both of which are powerful players. China’s path to regional pre-eminence will be paved with difficulty and is bound to be a complicated process.

History, however, offers some succour for China’s ambitions. Until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, China enjoyed overwhelming regional dominance: it was to the Middle Kingdom that all others, in varying degrees - depending on their distance from Beijing - paid homage, acknowledging their status as the Celestial Kingdom’s inferior. It was a hierarchical system of relations whose tentacles stretched across much of East Asia, with China at its centre. In the tributary system, as it was known, non-Chinese rulers observed the appropriate forms and ceremonies in their contact with the Chinese emperor. Taken together, those practices constituted the tribute system. During the Qing period they included receiving a noble rank in the Qing hierarchy, dating their communications by the Qing calendar, presenting tribute memorials on statutory occasions together with a symbolic gift of local products, performing the kow-tow at the Qing court, receiving imperial gifts in return and being granted certain trading privileges and protection.
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If a ruler recognized the superiority of Chinese civilization and paid tribute to the emperor, then the emperor generally pursued a policy of non-interference, leaving domestic matters to the local ruler. It was thus an essentially cultural and moral rather than administrative or economic system. The emperor exercised few coercive powers but maintained control for the most part symbolically. The fact that Chinese hegemony was exercised in such a light and relatively superficial way enabled it to be maintained over a huge and very diverse population for long periods of time. The tributary system was far from universal, but Korea, part of Japan, Vietnam and Myanmar all paid tributes to China, while a large number of South-East Asian states, including Malacca and Thailand, either paid tribute or acknowledged Chinese suzerainty. Those countries that were closer to China in terms of geography and culture were considered to be more equal than those that were not. So, for example, China was considered the big brother, Korea a middle brother and Japan a younger brother.

Given the extent of the system, the diversity of the countries and cultures embraced, and the vast time-period involved, it would be wrong to conceive of the tributary system as uniform or monolithic. Varying from country to country and from dynasty to dynasty,
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the Chinese world order might appropriately be described, in the Chinese historian William A. Callahan’s words, as ‘one civilization, many systems’.
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Although they shared things in common, the tributary system worked very differently, for example, for Japan and Korea, with Japan enjoying much greater autonomy from China than Korea, and from time to time even rebelling against the tributary system. No doubt this partly explains why later Japan was able to display such remarkable independence of action in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, with its rejection of the Sinocentric world and its turn to the West.
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Perhaps it also helps to explain South Korea’s recent turn towards China. Notwithstanding these variations, however, the common thread running through the tributary system was an acceptance of China’s cultural superiority. This was the reason why the acceding states voluntarily acquiesced in an arrangement which they regarded to be in their interests as well as the Middle Kingdom’s.
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The relative stability of the tributary system over such a long historical period was partly a function of its flexibility but, above all, because China was overwhelmingly dominant within it: inequality, in other words, served to promote order.
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From the second half of the nineteenth century, with the growing power of the European nations and the decline of China, the European-conceived Westphalian system, together with its colonial subsystem, steadily replaced the tributary system as the organizing principle of interstate relations in the region, or, more accurately, perhaps, was superimposed upon the existing system.
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Given that it constituted the regional system in East Asia for more than 2,500 years, the tributary system remains deeply embedded in the historical memory of the region. Most countries in East Asia had some experience of it, often as recently as a century ago, and certainly not more than a century and a half ago. Even as it began to break down towards the end of the century, elements of the tributary system continued to survive until well into the twentieth century. While it seems inconceivable that any future Chinese hegemony in East Asia could take the form of the old tributary system, it is certainly reasonable to entertain the idea that it could bear at least some of its traces. There is still an overwhelming assumption on the part of the Chinese that their natural position lies at the epicentre of East Asia, that their civilization has no equals in the region, and that their rightful position, as bestowed by history, will at some point be restored in the future. China still frequently refers to its Asian neighbours as ‘periphery countries’, suggesting that old ways of thinking have not changed as much as one might expect.
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Former habits and attitudes have a strange way of reasserting themselves in new contexts. It would not be entirely surprising, therefore, if elements of the old tribute system were to find renewed expression as China once again emerges as the dominant centre of the East Asian economy.
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We are, thus, confronted with a number of intriguing questions. Will China regain its regional pre-eminence? How long is that likely to take? How might it be achieved? What might that regional pre-eminence look like, what forms will it take, and to what extent might it bear strong echoes of the past?

At the beginning of the 1990s China, with the reform era already a decade old, still existed for the most part in a state of splendid isolation, a condition that it had inherited from the Maoist era. The suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstration exacerbated this state of affairs, leading to China’s estrangement by the West and its condemnation by Japan.
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Throughout the nineties, China steadfastly refused to countenance being a party to any regional multilateral arrangements,
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fearing that it would be obliged to play second-fiddle to Japan, aware that the United States was strongly opposed to regional organizations from which it was likely to be excluded
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and, not least, still imbued with that traditional regional aloofness born of its pervasive sense of superiority. It was only in the early 1990s that China had established diplomatic relations with South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Brunei.
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By the end of the decade, however, China had determined on a very different strategy, one that it was to implement with breathtaking speed.

Already, in 1994, it had established the Shanghai Five with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asia and a desire to engage with Russia and foster co operation on its traditionally troublesome north-western border. It was not until 2001, however, with the formal establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), that this was to be translated into something more thorough-going, with a permanent office in Shanghai, the addition of Uzbekistan and the acquisition of new and more extensive functions.
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The purpose of the SCO would appear to be threefold: to promote cooperation in Central Asia, to counter Islamic extremism and to resist American influence in the region. Over the subsequent years, India, Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia and Afghanistan have acquired observer status, while representatives are also invited from ASEAN and the CIS (composed of the former Soviet Republics). SCO’s future is difficult to assess but it certainly represents a powerful bloc of Central Asian countries and, significantly, remains outside the aegis of American influence. The heart of China’s new strategy, though, lay not to its north-west but to its south-east, a region towards which, in comparison, China had for centuries displayed for the most part benign neglect and traditional indifference. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the fulcrum of China’s strategy in East Asia - certainly as it has evolved over the last decade - came to hinge on a volte-face in its attitude towards ASEAN, the organization of the ten nations of South-East Asia that was formed in 1967.
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How do we explain China’s belated embrace of multilateralism? First and foremost, its dramatic economic growth after 1978 generated a growing sense of self-confidence and enabled the country to entertain new and more ambitious perspectives. Second, by the turn of the century China was on the verge of membership of the World Trade Organization, thereby marking its entry into the global international system and signalling its global acceptance of multilateralism. Third, China felt increasingly comfortable about its position in the region and confident that it would not be required to play the role of subordinate to Japan. Finally, as a consequence of the Asian financial crisis in 1997-8, which ravaged the economies of South-East Asia (and South Korea), China found itself thrown into an increasingly close relationship with them. As they struggled to emerge from the effects of the crisis, now rudely aware - after a long period of spectacular economic growth - of their vulnerability to global volatility and bruised by the damaging effects of the US and IMF-imposed solutions to the crisis, the ASEA N countries began to see China in a new light.
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From being a rival to be feared, its motives always the subject of suspicion, China increasingly came to be seen as a friend and partner, primarily because it refrained from devaluing the renminbi, a move which would have inflicted even further pain on their economies, together with its willingness to extend aid and interest-free loans during the crisis.
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The Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad remarked in 1999: ‘Chi na’s performance in the Asian financial crisis has been laudable, and the countries in this region . . . greatly appreciated China’s decision not to devalue the yuan [renminbi]. China’s cooperation and high sense of responsibility has spared the region a much worse consequence.’
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A decade earlier a rapprochement between ASEAN and China would have been inconceivable; now it had a certain air of inevitability. But it required, on the part of the Chinese, a leap of imagination, a new kind of mindset, a willingness to abandon old ways of thinking, and a boldness that had previously characterized their economic reform programme, though not their conduct of regional relations.

What was surprising was not simply that China was suddenly prepared to embrace multilateralism in the region but also the manner in which it did so. This, after all, was the country that down the ages, from Tang to Mao, had regarded its neighbours with a sense of superiority and indifference: China did not need its neighbours, but they needed it. Yet China was prepared to engage with ASEAN, an organization composed - broadly speaking - of the weakest nations in East Asia, and to do so on its terms rather than China’s. China’s approach, in other words, was informed by a new and unfamiliar humility. Historically, North-East Asia, home to old and powerful civilizations like Japan and Korea as well as China, has been overwhelmingly predominant over the much less developed South-East Asia, where a lower level of economic development, ethnic diversity and a weak sense of nationhood have long been manifest.
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There was now a remarkable inversion, at least in terms of diplomacy, of this traditional state of affairs.