The China Century

April 18, 2007

THAT VENERABLE old man of letters, Gore Vidal, was invited to Shanghai in March to give the city's culture-starved expats a few lessons in erudition. By the end of his long, improvised talk about American history, he was asked about his feelings towards China, of which he admitted to knowing very little, and all he could say was that the mandate of Heaven - the celestial baton that according to Chinese tradition is passed from dynasty to dynasty - had already shifted from Washington to Beijing.

What he was suggesting, as he gestured towards the sparkling Bund and the sprays of neon light that ricocheted along the Huangpu River, was that China's rise is inevitable and had already been realized in some
Hegelian world-historical sense. If history has taught us anything, it is that all things must pass, and that the fate of all heirs of Ozymandius - including George W. Bush, who Vidal continued to refer to as the "little fella" - is to watch all their great monuments crumble to dust and their names to be forgotten, surrounded by "the lone and level sands stretching far away". China, Vidal suggested, with octogenarian weariness, is being carried along on the cusp of historical change, driven forward by the timed release of its own trapped internal energy. The U.S. is essentially finished, he implied, with a certain degree of Schadenfreude, and all the momentum is here, in China, where the cities continue to surge, creating hinterland upon hinterland and industrial park upon industrial park, and where the tentacles of trade stretch into every continent.

It is a theory familiar to anyone who read Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the jeremiad of American decline published in the late 1980s. Overstretched and overburdened but anxious to maintain its dominance, the U.S. overstretches and overburdens itself still further, leaving it vulnerable - not least in terms of soft power - to advancing forces like China. By now, China has prestige as well as its long-standing Oriental mystique. Driven, perhaps, by a myriad of newspaper articles about its effervescence, its thriving cultural scene and the plentiful opportunities for making money, Shanghai has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of China's growing status abroad, and - if this expat's non-scientific observations are to be believed - its expat community has at least doubled in the last three or four years.

So, if China's rise is inevitable, the question, said Princeton University's Anne-Marie Slaughter at a talk in Beijing at the beginning of this year, is how the "transition" from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica is managed. All previous changes in the world order have led to conflict, and the greatest challenge now facing the U.S. is to minimize the damage, she said. The current obsessions in Washington - especially the Middle East and the "war against terror" - are essentially a distraction from the underlying historical forces that are now pushing against one another, ineluctably, like tectonic plates. The most significant of those forces are emerging from a largely optimistic, energetic population of 1.3 billion, led by a largely confident, outward-looking government with a coherent agenda.

Anne-Marie Slaughter was in Beijing to discuss a research report released by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and the Chinese foreign policy specialists in attendance seemed sceptical.

Professor Jin Canrong of the People's University said at the meeting that although the conflicts in the Middle East have received the bulk of the attention, the U.S. is still focusing too much on China's rise. Indeed, China has tried to remain under the radar as far as its recent surge is concerned. It has been anxious to maintain the uneasy but workable status quo with Taiwan. It has stressed, in many of its policy statements, its focus on resolving domestic problems - poverty and growth disparities, environmental pollution - and its desire to become a responsible member of a multipolar international community. China, it says repeatedly, is not a threat to anyone, and aims only to achieve the prosperity and stability that it has been denied for at least two centuries.

Although you never actually hear them talking about "the new Chinese century" or the inevitability of China's ascent to great power status, and despite acknowledging all their domestic problems, government officials are generally sanguine and self-confident about China's future on the world stage. They talk optimistically about mutually beneficial exchanges of culture and ideas, "double win" trade deals and aid packages and the constant improvements in cooperation and understanding. They also continue to talk about the long term, and about the targets that have been set to overtake other industrial economies over the next few decades.

During a recent trip to Yunnan, a drunken conversation with senior local officials eventually turned - as it usually does when you are British - to the thorny issue of imperialism and the way foreign troops led by the Crown ravaged some of China's biggest cities and opened up the country to opium. "China should be grateful [for what happened in the nineteenth century]," said one figure, shortly before making another baijiu toast, "because the foreign countries made us realize that the only way to guarantee peace is to make sure that we are all of equal strength."

It's a nice idea.