Empire of Emperors

What Is China, and Why You Should Worry About It: An excerpt from David Goldman’s new book: ‘You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World’

Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a larger population at higher living standards than any other part of the pre-modern world. But China’s riparian civilization was also fragile, subject to periodic drought, famine, and flood, leading to civil unrest, barbarian invasion, and prolonged periods of chaos.

All this compelled China to turn inward. Its forays into the broader world were brief and abortive. No more; China can feed itself and control natural disasters. It has turned outward to the world and is seeking its place in the sun. This is a grand turning point in world history. For most of the past five thousand years, China has been the world’s most populous and wealthiest civilization in the world, but largely indifferent to events outside its borders. Now its ambitions are turned outward. Its 2,500-year-old system of elite formation now embraces the ten million students who take the annual college entrance exam. It has absorbed tens of thousands of the best Western scientists and engineers into its project for technological dominance, above all through Huawei, its bridgehead in the world market. And it proposes to extend its imperial principle of assimilation through infrastructure to the whole of the Eurasian continent, through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people. Sadly, the distinction between “good people” and “bad state” is a misjudgment on which America’s China hawks and China doves agree. Since the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in 1979, the liberal foreign policy establishment has argued that economic liberalization inevitably would lead to political liberalization. That didn’t happen. The China hawks argue that the Chinese people will rise up and overthrow their Communist overlords if the United States applies sufficient pressure, by placing tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. That won’t happen, either.

The Liberal Illusion That Prosperity Promotes Political Reform

China doves promised that China’s economic success inevitably would lead to political reforms. Prominent among them is former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton, now a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and chairman of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, Washington’s oldest and best-funded think tank. In 2009, Thornton told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that China was making progress towards democracy:

Premier Wen Jiabao consistently advocates for the universal values of democracy. He has defined democracy in largely the same way as many in the West would. “When we talk about democracy,” Premier Wen said, “We usually refer to the three most important components: elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.”

Premier Wen’s emphasis on universal values of democracy reflects new thinking in the liberal wing of the Chinese political establishment. He likely represents a minority view in the Chinese leadership, but like many other ideas in China during the past three decades, what begins as a minority view may gradually and eventually be accepted by the majority.

Now let me move to the second issue: New and far-reaching economic and socio-political forces in present-day China. Let me briefly mention three such forces, the first is the new and ever-growing middle class, the second is the commercialization and increasing diversity of the media, and the third is the rise of civil society groups and lawyers. These new players are better equipped to seek political participation than the Chinese citizens of 30 years ago …

Political participation through institutional means remains very limited. Yet, the ongoing political and intellectual discourse about democracy in the country, the existence of a middle class, commercialization of the media, the rise of civil society groups, the development of the legal profession, and checks and balances within the leadership are all important, contributing factors for democratic change in any society. In all these aspects, China is making significant progress.

China remains quite as authoritarian as ever it was, and technology has vastly increased the ability of its government to monitor and control the details of everyday life. The government of China knows where every smartphone is at all times, and can verify that it is carried by its registered owner through a vast network of facial recognition cameras. Soon it will require Chinese citizens to log on to the internet through facial recognition to police the online activity of the whole of society.

American hawks have argued that the Chinese political system is fragile and that the Communist Party can be toppled by outside pressure. Prominent among them is Gordon Chang, whose book The Coming Collapse of China appeared in its first edition in 2001. “The People’s Republic is a paper dragon,” Chang argued. “Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao’s death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society.” That was 18 years ago. In the meantime China’s per capita GDP has quintupled. Chang continues to provide newspaper and television commentary predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese system.

Hawks and doves are both wrong because they share the same false premise: For a society to succeed, they both believe, it must look and act like the United States of America. The doves thought that China would evolve into something like a Western democracy and succeed, while the hawks thought China would remain authoritarian and collapse. In fact, China remained authoritarian and deepened its economic success. Hawks and doves suffer from a sort of narcissism. They cannot conceive that a society so radically different from ours can flourish.

China Is in a Golden Age

But China has flourished. As Francesco Sisci observes, China is in a Golden Age, the first time in history that no one need fear going hungry. Since 1986, household consumption in China has risen seventeen-fold—that is, 1,700%. That isn’t a fabrication of Communist Party statisticians. Chinese now in their thirties, spent their early childhood in homes with dirt floors and outhouses. They now live in newly built apartments with central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. In 1986, just 3% of Chinese had access to universities or professional schools. That proportion grew to 50% by 2017. One-third of new labor force entrants have university degrees, and one-third of those are engineers. The Chinese buy 400 million smartphones a year and 25 million automobiles. Chinese commute to work in Shanghai on high-speed trains that reduce the distance from Wilmington to New York City to a 45-minute interval. We will take a closer look at China’s economy in another chapter.

We have to stop viewing China through a half-silvered mirror that reflects our own image back at us, and understand China on its own terms. It isn’t a pleasant picture, but we need to take a hard look at it.

by David P. Goldman, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty