|
BRITISH
industrialists advised Britain's first official
embassy to China, led George Macartney in
1793, to take a "very extensive selection
of specimens of all the articles both for
ornament and use". By displaying such
a selection to the emperor, court and people,
Lord Macartney's embassy would learn what
the Chinese wanted make more.
But
that is not how things turned out, says
an essay in London's Economist. The emperor
accepted Macartney's gifts, and quite liked
some of them - a model of the Royal Sovereign,
a first-rate man o' war, seemed to catch
his fancy - but understood the whole transaction
as one of tribute, not trade.
"We
have never valued ingenious articles, nor
do we have the slightest need of your country's
manufactures," said the emperor.
Now,
though, China has become what Macartney
was looking for: a relatively open market
that very much wants to trade. The past
two decades have seen the most favourable
conditions that have ever occurred for the
introduction of China's manufactures into
the most extensive markets in the world.
That
has brought China remarkable prosperity.
In terms of purchasing power it is poised
to retake its place as the biggest economy
in the world. Still home to hundreds of
millions mired in poverty, it is also a
21st-century nation of Norman Foster airports
and shining solar farms. It has rolled a
rover across the face of the moon, and it
hopes to send people to follow it.
And
now it is a nation that wants some things
very much. In general, it knows what these
things are. At home its people want continued
growth, its leaders the stability that growth
can buy.
China's
earlier decline and the empire's demise
have been much discussed. Some point to
what Mark Elvin, a historian, calls "the
high-level equilibrium trap".
The
country ran well enough, with cheap labour
and efficient administration, that supply
and demand could be easily matched in a
way that left no incentive to invest in
technological improvement.
Others
note that Europe benefited from competition
and trade between states, which drove its
capacity for weaponry and its appetites
for new markets.
As
Kenneth Pomeranz, an American historian,
has argued, access to cheap commodities
from the Americas was a factor in driving
industrialisation in Britain and Europe
that China did not enjoy.
So
was the good luck of having coal deposits
close to Europe's centres of industry; China's
coal and its factories were separated by
thousands of miles, a problem that remains
trying today.
For
some or all of these reasons, China did
not industrialise in the way that the West
did. Europe had learned of gunpowder from
China in the Middle Ages, but by the 19th
century Europeans were far better at using
it to get their way.
In
the 1830s the British tried to prise open
the China market with opium - something
people could be made to want, and keep wanting,
whatever their previous inclinations.
The
Chinese tried to stop the trade; the British
went to war and won. In the subsequent Treaty
of Nanjing, concluded in 1842, Britain grabbed
Hong Kong and forced China to open its doors.
China
descended into a spiral of denial, defeat
and semi-colonisation. Perhaps most humiliating,
in the 1890s enfeebled China was defeated
in battle by the Japanese - a people whose
culture had been founded on Chinese civilisation,
but which was now transformed by eagerly
adopted Western technology and ambition.
China's centrality in Asia had been usurped.
Much
of what has taken place since the republican
revolution in 1911, the rise and victory
of Maoism in 1949 and now "socialism
with Chinese characteristics" - has
been a reaction to the loss of wealth, power
and status, and a desire to regain the respect
China's leaders and people feel to be their
country's due.
The
reformers and revolutionaries of the late
19th century came to believe that traditional
Chinese culture was part of the problem.
In an attempt not to be carved up by the
colonial powers, they began to ditch much
of China's cultural heritage.
To
save themselves as a nation, many believed
they had to destroy themselves as a culture.
In 1905, the Confucian examination system
that had been the focus of governmental
training for two millennia was abandoned.
The
last emperor and the entire imperial system
were overthrown in 1911. With no modern
institutions to support it, the new republic
soon collapsed into chaos.
On
the international stage people and Communist
Party want a new deference and the influence
that befits their nation's stature. Thus
China wants the current dispensation to
stay the same - it wants the conditions
that have helped it grow to endure - but
at the same time it wants it turned into
something else.
Finessing
this need for things to change yet stay
the same would be a tricky task in any circumstances.
It is made harder by the fact that China's
Leninist leadership tries to keep its grip
on a society, which has transformed itself
socially almost as fast as it has grown
economically.
And
it is made more dangerous by the fact that
China is steeped in a belligerent form of
nationalism and ruled over by men who respond
to every perceived threat and slight with
disproportionate self-assertion.
The
post-perestroika collapse of the Soviet
Union taught China's leaders not just the
dangers of political reform but also a profound
distrust of America: would it undermine
them next?
Xi
Jinping, the president, has since been spooked
by the chaos unleashed in the Arab spring.
It seems he wants to try to cleanse the
party from within so it can continue to
rule while refusing any notions of political
plurality or an independent judiciary. That
consolidation is influencing China's foreign
policy.
China
is building airstrips on disputed islands
in the South China Sea, moving oil rigs
into disputed waters and redefining its
airspace without any clear programme for
turning such assertion into the acknowledged
status it sees as its due.
This
troubles its neighbours, and it troubles
America. Put together China's desire to
re-establish itself without being fully
clear about what that might entail and America's
determination not to let that desire disrupt
its interests and those of its allies can
be very dangerous indeed.
Shi
Yinhong, of Renmin University in Beijing,
one of China's most eminent foreign-policy
commentators, says that, five years ago,
he was sure that China could rise peacefully,
as it says it wants to. Now, he says, he
is not so sure.
|
