When China Rules the World (64 page)

The world has become accustomed to thinking in terms of the nation-state. It is one of the great legacies of the era of European domination. Nations that are not yet nation-states aspire to become one. The nation-state enjoys universal acceptance as the primary unit and agency of the international system. Since the 1911 Revolution, even China has sought to define itself as a nation-state. But, as we have seen, China is only latterly, and still only partially, a nation-state: for the most part, it is something very different, a civilization-state. As Lucian Pye argued:

China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations. China is a civilization pretending to be a state. The story of modern China could be described as the effort by both Chinese and foreigners to squeeze a civilization into the arbitrary and constraining framework of a modern state, an institutional invention that came out of the fragmentation of Western civilization.
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It is this civilizational dimension which gives China its special and unique character. Most of China’s main characteristics predate its attempts to become a nation-state and are a product of its existence as a civilization-state: the overriding importance of unity, the power and role of the state, its centripetal quality, the notion of Greater China, the Middle Kingdom mentality, the idea of race, the family and familial discourse, even traditional Chinese medicine.

Hitherto, the political traffic has all been in one direction, the desire of Chinese and Westerners alike to conform to the established Western template of the international system, namely the nation-state. This idea has played a fundamental role in China’s attempts to modernize over the last 150 years from a beleaguered position of backwardness. But what happens when China no longer feels that its relationship with the West should be unidirectional, when it begins to believe in itself and its history and culture with a new sense of confidence, not as some great treasure trove, but as of direct and operational relevance to the present? That process is well under way
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and can only get stronger with time. This will inexorably lead to a shift in the terms of China’s relationship with the international system: in effect, China will increasingly think of itself, and be treated by others, as a civilization-state as well as a nation-state. As we saw in Chapter 9, this has already begun to happen in East Asia and in due course it is likely to have wider global ramifications. Instead of the world thinking exclusively in terms of nation-states, as has been the case since the end of colonialism, the lexicon of international relations will become more diverse, demanding room be made for competing concepts, different histories and varying sizes.

The Westphalian system has dominated international relations ever since the emergence of the modern European nation-state. It has become the universal conceptual language of the international system. As we have seen, however, the Westphalian system has itself metamorphosed over time and enjoyed several different iterations. Even so, it remains what it was, an essentially European-derived concept designed to make the world conform to its imperatives and modalities. As a consequence, different parts of the world approximate in differing degrees to the Westphalian norm. Arguably this congruence has been least true in East Asia, where the legacy of the tributary state system, and the presence of China, mean that the Westphalian system exists in combination with, and on top of, pre-existing structures and attitudes. The specificity of the East Asian reality is illustrated by the fact that most Western predictions about the likely path of interstate relations in the region since the end of the Cold War and the rise of China have not been borne out: namely, that there would be growing instability, tension and even war and that the rise of China would persuade other nations to balance and hedge against it. In the event, neither has happened. There have been fewer wars since 1989 than was the case during the Cold War, and there is little evidence of countries seeking to balance against China: on the contrary, most countries would appear to be attempting to move closer to China.
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This suggests that the modus operandi of East Asia is rather different to elsewhere and contrasts with Western expectations formed on the basis of its own history and experience. A fundamental feature of the tributary state system was the enormous inequality between China and all other nations in its orbit, and this inequality was intrinsic to the stability that characterized the system for so long. It may well be that the new East Asian order, now being configured around an increasingly dominant China, will prove similarly stable: in other words, as with the tributary system, overweening inequality breeds underlying stability, which is the opposite to the European experience, where roughly equal nation-states were almost constantly at war with each other over many centuries until 1945, when, emerging exhausted from the war, they discovered the world was no longer Eurocentric.
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The idea that East Asia in future will owe as much to the tributary system as the Westphalian system will inevitably influence how China views the wider international system. Moreover if East Asia, as the most important region in the world, operates according to different criteria to other parts of the global system, then this is bound to colour behaviour and norms elsewhere. In other words, the tributary state system will not only shape China’s outlook but, in the context of its global hegemony, also serve to influence the international system more widely. As the writer David Kang suggests, the modalities of East Asia in terms of interstate relations, from being ignored or marginalized until the end of the Cold War, will increasingly assume the role of one of the world’s major templates.
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Two key characteristics of the tributary system were the overwhelming size of China in comparison with its neighbours and a mutual acceptance of and acquiescence in Chinese superiority. In the era of globalization, these characteristics, certainly the first, might be transferred on to a wider canvas. Such will be the relative economic size and power of China that it is likely to find itself in relationships of profound inequality with many countries outside, as well as within, East Asia; as a result, they are likely to find themselves highly dependent on China. The most obvious example of this is Africa and to a lesser extent various Latin American countries like Peru and Bolivia; in other words, developing countries which are predominantly commodity-producers.
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As China’s voracious appetite for raw materials grows apace, more and more such countries are likely to enter into its orbit. It has even been mooted that China might lease, or even buy, overseas farmland in Latin America and Australia in order to boost its supply of food.
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There is an understandable tendency to see China’s emergent relationship with these countries in the same terms as those of the West, past and present. This, however, is to underestimate the difference between China and the West, and therefore the novelty of the situation. Given the huge disparity in size, rather than seeing it in basically colonial or neocolo nial terms, perhaps it would be more appropriate to think of this relationship in neo-tributary terms. To what extent the other characteristic of the tributary system - an acceptance of China’s cultural superiority - might also become a factor is more difficult to judge, although, in light of the Chinese mentality, there will certainly be powerful elements of this. It is important, however, to place these points in a broader context. China’s rise will be accompanied by that of other major developing countries, such as India and Brazil, and these are likely to act in some degree as a constraint on China’s power and behaviour.

At the height of the British Empire in 1913, Britain accounted for only 2.5 per cent of the world’s population, while Western Europe represented 14.6 per cent. By 2001 Western Europe’s share had fallen to 6.4 per cent. In 2001, when the United States was the world’s sole superpower, it comprised a mere 4.6 per cent of the world’s population. The proportion accounted for by the West as a whole - including Eastern Europe and countries like Australia but excluding the former USSR - was 13.9 per cent in 2001. China, in contrast, comprised 20.7 per cent of the world’s population in 2001.
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Moreover, whatever the obvious commonalities - historical, cultural and ethnic - that serve to link and cohere the Western world, this is very different from the unity and cohesion that China enjoys as a single nation. The true comparison is China’s 20.7 per cent against the US’s 4.6 per cent. In other words China, as the world’s leading country, will enjoy a demographic weight that is qualitatively different from that of any previous hegemonic power in the modern era.

The basis of democracy is that numbers count. Hitherto this proposition has been confined within the boundaries of each individual nation-state. It has never found any form of expression at a supranational, let alone global, level, with the possible exception of the United Nations General Assembly - which, predictably, enjoys virtually no power. Institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have never sought to be democratic but instead reflect the economic and political clout of those countries that founded them, hence the dominance of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe, with the US enjoying in effect the power of veto. The Western world order has - in its post-1945 idiom - placed a high premium on democracy within nation-states while attaching zero importance to democracy at the global level. As a global order, it has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian. The emergence of China as the globally dominant nation is very unlikely to usher in a new kind of democratic global governance, but the rise of developing nations like India, Brazil and Russia, along with China, should herald, in a rough and ready way, a more democratic global economy. The huge mismatch between national wealth on the one hand and size of population on the other that has characterized the last two centuries will be significantly reduced. For the developing world, including the most populous countries, poverty has meant marginalization or effective exclusion from global decision-making; economic power, in contrast, is a passport to global enfranchisement. Or, to put it another way, a global economic regime based on the BRICS (namely Brazil, Russia, India and China), together with other developing countries, will be inherently more democratic than the Western regime that has previously prevailed. Furthermore, the fact that China, as the top dog, is so numerous will in itself introduce a more democratic element, albeit in the crudest sense, to the global polity. One-fifth of the world, after all, is rather more representative than the US’s 4.6 per cent.
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That China, as a global power, will be so numerous will have many consequences. China will exercise a gravitational pull and also have a centrifugal impact on the rest of the world. There will be many aspects to this push-pull phenomenon. The size of the Chinese market means that, in time, it will inevitably become by far the world’s largest. As a result, it will also assume the role of de facto yardstick for most global standards and regulations. The size of its domestic market will also have the consequence that Chinese companies will be the biggest in the world, as will the Chinese stock exchanges. In the 1950s Europeans were astounded by the scale of all things American; in the future, these will be dwarfed by the magnitude of all things Chinese. Even the position of Las Vegas as the gambling capital of the world is under threat, with the gaming revenues of Macao on the verge of overtaking those of the former by 2007. An example of China’s centrifugal impact is offered by Chinese migration. China will be a net exporter of people, as Europe was until the mid twentieth century, but unlike the United States, which remains a net importer.
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A small insight into what this might mean is provided by the rapid migration of hundreds of thousands of Chinese to Africa in the first few years of the twenty-first century. If the economic relationship between China and Africa continues to develop along the same lines in the future, Chinese settlers in sub-Saharan Africa could come to represent a significant minority of its population. It is not inconceivable that large numbers of Chinese might eventually migrate to Japan to compensate for its falling population, though this would require a sea-change in Japan’s attitude towards immigration. It is estimated that the Chinese minority there, legal and illegal, presently numbers up to 400,000.
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The Chinese are already a rapidly growing minority in Russia, especially in the Russian Far East. In comparison with Americans, then, if not necessarily with the Europeans before them, the Chinese will be far more ubiquitous in the world.

Another example will be provided by tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organization predicts, rather conservatively, that there will be 100 million outward-bound Chinese tourists by 2019 (compared with almost 28 million in 2004), and an estimated global total of 1.6 billion in 2020. The World Travel and Tourism Council has predicted that by 2018 the value of Chinese tourism will almost be as great as that of the United States. The impact will be greatest in East Asia, especially South-East Asia, and Australia, where many destinations will seem as if they have been taken over by Chinese tourists, a phenomenon that hitherto has been almost exclusively Western, but which will happen on a far grander scale with the Chinese.
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The Chinese language, similarly, will assume global importance simply because it has so many native speakers; this will contrast with recent periods of history when the USSR and later Japan were riding high but which, partly because of their relatively small populations, had little linguistic impact, apart from on Eastern Europe in the case of the Soviet Union, outside their own borders. In terms of language, it is already possible to glimpse the future through those who use the internet. Though the proportion of China’s population who are internet users is far smaller than that in the United States, by 2008 the number of Chinese internet users had already overtaken the number of American users.
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