The National Destiny Debate—The Triumphalist View
China’s encounter
with the modern, Western-designed international system has evoked
in the Chinese elites a special tendency in which they debate—with
exceptional thoroughness and analytical ability—their national
destiny and overarching strategy for achieving it. The world is
witnessing, in effect, a new stage in a national dialogue about the
nature of Chinese power, influence, and aspirations that has gone
on fitfully since the West first pried open China’s doors. China’s
previous national-destiny debates occurred during periods of
exceptional Chinese vulnerability; the current debate is occasioned
not by China’s peril but by its strength. After an uncertain and
sometimes harrowing journey, China is finally arriving at the
vision cherished by reformers and revolutionaries over the past two
centuries: a prosperous China wielding modern military capacities
while preserving its distinctive values.
The previous stages
of the national-destiny debate asked whether China should reach
outward for knowledge to rectify its weakness or turn inward, away
from an impure if technologically stronger world. The current stage
of the debate is based on the recognition that the great project of
self-strengthening has succeeded and China is catching up with the
West. It seeks to define the terms on which China should interact
with a world that—in the view of even many of China’s contemporary
liberal internationalists—gravely wronged China and from whose
depredations China is now recovering.
As the economic
crisis spread across the West in the period after the Olympics, new
voices—both unofficial and quasi-official—began to challenge the
thesis of China’s “peaceful rise.” In this view, Hu’s analysis of
strategic trends was correct, but the West remained a dangerous
force that would never allow China to rise harmoniously. It thus
behooved China to consolidate its gains and assert its claims to
world power and even superpower status.
Two widely read
Chinese books symbolize that trend: an essay collection titled
China Is Unhappy: The Great Era, the Grand
Goal, and Our Internal Anxieties and External Challenges
(2009), and China Dream: Great Power Thinking
and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (2010). Both
books are deeply nationalistic. Both start from the assumption that
the West is much weaker than previously thought, but that “some
foreigners have not yet woken up; they have not truly understood
that a power shift is taking place in Sino-Western relations.”
15 In this view,
it is thus up to China to shake off its self-doubt and passivity,
abandon gradualism, and recover its historic sense of mission by
means of a “grand goal.”
Both books have been
criticized in the Chinese press and in anonymous postings on
Chinese websites as irresponsible and not reflecting the views of
the great majority of Chinese. But both books made it past
governmental review and became best-sellers in China, so they
presumably reflect the views of at least some portion of China’s
institutional structure. This is particularly true in the case of
China Dream, written by Liu Mingfu, a
PLA Senior Colonel and professor at China’s National Defense
University. The books are presented here not because they represent
official Chinese government policy—indeed, they are contrary to
what President Hu has strongly affirmed in his U.N. address and
during his January 2011 state visit in Washington—but because they
crystallize certain impulses to which the Chinese government has
felt itself obliged to respond.
A representative
essay in China Is Unhappy sets out the
basic thesis. Its title posits that “America is not a paper
tiger”—as Mao tauntingly used to call it—but rather “an old
cucumber painted green.”16 The author, Song Xiaojun, starts from the
premise that even under the present circumstances, the United
States and the West remain a dangerous and fundamentally
adversarial force:
Countless facts have already proven that the West will never abandon its treasured technique of “commerce at bayonetpoint,” which it has refined over the course of several hundred years. Do you think it is possible that if you “return the weapons to the storehouse and put the war-horses out to pasture” 17 that this will convince [the West] to simply drop their weapons and trade with you peacefully?18
After thirty years of
rapid Chinese economic development, Song urges, China is in a
position of strength: “more and more of the masses and the youth”
are realizing that “now the opportunity is coming.”19 After the financial
crisis, he writes, Russia has become more interested in fostering
its relations with China; Europe is moving in a similar direction.
American export controls are now essentially irrelevant because
China already possesses most of the technology it needs to become a
comprehensively industrialized power and will soon have an
agricultural, industrial, and “post-industrial” economic base of
its own—in other words, it will no longer be reliant on the
products or the goodwill of others.
The author appeals to
the nationalist youth and masses to rise to the occasion, and he
contrasts the current elites unfavorably with them: “What a good
opportunity to become a comprehensively industrialized country, to
become known as a country that wants to rise and change the world’s
unjust and irrational political and economic system—how is it that
there are no elites to think of it! ”20
PLA Senior Colonel
Liu Mingfu’s 2010 China Dream defines a
national “grand goal”: to “become number one in the world,”
restoring China to a modern version of its historic glory. This, he
writes, will require displacing the United States.21
China’s rise, Liu
prophesies, will usher in a golden age of Asian prosperity in which
Chinese products, culture, and values set the standard for the
world. The world will be harmonious because China’s leadership will
be wiser and more temperate than America’s, and because China will
eschew hegemony and limit its role to acting as primus inter pares of the nations of the world.
22 (In a
separate passage, Liu comments favorably on the role of traditional
Chinese Emperors, whom he describes as acting as a kind of
benevolent “elder brother” to smaller and weaker countries’ kings.)
23
Liu rejects the
concept of a “peaceful rise,” arguing that China cannot rely solely
on its traditional virtues of harmony to secure the new
international order. Due to the competitive and amoral nature of
great power politics, he writes, China’s rise—and a peaceful
world—can be safeguarded only if China nurtures a “martial spirit”
and amasses military force sufficient to deter or, if necessary,
defeat its adversaries. Therefore, he posits, China needs a
“military rise” in addition to its “economic rise.”24 It must be
prepared, both militarily and psychologically, to struggle and
prevail in a contest for strategic preeminence.
The publication of
these books coincided with a series of crises and tensions in the
South China Sea, with Japan, and over the borders of India, in such
close succession and of a sufficiently common character as to
prompt speculation whether the episodes were the product of a
deliberate policy. Though in each case there is a version of events
in which China is the wronged party, the crises themselves
constitute a stage in the ongoing Chinese debate about China’s
regional and world role.
The books discussed
here, including the criticisms of China’s supposedly passive
“elites,” could not have been published or become a national cause
célèbre had the elites prohibited publication. Was this one
ministry’s way of influencing policy? Does it reflect the attitudes
of the generation too young to have lived through the Cultural
Revolution as adults? Did the leadership allow the debate to drift
as a kind of psychological gambit, so that the world would
understand China’s internal pressures and begin to take account of
them? Or is this just an example of China becoming more
pluralistic, allowing a greater multiplicity of voices, and of the
reviewers happening to be generally more tolerant of nationalist
voices?25