For Beijing, the past is exceptionally
useful, and usefully exceptional.
By
Howard W. French, Ian Johnson, Jeremiah Jenne, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Robert A.
Kapp, Tobie Meyer-Fong
China’s foreign policy increasingly looks
like an effort to win back for itself an imagined position where China was the
center of East Asia and other nations largely submitted to its will.
Of course, this past never existed — most
countries (or more accurately kingdoms, fiefdoms, and so on, because the nation
state didn’t exist then) probably didn’t see China that way. Instead, they sent
missions to China and pretended to submit to China as a survival strategy — a
way to give their giant neighbor face while allowing them to pursue their own
goals.
China’s foreign policy increasingly looks
like an effort to win back for itself an imagined position where China was the
center of East Asia and other nations largely submitted to its will.
Of course, this past never existed — most
countries (or more accurately kingdoms, fiefdoms, and so on, because the nation
state didn’t exist then) probably didn’t see China that way. Instead, they sent
missions to China and pretended to submit to China as a survival strategy — a
way to give their giant neighbor face while allowing them to pursue their own
goals.
But no matter, the key for the current
Chinese leader is to give itself and Chinese people the sense that China is
back in its natural place in the world order, which means as the regional
hegemon and at least one of the top few countries in the world.
Why this desire to recreate past glory? In a
piece I published recently in the New York Review of Books Daily, I argue that
it’s part of Xi Jinping’s adoption of the “classic
nationalist-authoritarian-traditionalist playbook.” Part of this is the obvious
strategy of diverting attention away from current problems, such as a
dangerously slowing economy.
But it is also the external manifestation of
a broader effort to recreate past values, principles, and structures in Chinese
society. This comes after a century of largely trying to dismantle these guiding
ideas and — perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not — a century of violence,
famines, wars, and turmoil. This strategy is part of a desire for China to go
back to what seemed like a more stable and glorious past, one where China’s
position in the world was assured, just like ordinary people’s position in
society was safe, predictable and seemingly free from the turmoil of living in
a globalized capitalist society.
Of course, this past never existed. It is a
dream — the China Dream, perhaps, which Mr. Xi has made his signature idea. But
if pushed too far it can become something else: a delusion.
Howard
W. French, Associate Professor, Columbia Journalism School:
I take it as self-evident that China’s past
strongly shapes its views of the world, as it does its views of itself and of
its place in the world. I have just published a book (last week) on this very
topic, titled Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s
Push for Global Power.
China has generated a number of durable
idealized narratives about its position in the world and its relations with
other peoples. The essence of these narratives concerns China’s intercourse
with neighbors. It is worth stating that pretty much every important power
generates idealized narratives about itself. Just as clearly, none of these
powers consistently live up to their self-idealization. According to myths dear
to Americans, whose society was founded on the basis of slavery and the
dispossession and substantial eradication of the native population, the United
States is a force for liberty in the world. More recently, and prior to Trump,
the United States has also long promoted an image of itself a country that is
keen on openness, in ideas, in matters of immigration and in trade. None of
these things have been consistently true of the United States — ever.
So how has China idealized itself? Since this
conversation has largely been about imperial China, I’ll limit myself to that.
China has tended to imagine itself as a
benign force whose centrality, preeminence and prestige have often served as
the basis for a loosely articulated Pax Sinica. This is especially true in
terms of how China imagines past relations with East and Southeast Asia. In its
own self-conception, China was rarely the aggressor or expansionist, and pretty
much never a hegemon. Instead, other countries were drawn toward it by its
wealth and brilliance, and if they submitted to it, they did so voluntarily,
because this seemed to them to be the natural and proper thing to do.
In exchange, China bestowed legitimacy on
appropriately deferential regimes, showered those who were interested in them
with the fruits of Chinese civilization and allowed them access to its rich
markets.
I argue in my book that there are strong
echoes of these very idealized narratives that persist in China’s dealings with
its neighbors today. China would like to be preeminent in its neighborhood. It
would like to attain such a position through peaceful means, using its assumed
powers of attraction. But especially because this was never a consistent
reality in the past, one must be ready for the possibility that China is
prepared to use non-peaceful means to attain its aims in the region, and indeed
there are already signs suggesting preparations for just such a thing. See, for
example, recent Chinese behavior in the South China Sea.
This leads to a question posed by Wang
Gungwu, who is quoted thusly in my book:
“In the nineteenth century China had to be
forced to ‘enter into the family of nations.’ China joined an international
system in which all members were equal, at least in theory; in fact, it was
difficult for China not to feel that it had been admitted as a less-than-equal
member. China’s bending before superior force was a rational decision which the
Western powers could approve of, but there has always been some doubt as to
whether it was simply a decision of strategy and whether the Chinese ever
believed that equality really existed in international relations. [And] the
Chinese may wish to go back to their long-hallowed tradition of treating
foreign countries as all alike but unequal and inferior to China.”
Another interesting question for me when I
think about China’s attractive powers is to compare imperial China at various
high points of its history with present day China and assess whose soft power
was greater? Today’s China unquestionably has the lure of markets and trade and
the associated promise of wealth that go with them. But in the imperial past,
in addition to these attributes, it could also boast leadership in philosophy,
religion, astrology, medicine, science and technology, writing and literature,
access to the examination system and more. Will China in the future be able to
roll out a panoply of soft power attributes of comparable breadth and prestige
to compliment its financial and hard power? If so, where will the ideational
elements of this soft power come from? If not, what are the implications of
being a new great power with a rather more narrowly based soft power foundation
that in the past?
Robert
Kapp, China specialist, Robert A. Kapp & Associates, Inc.:
Of course China’s past — imperial or
otherwise — is present in the shaping of China’s foreign policy today, because
a) “The Past Is Vast” — the term “imperial past” encompasses two-plus
millennia, in which distinguishing features and commonalities cohabit with any
number of foundational pluralisms, deviations, evolutions, additions,
modifications, etc.; and because b) the history of the development of the
Chinese nation (the nation, that is, not the civilization) over the past two
centuries has never ceased to be a story of identity-recovery,
identity-definition, identity-revision, and identity debate. That continues to
this day, as Orville Schell and his co-author John Delury emphasized in their
book Wealth and Power a few years ago, and it continues in Xi’s ongoing
attempts to invoke for the populace a unique Chinese identity made up of
Chinese Characteristics, Chinese Culture, etc. while at the same time he
regularly heats the boiling oil to prevent an onslaught of insidious and
infectious “Western Values” from infecting his people and undoing his polity.
The kicker, of course, is that “China’s
Past,” or its “imperial past,” is so vast and complex that it is pretty well up
to whoever invokes it to try to convince people that what he/she evokes is what
matters most. In a twenty-first-century one-party state, in which “politics”
have a defined role in the management of most aspects of Chinese life, the
possibility of conflicting or (heaven forfend) “alternative” versions of
history quickly becomes “political,” with all the inherent personal and
professional implications that this can bring. Just think of the vast kerfuffle
about “New Qing History,” for example.
China remains, and cannot avoid remaining,
drenched in its history, far more than most other modern nation states. (Donald
Trump’s hanging a portrait of Andrew Jackson in a conspicuous White House
location while he sets about Making America Great Again is small beer by
comparison).
As the Chinese people, China’s vast
opinion-formation apparatus, and above all China’s ultimate policy-making
elites ponder China’s place in the world of the present and the future, the
“imperial past,” however selectively defined and employed, lives. It lives in
the shared memory of facts, legends, names, and events, and it lives in the
Chinese language itself, filled as the latter is with words and phrases of
ancient but still-understood allusions and associations.
All of that having been said, however, crude
American or other non-Chinese evocations of a sort of Hollywood version of
“China’s imperial past” (I recall some wonderful film clips in Irv Drasnin’s
1972 TV special Misunderstanding China) will not do us or the Chinese any good.
Our job is to identify as best we can contemporary Chinese perceptions of their
immense historical legacy, pursuing that understanding through direct
engagement with thoughtful Chinese counterparts, and to factor what we learn
into our own perceptions and policy-making. It will not be all sweetness and
light, to be sure, and the comments of those in this exchange who point to the
apparent cynicism with which “the past” seems to be manipulated by present-day
power-holders bear careful study. (The Chinese Communist Party, by the way, is
not alone in these practices; the Kuomintang, from its first rise to power in
the 1920s until very recent years, diligently evoked and manipulated the
Chinese Past as well.) But to say “the imperial past” is not a meaningful
component of contemporary Chinese foreign policymaking would, I think, be
dangerously dismissive.
Pamela
Kyle Crossley, Collis Professor of History, Dartmouth College:
Like any country, China’s current foreign
policy shows a loose relationship between rhetoric and practice. The tendency
of some international relations theorists to look to a supposed historical
“tributary system” for both Chinese behavior and the reception of that behavior
across East Asia is a bit puzzling, since there never was such a system. There
was a set of rituals that ambassadors to the empire based in China were
expected to perform, and a certain amount of rhetoric about civilization. The
relationships performed were between the Son of Heaven and the outside
sovereigns — not their respective societies — and Chinese records were always
explicit about that. Beyond the rituals there were no prescriptions, whether
commercial, strategic, or cultural, for relations between China and any country
sending ambassadors. The actual policies and practices regarding the embassy
nations varied enormously, from close supervision of trade and domestic
politics in the case of Korea to indifference to reports and requests (as in
the case of Vietnam, for example), to polite curiosity about envoys claiming to
represent the Netherlands or the Vatican. The general trade policies once
attributed to the effects of the “tributary system” are just as elusive in
historical fact; Qing policies were rational and well-suited to the priorities
of the empire, even if they did not suit the expectations of countries — like
Britain — that were poorly suited to the market realities of East Asia.
This is not to say that the actual history of
relations between the Qing empire (and previous empires based in China) and
East Asian neighbors were not complex and sometimes momentous.
The Qing empire tried consistently to manage
Korea, and the Joseon court in Korea tried consistently (and with a certain
amount of success) to resist. Japan by its own choice kept to itself until the
late nineteenth century, though its southwestern domains were constantly
engaged in a culturally variegated pirate network that frustrated and enraged
authorities both in Korea and in China. Russia was the empire that shared the
most distinct conditions and concerns with the Qing, and the two empires forged
a method of co-existence that has some resemblances to the present.
But such similarities are incidental. Neither
Korea nor Japan shows any interest today in treating the Chinese president as a
Son of Heaven. China’s plan for “one belt, one road” is wholly native to the
21st century. The ambition to encircle India by land and sea; to create a
financial and resource exchange system for infrastructure development engaging
Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and to construct interlocking
trade and security relationships that will block the American reach across the
Pacific all are completely novel in Chinese and in global history. The Xi
Jinping government may be designing the post-globalization pattern of managed
trans-national spheres, and pioneering a financial and strategic role that few
other countries seem even to envisage. China has no need to draw on any distant
past for a template of its ambitions, attitudes, or enterprises.
Jeremiah
Jenne, independent China historian:
Chinese exceptionalism rests on several hoary
myths, but perhaps the most perplexing is that of China as the ultimate
pacifist nation, the victim of all and an aggressor toward none. In this
narrative, China, as presently constituted, emerged fully formed from the mists
of history and expanded to its current size by entirely (or mostly) peaceful
means.
It is a view of regional history that often
bemuses and frustrates China’s immediate neighbors, not the least Vietnam where
the phrase “1000 Years of Chinese Domination” holds near as much resonance as
“100 Years of Foreign Humiliation” does here in Beijing.
This exceptionalist narrative ignores the fraught
history by which the former frontiers of empire became the borders and
boundaries of a nation. This month, my students, undergraduates from several
different U.S. colleges and universities who are studying in Beijing, are
looking at the legacy of Qing imperial expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries
during which the Qing Empire fought wars in both Burma and Vietnam on the
pretext of enforcing regional order.
The Sino-Burmese Wars of 1765-1769 began,
ironically enough for historians of the Opium Wars, when a local official
escalated a trade dispute into an ill-fated attempt to expand Qing imperial
power and prestige. In 1788, Qing armies intervened and occupied Hanoi when the
Lê dynasty was toppled by the Tây Sơn army. Unfortunately, the commander of the
Qing forces, Sun Shiyi, failed to capitalize on his early success and was
forced to flee with his surviving troops back into China only a few months
later.
A cynic might suggest that it’s not that
China didn’t invade other countries, it’s just that it wasn’t very good at it.
In the nineteenth century, the Qing Empire
would also fight wars with France and Japan when those powers aggressively
challenged Qing influence in Vietnam and Korea. As Professor Crossley has
noted, that influence came about through a diverse set of practices and rituals
described as the “Tributary System” by John K. Fairbank and many other
twentieth-century historians of China.
In the cases of the Sino-French War of
1884-1885 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Qing faced bellicose and
aggressive powers who were unwilling to respect existing regional power
relationships and had the military means to push back forcefully against the
Qing assertion of its perceived rights and responsibilities as a great power.
What happens when the inevitable challenges
the exceptional? If China’s aggressive assertion of territorial claims leads to
conflict again with its neighbors in the present-day, how will that be squared
with the collective self-image of timeless pacifism? Will future wars be
explained as a preemptive defense of inherent Chinese territory, as in the case
of the border wars with India in the 1960s, or will they be intentionally and
conveniently forgotten, like the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979?
Ultimately, China’s efforts to spread its
influence in the region beyond may depend on how the Chinese government can
reconcile the extension of power beyond China’s borders with a self-congratulatory
exceptionalist narrative of its own creation.
Tobie
Meyer-Fong, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University:
Rather than asking how the imperial past
shapes the present, we also might consider how people in the present
selectively craft a usable past for purposes ranging from soft power to leisure
entertainment. In the mid-1960s, a stage spectacular titled The East is Red
encapsulated the official view of China’s imperial past. In song, dance, and
narrative voiceover, the performers presented a bleak history of misery,
feudalism, and imperialism that had to be overturned in order for China to
achieve a bright industrial future. In 2008, the Beijing Olympics opening
ceremony enacted a very different vision: the past as a rich and cosmopolitan
stage for global engagement and domestic social harmony—a proud heritage
providing a platform for China’s peaceful rise. In the 1960s and more recently,
the imperial past has been choreographed selectively into performance art. In
the imperial past, historical writing almost inevitably entailed censure or
praise for political or moral purposes (or both). Here, in the contrast between
The East is Red and the Olympic Opening Ceremony we see a reversal of verdicts
on the imperial past—from past as shackles to be cast off, to past as abundant
resource to be mined.
Today, the imperial past is celebrated as
glorious heritage in front of audiences both foreign and domestic, and in
contexts including Confucius Institutes abroad and tourist venues at home. While
the central government sets the agenda and narrative, local governments and
ordinary people (including tourists) also articulate visions (and versions) of
the imperial past. In the 1990s, signage at tourist venues inevitably presented
famous sites as manifestations of the genius of China’s working classes. Today,
those same sites are celebrated as the former playgrounds of emperors,
officials, and literati. Cultural heritage has become a global commodity and
also a consumable domestic resource in a developing service economy. We see
this especially in tourism.
In the early 1990s, tourism was managed by
the local Overseas Chinese and foreign office, and tourism was imagined as a
source of foreign currency. By the end of the 1990s, tourism had been reclassified
as a domestic industry. New regimens of work and leisure (the arrival of the
regular two-day weekend and longer holidays) and greatly improved
transportation infrastructure have contributed to a surge in domestic leisure
travel. Ironically, local officials have sought to manufacture scenic sites to
lure tourists, developing local “brand identities” even as China’s cities have
become increasingly homogeneous in their appearance. New shopping centers and
scenic sites in the “classical style” (often with names and associations from
the imperial past) proliferate; famous gardens, once enclosed within government
offices, schools, or factories, open anew to the public, creating additional
venues for ticket sales and local branding. Old vernacular architecture by
contrast continues to disappear. The imperial past has become a commodity, with
local variants on a glorious national theme. Messages honoring the emperors and
literati and high-ranking officials of the imperial past in fact affirm the
prosperity, splendor, glory, stability, and indigenous antecedents of the
present.
