Brushwood and gall
China insists that its growing military and diplomatic clout
pose no threat. The rest of the world, and particularly America, is not so
sure, says Edward Carr
The Economist - Dec
2nd 2010
IN 492BC, at the end of the “Spring and Autumn” period in
Chinese history, Goujian, the king of Yue in modern Zhejiang, was taken
prisoner after a disastrous campaign against King Fuchai, his neighbour to the
north. Goujian was put to work in the royal stables where he bore his captivity
with such dignity that he gradually won Fuchai’s respect. After a few years
Fuchai let him return home as his vassal.
Goujian never forgot his humiliation. He slept on brushwood
and hung a gall bladder in his room, licking it daily to feed his appetite for
revenge. Yue appeared loyal, but its gifts of craftsmen and timber tempted
Fuchai to build palaces and towers even though the extravagance ensnared him in
debt. Goujian distracted him with Yue’s most beautiful women, bribed his officials
and bought enough grain to empty his granaries. Meanwhile, as Fuchai’s kingdom
declined, Yue grew rich and raised a new army.
Goujian bided his time for eight long years. By 482BC,
confident of his superiority, he set off north with almost 50,000 warriors.
Over several campaigns they put Fuchai and his kingdom to the sword.
The king who slept on brushwood and tasted gall is as
familiar to Chinese as King Alfred and his cakes are to Britons, or George Washington
and the cherry tree are to Americans. In the early 20th century he became a
symbol of resistance against the treaty ports, foreign concessions and the
years of colonial humiliation.
Taken like that, the parable of Goujian sums up what some
people find alarming about China’s rise as a superpower today. Ever since Deng
Xiaoping set about reforming the economy in 1978, China has talked peace. Still
militarily and economically too weak to challenge America, it has concentrated
on getting richer. Even as China has grown in power and rebuilt its armed
forces, the West and Japan have run up debts and sold it their technology.
China has been patient, but the day when it can once again start to impose its
will is drawing near.
However, Goujian’s story has another reading, too. Paul
Cohen, a Harvard scholar who has written about the king, explains that the
Chinese today see him as an example of perseverance and dedication. Students
are told that if they want to succeed they must be like King Goujian, sleeping
on brushwood and tasting gall—that great accomplishments come only with
sacrifice and unyielding purpose. This Goujian represents self-improvement and
dedication, not revenge.
Which Goujian will 21st-century China follow? Will it
broadly fit in with the Western world, as a place where people want nothing
more than a chance to succeed and enjoy the rewards of their hard work? Or, as
its wealth and power begin to overshadow all but the United States, will China
become a threat—an angry country set on avenging past wrongs and forcing others
to bend to its will? China’s choice of role, says Jim Steinberg, America’s
deputy secretary of state, is “the great question of our time”. The peace and
prosperity of the world depends on which path it takes.
Some people argue that China is now too enmeshed in
globalisation to put the world economy in jeopardy through war or coercion.
Trade has brought prosperity. China buys raw materials and components from abroad
and sells its wares in foreign markets. It holds $2.6 trillion of
foreign-exchange reserves. Why should it pull down the system that has served
it so well?
But that is too sanguine. In the past integration has
sometimes gone before conflagration. Europe went up in flames in 1914 even
though Germany was Britain’s second-largest export market and Britain was
Germany’s largest. Japan got rich and fell in with the European powers before
it brutally set about colonising Asia.
Others go to the opposite extreme, arguing that China and
America are condemned to be enemies. Ever since Sparta led the Peloponnesian
League against Athens, they say, declining powers have failed to give way fast
enough to satisfy rising powers. As China’s economic and military strength
increase, so will its sense of entitlement and its ambition. In the end
patience will run out, because America will not willingly surrender leadership.
Reasons for optimism
But that is too bleak. China clings to its territorial
claims—over Taiwan, the South China Sea, various islands and with India. Yet,
unlike the great powers before 1945, China is not looking for new colonies. And
unlike the Soviet Union, China does not have an ideology to export. In fact,
America’s liberal idealism is far more potent than token Communism, warmed-up
Confucianism or anything else that China has to offer. When two countries have
nuclear weapons, a war may not be worth fighting.
In the real world the dealings between rising and declining
powers are not straightforward. Twice Britain feared that continental Europe
would be dominated by an expansionary Germany and twice it went to war. Yet
when America took world leadership from Britain, the two remained constant
allies. After the second world war Japan and Germany rose from the ashes to
become the world’s second- and third-largest economies, without a whisper of a
political challenge to the United States.
International-relations theorists have devoted much thought
to the passing of empires. The insight of “power-transition theory” is that
satisfied powers, such as post-war Germany and Japan, do not challenge the
world order when they rise. But dissatisfied ones, such as pre-war Germany and
Japan, conclude that the system shaped and maintained by the incumbent powers
is rigged against them. In the anarchic arena of geopolitics they believe that
they will be denied what is rightfully theirs unless they enforce their claim.
So for most of the past decade the two great powers edged
towards what David Lampton, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, calls a double wager. China would broadly fall in with
America’s post-war order, betting that the rest of the world, eager for China’s
help and its markets, would allow it to grow richer and more powerful. America
would not seek to prevent this rise, betting that prosperity would eventually
turn China into one of the system’s supporters—a “responsible stakeholder” in
the language of Robert Zoellick, a deputy secretary of state under George Bush
junior and now president of the World Bank.
For much of the past decade, barring the odd tiff, the wager
worked. Before 2001 China and America fell out over Taiwan, the American
bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade and a fatal mid-air collision between an
American EP3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter. Many commentators back then
thought that America and China were on a dangerous course, but Chinese and
American leaders did not pursue it. Since then America has been busy with the
war on terror and has sought plain dealing with China. American companies
enjoyed decent access to Chinese markets. China lent the American government
huge amounts of money.
This suited China, which concluded long ago that the best
way to build its “comprehensive national power” was through economic growth.
According to its analysis, articulated in a series of white papers and speeches
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the country needed a “New Security Concept”.
Growth demanded stability, which in turn required that China’s neighbours did
not feel threatened.
To reassure them, China started to join the international
organisations it had once shunned. As well as earning it credentials as a good
citizen, this was also a safe way to counter American influence. China led the
six-party talks designed to curb North Korea’s nuclear programme. The
government signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and by and large stopped
proliferating weapons (though proliferation by rogue Chinese companies
continued). It sent people on UN peacekeeping operations, supplying more of
them than any other permanent member of the security council or any NATO
country.
Inevitably, there were still disputes and differences. But
diplomats, policymakers and academics allowed themselves to believe that, in
the nuclear age, China might just emerge peacefully as a new superpower.
However, that confidence has recently softened. In the past few months China
has fallen out with Japan over a fishing boat that rammed at least one if not
two Japanese coastguard vessels off what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands
and the Chinese the Diaoyu Islands.
Earlier, China failed to back South Korea over the sinking
of a Korean navy corvette with the loss of 46 crew—even though an international
panel had concluded that the Cheonan was attacked by a North Korean submarine.
When America and South Korea reacted to the sinking by planning joint exercises
in the Yellow Sea, China objected and got one of them moved eastward, to the
Sea of Japan. And when North Korea shelled a South Korean island last month,
China was characteristically reluctant to condemn it.
China has also begun to include territorial claims over
large parts of the South China Sea among its six “primary concerns”—new
language that has alarmed diplomats. When members of the Association of
South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) complained about this in a meeting in Hanoi in
the summer, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, worked himself into a rage:
“All of you remember how much of your economic prosperity depends on us,” he
reportedly spat back.
Last year a vicious editorial in China’s People’s Daily
attacked India after its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited disputed
territory near Tibet; Barack Obama was shabbily treated, first on a visit to
Beijing and later at the climate-change talks in Copenhagen, where a junior
Chinese official wagged his finger at the leader of the free world; Chinese
vessels have repeatedly harassed American and Japanese naval ships, including
the USS John S. McCain and a survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable.
Such things are perhaps small in themselves, but they matter
because of that double bet. America is constantly looking for signs that China
is going to welsh on the deal and turn aggressive—and China is looking for
signs that America and its allies are going to gang up to stop its rise.
Everything is coloured by that strategic mistrust.
Peering through this lens, China-watchers detect a shift.
“The smiling diplomacy is over,” says Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of
state under George Bush. “China’s aspiration for power is very obvious,” says
Yukio Okamoto, a Japanese security expert. Diplomats, talking on condition of
anonymity, speak of underlying suspicions and anxiety in their dealings with
China. Although day-to-day traffic between American and Chinese government
departments flows smoothly, “the strategic mistrust between China and the US
continues to deepen,” says Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, DC.
There is nothing inevitable about this deterioration. Peace
still makes sense. China faces huge problems at home. It benefits from American
markets and good relations with its neighbours, just as it did in 2001. The
Chinese Communist Party and the occupant of the White House, of any political
stripe, have more to gain from economic growth than from anything else.
China’s leaders understand this. In November 2003 and
February 2004 the Politburo held special sessions on the rise and fall of
nations since the 15th century. American policymakers are no less aware that,
though a powerful China will be hard to cope with, a dissatisfied and powerful
China would be impossible.
Now, however, many factors, on many sides, from domestic
politics to the fallout from the financial crisis, are conspiring to make
relations worse. The risk is not war—for the time being that remains almost
unthinkable, if only because it would be so greatly to everyone’s disadvantage.
The danger is that the leaders of China and America will over the next decade
lay the foundations for a deep antagonism. This is best described by Henry
Kissinger.
The dark side
Under Richard Nixon, Mr Kissinger created the conditions for
40 years of peace in Asia by seeing that America and China could gain more from
working together than from competing. Today Mr Kissinger is worried. Speaking
in September at a meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies,
he observed that bringing China into the global order would be even harder than
bringing in Germany had been a century ago.
“It is not an issue of integrating a European-style nation-state,
but a full-fledged continental power,” he said. “The DNA of both [America and
China] could generate a growing adversarial relationship, much as Germany and
Britain drifted from friendship to confrontation…Neither Washington nor Beijing
has much practice in co-operative relations with equals. Yet their leaders have
no more important task than to implement the truths that neither country will
ever be able to dominate the other, and that conflict between them would
exhaust their societies and undermine the prospects of world peace.”
Nowhere is the incipient rivalry sharper than between
America’s armed forces and their rapidly modernising Chinese counterparts.
Globally, American arms remain vastly superior. But in China’s coastal waters
they would no longer confer such an easy victory. *
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