The problem with Western commentary on China has been its overwhelming preoccupation with China ’s polity, in particular the lack of democracy and its Communist government, and, to a lesser extent, its potential military threat. In fact, the challenge posed by the rise of China is far more likely to be cultural in nature, as expressed in the Middle Kingdom mentality. Or, to put it another way, the most difficult question posed by the rise of China is not the absence of democracy but how it will handle difference. A country’s attitude towards the rest of the world is largely determined by its history and culture. The power of each new hegemonic nation or continent is invariably expressed in novel ways: for Europe, the classic form was maritime expansion and colonial empires, for the United States it was airborne superiority and global economic hegemony. Chinese power, similarly, will take new and innovative forms. The Chinese tradition is very distinct from that of the West, even though there are certain affinities, notably a shared belief in universalism, a civilizing mission and a sense of inherent superiority. Although the Chinese steadily augmented their territory as a result of land-based expansion, there has been no equivalent of Western overseas expansion or the European colonization of large tracts of the world. The most likely motif of Chinese hegemony lies in the area of culture and race. The Chinese sense of cultural self-confidence and superiority, rooted in their long and rich history as a civilization-state, is utterly different from the United States, which has no such legacy to draw on, and contrasts with Europe too, if less strongly. The Chinese have a deeply hierarchical view of the world based on culture and race. As a consequence, the rise of China as a global superpower is likely to lead, over a protracted period of time, to a profound cultural and racial reordering of the world in the Chinese image. As China draws countries and continents into its web, as is happening already with Africa, they will not simply be economic supplicants of a hugely powerful China but also occupy a position of cultural and ethnic inferiority in an increasingly influential Chinese-ordered global hierarchy.
In the early nineties books about China were relatively few and far between. The story was still, for the most part, the Asian tigers, and most Western writers seemed to park themselves in Hong Kong and Singapore and view China and the region through that prism. My first visits to the region followed a similar pattern: both island-states always seemed to be on my itinerary, partly because they provided a ready-made network of contacts and partly because English was widely spoken. Given this cultural baggage, it is not surprising that China was generally seen in derivative terms: it was all a question of when and to what extent China would become infected with the Hong Kong bug. When Hong Kong was finally returned to China in 1997, the British, self-congratulatory almost to a person, were deeply sceptical as to whether the territory would thrive in the way that it had under the British; predictably they believed that China ’s future hung on the extent to which it became like Hong Kong. In this view, China ’s prospects depended on learning from everyone else, with the recommended direction of wisdom invariably proceeding from the outside inwards rather than from within outwards. This contained a kernel of truth: the transformation of the region had, indeed, begun outside China. The role and importance of Hong Kong and Singapore in this wider process, however, is a moot point; far more significant were Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which looked far less like, and owed much less to, the West than these micro-states.
In fact, this mindset was deeply patronizing towards China. It suggested that China was an empty vessel that needed filling up with Western ideas and know-how. Certainly China had much to learn from the West, but its subsequent transformation has been more home-grown than Western import. In fact, if China ’s growth in the 1980s had relied heavily on the resources and knowledge of Hong Kong and Taiwanese entrepreneurs, by the nineties the direction of influence was in the process of being reversed, with the Middle Kingdom once more becoming the centre of influence, power and wealth. A map of East Asia in the eighties might reasonably have had the lines of influence and capital running from a miscellany of Hong Kong, Taiwan and the overseas Chinese into China itself. Now it is the opposite. The hubs no longer lie around China ’s borders but are congregated within.
