There are no “declinists” in China. There may be many Chinese who see in the country’s course over the last ten years much to lament. There may be those who treasure the older Maoist views and who condemn the “consumerism” and “materialism” which are replacing collectivism—and which threaten their privileges. Certainly the octogenarians who run the country worry a good deal about developments which threaten their privileges—and their control. And there are many others who cannot wait for the same octogenarians to pass so that China can proceed to its next modernization—democracy. But in the things that have mattered most for the past century and a half—the survival of the country, its wealth, its power, its standing, its face—China’s fundamental relationship to the rest of the world may finally be turning, re-turning, as it were, to a condition more in keeping with the traditional Chinese view of the appropriate international pecking order.

Much of this has to do with the collapse of the Soviet empire. For all its unsettling implications, not least its discrediting of Communism as an intellectual and political doctrine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union resolved the Sino-Soviet rivalry in China’s favor. Where reports from Russia and the other successor republics of the old Soviet Union describe uncertainty, civic crisis, and economic near-chaos, China is into the post-Communist era with a vengeance, striking all who pay attention to it as busy and energetic and purposeful.

Furthermore, for all the unpredictability introduced into political affairs by the post-Communist scrambling of world power relations, there is something in this new situation which resonates with traditional Chinese statecraft. In the end, as the Chinese have always seen it, one prevails because of superior stratagem, not because of superior power. In the great triangular contest involving China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, China was to “sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight.” Now, with one of these barbarian superpowers in a state of collapse, and the other in an apparent state of depression, have not Chinese patience and foresight been vindicated?

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While Westerners should never forget that the Chinese are seriously given to such musings, the main element in China’s new security and prominence is the remarkable performance of its economy. In a world worried by slow economic growth, and on a continent now famous for rapid economic expansion, China’s policies of the last ten years are starting to tell. In 1991, the country’s gross national product grew by 7 percent, industrial production by 14; the comparable figures for the first half of 1992 are 11 and 18. The CIA tells us that the Chinese are also building their bank balances, holding now some $40 billion in foreign hard currency, about equal to our own holdings. And China now runs a trade surplus of about $13 billion with the United States, second only to that of Japan.

These figures can be misleading and sobering at the same time. They are misleading in that China’s total output is still but a tenth of ours, even though its population is almost five times as large. The Achilles heel of the Chinese economy is what economists call per-capita production, woefully low in China, in the neighborhood of $500 (as compared with about $20,000 in the U.S., $9,000 in Singapore, $6,000 in Taiwan, and $5,000 in South Korea). Still, in a country with 1.2 billion capita, small individual advances, when multiplied, quickly boost the aggregate. Hence the sobering aspect. Even at something less than its current growth rate, China’s gross domestic product could readily quadruple in the next twenty years, with plenty of slack left over.

Naturally, one cannot say whether China will stick to its present course, but we do know that it can if it wants to, and that recent public political displays indicate it still does. It is not only that the regime now understands that capitalist policies work and Maoist ones do not; it also has the added capacity to build on the prior economic successes of peoples in the region with close kinship to China proper. Hong Kong investors, for example, are putting billions into projects throughout China.

Even its political rival Taiwan cannot resist the gravitational attraction of an ever more massive Chinese economy. Conservative estimates place Taiwan’s investments in China at some $4 billion, with the actual amount probably much higher. There may already be about $10-billion worth of trade each year between these supposed enemies. And the industrious Taiwanese now control the largest single hoard of hard currency in the world, more than $80 billion of it, with additional investment opportunities close at hand.

For good measure there is a growing appreciation of the economic influence of the 50 million or so overseas Chinese—ethnic Chinese living outside China—who are a powerful commercial and financial force, especially in Southeast Asia. “Worldwide,” the Economist reports, “the overseas Chinese probably hold liquid assets (not including securities) worth $1.5 trillion-$2 trillion. For a rough comparison, in Japan, with twice as many people, bank deposits in 1990 totalled $3 trillion.” Surely, China proper will provide opportunities for economic incentive and ethnic solidarity if, as they say, present trends continue.

Finally, there is the intriguing situation of the Chinese people’s own savings at home. This past summer, there were accounts of riots in the southeast China city of Shenzhen, where more than 500,000 people showed up to buy applications for purchasing shares in a dozen new offerings. Three hundred bank offices, where the warrants were up for sale, were besieged by the avid investors. This is a boisterous—and exaggerated—manifestation of the simple fact that demand for investment opportunities far exceeds the supply, but it also suggests that the general population has an intuitive grasp of the desirability of recycling the income gains of recent years back into further economic expansion. The regime is clearly interested in encouraging that impulse, even if more than a few instances of bubble and burst accompany the introduction of “people’s capitalism” into China.

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The rise of China as a commercial and trading power, a magnet for investment, a major purchaser of goods and services in world markets, certainly creates strains, but nothing that we are not accustomed to. We have been through it before in the case of Japan and the other Asian “dragons.” With the application of minimal good sense, everyone ends up richer than he was before. But there is also the relationship among economic power, political presence, and strategic influence, and here the consequences may not be so benign or so easily managed.

People do different things with their money. Thus, for some years now, we have awaited the emergence of Japan as a stronger political and strategic force in the world, reflecting its amazing economic rise. Indeed, not only were we unnerved by predictions that our own country would be gobbled up by Japanese financiers, we were also alerted to prepare ourselves for a kind of Pax Nipponica in Asia. That neither prediction has come true is a reminder that the Japanese, like other peoples, can remain self-absorbed, and that national aggrandizement can be as much a function of temperament as of capacity.

There are, however, many indications that China, still but an economic pygmy compared to Japan, is of a disposition to translate its limited gains into international influence. China, unlike Japan, is a major participant in the international arms trade. It exports nuclear technology to strategically sensitive third-world countries like Iran and Pakistan, and it has sold long-range missiles to Saudi Arabia. China is also an arms importer, especially of weapons which allow it to extend its military reach. The Chinese are reported to be negotiating for the purchase of an aircraft carrier from cash-hungry Ukraine, and have already taken delivery of high-performance fighter aircraft from Russia. Over the next several years, they will acquire the ability to refuel fighters in flight.

Along with all this, China has become increasingly assertive in territorial disputes in its adjacent waters, especially in consolidating its claims to islands hundreds of miles offshore in the South China Sea, reputed to sit atop substantial petroleum reserves.

Also within its own bailiwick, China has established diplomatic relations with South Korea, and in addition retains and exploits an important psychological advantage over Japan, which translates itself into an ability to draw on huge Japanese financial resources while continuing to cow and to render perpetually contrite the government in Tokyo. This is part and parcel of the “elder brother-younger brother” relationship of pre-modern times, an insurmountable barrier to any real Pax Nipponica in Asia—even aside from China’s nuclear forces.

Moreover, in the larger sense, China is neither uncomfortable nor unfamiliar with the standing of Great Power. It has long enjoyed the trappings in the United Nations, as one of five permanent members of the Security Council, and its aura in the world has, for the past generation, far exceeded its real economic and military weight.

Now, none of these things, nor even all of them together, necessarily bespeak a China wildly ambitious or dangerously bellicose. But they do suggest a China that is, at the least, of an imperial mind, prepared to reoccupy the space in Asia vacated by a defunct Soviet Union, a withdrawing United States, and a reticent Japan. And such a mind can only be strengthened by other intangibles, especially a rediscovery and redefinition of things “Chinese,” a new respect for them, congenial to both Chinese and Westerners.

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About 30 years ago, when the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties were stepping up their feud over the proper interpretations of Marxist and Leninist doctrine, the Chinese claimed the intellectual leadership of the revolutionary Left. The power of Chairman Mao’s ideas alone was to substitute for other, more traditional, reckonings of power. By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Chinese had managed to scare a goodly number of the world’s chanceries with their notions of “people’s war” and “national liberation”—strategies, in other words, for poor and backward countries to turn themselves into rich and powerful ones, thereby transforming the entire world order in the bargain. It is a mark of the upheavals of a generation, therefore, to note that the global ideological relevance of today’s China is as an exemplar of capitalism and, even more, of the power of venerable Chinese tradition.

To any student of China and of China’s view of itself in modern times, it is startling that the salvation of backward countries and peoples (and even some advanced ones, too) should now be so widely thought to lie in a rediscovery of the Confucian ethos—the very thing that was once seen as an obstacle to progress by all modern-minded Chinese, whether liberal reformers or thoroughgoing radicals. Lawrence Harrison, who has written on the relationship between cultural values and secular success, offers what are now quite typical opinions:

The economies that grew fastest between 1965 and 1990 were those of Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Though these countries differ significantly, all are strongly influenced by the Confucian ethos, which emphasizes precisely the values that have suffered erosion in America. It is an ethos strikingly similar to the Protestant ethic, the well-spring of our own value system.

The Confucian ethos looms now as a model not only for personal character but also for social organization. Again, Lawrence Harrison:

For many American conservatives, “bloated” government is the problem. For many liberals, “greedy” business is the problem. Yet there is no solution to the social and fiscal distress we face—in our homes, in our cities, in budgets at all levels of government, and in our universities—without a dynamic economy. As the Confucian societies remind us, that depends on a marriage of effective government with vigorous entrepreneurship and business excellence.

These are not the attributes one used to associate with China or with societies under its cultural sway. Yet we are suddenly confronted with the increasing appeal of a kind of Sinified authoritarianism—best exemplified for the moment by Singapore—which makes the trains run on time and the trade surpluses mount up. As Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times correspondent in Beijing, writes:

Singapore not only has very few street protests; it has a cleanliness and orderliness that critics find dreary and antiseptic. . . . There is no pornography, no extreme poverty, little corruption, and not much spitting or littering in public.

All this is a far cry from an earlier generation’s clichés. Then, Confucius was the butt of “he-say” jokes, the typical Chinese business was a laundry or a restaurant, and China itself was either a utopian fantasyland for alienated radicals or the home of exotic religious creeds and offbeat aesthetic experiences for the intellectually disoriented. In the more distant past, Westerners may have been fascinated by Chinese philosophy and Chinese governance, but ours seems to be the first time a Sinic way of doing things is widely heralded in the West as practically transferable.

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On the other hand, it remains a cliché that—as one American analyst writes—“the critical question determining the shape of the world as we head for a new century” is the relationship among America, Germany, and Japan. Yet in the great coming clash of capitalisms, is not China as well-positioned for the next twenty years as a Japan whose current economic stresses may signal the reaching of its natural limits, or as a Europe unable to resolve intracontinental ethnic, economic, political, and—most recently—monetary and financial stresses? What should China make of these developments? And what weight should Americans give to the potential of China proper, and of a more cohesive Sinic bloc, in our own speculations about the new century?

Curiously—and rather unimaginatively, in fact—the answer so far seems to be “not much.” Not only is there little apparent consideration of the strategic significance of China in the new world order, but the focus seems to be entirely on the fragilities of China’s arrangements. The leadership is seen as pressured on many fronts—the appearance of regional disparities in the economy; huge internal population movements as rural workers leave the countryside for booming urban centers; nepotism and peculation as the current leaders try to secure privileged circumstances for their children and grandchildren; the demonstrated incapacity of a repressive regime to balance economic advance with concomitant requirements for political liberalization. Beyond all that, the ruling Communist gerontocracy has more than the traditional succession problems of regimes of its type, for even its murderous methods have not weakened the rising generation’s interest in political democratization and in human rights.

From this perspective, things are likely to evolve in a way which will make China ever more prosperous, yet less consequential in political and strategic terms. China will become a gigantic Switzerland, earning lots of money but not disturbing the adjacent world as it goes about its business.

Certainly a plausible case can be made for this view. After all, when one looks at contemporary China, one finds the linguistic and institutional paraphernalia of Communism to be in a somewhat confused state. By most reckonings, over half the economy is in private hands, with more to follow. The regime’s ideological pretensions have also disappeared: it is no longer much given to grand pronouncements about world affairs, and is certainly no longer engaged in the business of building “people’s armies” in different countries designed to wage revolutionary warfare. (China’s man at the Security Council nowadays even wears an ordinary suit and tie instead of a Mao jacket, his sole sartorial concession to the old style being his eyeglass frames—dark above, clear plastic below, a là Mrs. Mao.) And brutal though they may be, the regime’s methods at home are as nothing compared to the mass slaughters of the high Maoist periods, especially those of the late 1950’s and the late 1960’s.

So perhaps Communism in China really is withering away, to be superseded by some softer, albeit authoritarian, regime—like that, precisely, of Singapore (about which Deng Xiaoping himself has reportedly said: “We should learn from this experience and we should do a better job than they do”).

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As benign as this trend has been and A may be, it is nonetheless already creating the basis for a new kind of antagonism between China and the world, and between the Chinese and ourselves especially. On the face of it, this is not what we would expect. Traditionally, we have thought of ourselves as friends of China, and it was only its capture by Communism, its alliance with the Soviets, and its support of world revolution which brought us into conflict.

There were, of course, bitter arguments about the true danger to us of any of these Chinese acts. Those who purported to know the most about the new China—professional Sinologists—were almost wholly of the view that the threat posed by a Communist China was woefully exaggerated and, in any case, should be coped with through greater contact and less direct criticism. Even many of those appalled by the Maoist experiment argued for better relations—for playing the China card.

But the Soviet Union, object of such strategic manipulations, is now gone, and the pragmatist’s justification for warmer relations is now gone along with it. The ideological justification for the muting of criticism is also gone—or at least going; for as China continues to move to the “Right,” its former apologists seem to have less use for it.

Indeed, it is interesting that though the worst excesses of the regime in the past could not quite provoke heartfelt outrage, there is from time to time a nostalgia for those old days, masked as criticism of today’s abuses. Take a recent page-one account in the New York Times. “With Focus on Profits, China Revives Bias Against Women,” reads the headline, and “As Communist Ethics Yield to Capitalism, Women Lose Out,” reads the bold-face synopsis. These things are happening, writes the correspondent, “as Chinese society focuses more on profit than on equality, and as Communist morality loses its influence.”

This is, perhaps, an unusually egregious example, but it says something about the nature of the growing criticism of China among the intelligentsia throughout the West. Such sentiments seem destined to insinuate themselves into the historiography of China’s past twenty years. Inevitably, the prior era of “higher purpose” will be contrasted to the rampant materialism that follows. In this, Deng Xiaoping is apt to become China’s Reagan, presiding officer over a decade of greed, of unbounded consumption, and certainly of greater air pollution. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” if it succeeds in catapulting China into the first rank of the world’s economic and political powers, will be no socialism at all.

Willy-nilly, then, we seem to have in the making a new basis for Sino-American antagonism, something different from the “yellow peril” which led us to enact the infamous Chinese exclusion acts, and different, yet again, from Maoist totalitarianism and its self-proclaimed international pretensions, which led us to make war in Korea and Indochina.

But whether grounded in political predilection or hard-headed analysis, our changing sense of China must now, for the first time in a century and a half, be made to fit with a China which actually is powerful and influential. In Maoist lingo, China is poised for its strategic counter-offensive in the world, having now recognized that the methods Mao himself used to begin it in 1950 were a false start. In the disputes that went on in China during these decades—between “radicals” and “pragmatists,” between “reds” and “experts”—we used to hope for the victory of the moderates, the less ideological, the more practical, those more aware of the transforming power of free-fire capitalism. We must now begin to think about the consequences of living with what we have wished for, the fulfillment of another of those proverbial Chinese curses.

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