|
WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Chip on China’s Shoulder China’s leaders wield historical maps like a bludgeon, and their spurious claims now constitute what many Chinese believe is a “natural order” that must be restored. Stephen R. Platt reviews “Everything Under the Heavens” by Howard W. French.
By Stephen R. Platt
‘History,’ writes Howard French in his accessible and stimulating book on China’s global ambitions, “bequeathed China the most complicated geopolitical situation of any major country, bar none.” He does not exaggerate. With its 14,000 miles of land borders and 20 immediate neighbors, it is clear why China would desire a regional order that could guarantee its own security and centrality. Mr. French explores that desire through the Chinese phrase “tian xia,” (thiên hạ) which he translates in his title as “Everything Under the Heavens.” It encapsulates the old imperial worldview in which China was the central civilization of Asia while its neighbors, who lived in its cultural and military shadow, paid tribute and acknowledged its superiority in exchange for trade. It was a position China held in the past through a mixture of bullying and benevolence, and Mr. French suggests that it once again underlies China’s ambitions for the future. Floating city-states; the most secretive man in Washington; titans in tin cans; Camille Paglia is back; when Marilyn Monroe took Manhattan; the chip on China’s shoulder; Mussolini’s most notorious lover; and much more. This is not to say that China is defined entirely by its past. The author makes clear that he doesn’t believe in some kind of “cultural DNA” that determines China’s behavior, but nevertheless it is evident that certain patterns from the imperial period provide a tempting model for the country’s current leaders—a nostalgic “half-idealized, half-mythologized past,” as Mr. French puts it, when China was accepted as paramount in Asia. That confident worldview of tian xia is, however, balanced by a separate and far more resentful theme from China’s recent history, namely “humiliation”: specifically, the desire to recover territory lost in the country’s era of weakness during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is from this latter impulse that we get the famous “nine-dash line” that delineates China’s maritime claims, which first appeared in 1947 and can now be found on all maps made in China. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was so obsessed with this territorial issue that he wrote “avenge humiliation” on the top of every page of his diary for 20 years. A “Map of National Shame” created during his rule in 1938 outlined the territory China must recover to regain its past greatness—territory that included, alarmingly enough, not just the more familiar island claims of today but also Mongolia, Korea, Indochina, Singapore, and even parts of India and Pakistan. Both of those themes—restoration and resentment—come together in this account. Mr. French writes of how China’s current leaders wield historical maps “like a bludgeon” in demanding the return of allegedly timeless and inalienable Chinese territory, especially in the South China Sea. As he points out, no other countries in the world support those claims, which exist in a historical echo chamber of sorts, meaningful only to China’s domestic audience. But that audience contains nearly one-fifth of the people in the world, and as spurious as the claims might seem to outsiders, they constitute what many Chinese now firmly believe is a “natural order” that must be restored. As for the benevolent side of China’s imperial past, anyone who has lived in the country in recent decades is familiar with the often-repeated claim that China never invaded neighboring countries or sought “hegemony,” as if the current regime were somehow constrained by the mores of the past—and if, furthermore, those mores can even be said to exist. But as Mr. French argues, the ways in which China presents its history and the reality of that history can be two very different things. For example, he gives us the voyages of Zheng He, the 15th-century admiral of the Ming Dynasty who led a mammoth fleet of ships down through Southeast Asia and to the east coast of Africa. Chinese scholars like to note that, unlike the British or Portuguese, Zheng He did not seek conquest but only mutually beneficial trade—implying by extension that trade is all China has ever wanted in its foreign relations. Zheng He was a “peace ambassador,” says one Chinese scholar Mr. French quotes, who, according to another, proved that China “does not seek hegemony over others.” Yet the reality was that Zheng He carried a large army with him and did not hesitate to make war when he deemed it appropriate. That rosy vision of Zheng He and the model it allegedly sets for China’s peaceful exertion of power are, in Mr. French’s words, “Chinese idealization, not history.” A veteran journalist, Mr. French takes a broad approach to his research in this book, interweaving on-the-ground reporting with panoramas of history, looking at China largely through the eyes of its neighbors both in the past and today. The responses he finds differ greatly. Whereas in Japan he sees military preparations to defend the Senkaku Islands, for example, in the Philippines he interviews a scholar who wonders whether it might be best for his country simply to accept a new tributary relationship with China—that is, to give the country the place and status it wants. This book is a reminder that China’s international relations take place in a historical context going back centuries if not millennia, and Mr. French is an engaging guide through that deeper history. With regard to today’s tensions, however, it is the more recent history of the 20th century that matters above all—especially the lingering wounds of the Pacific War. In the current Chinese political climate, Mr. French writes, Japan is the only country that artists can attack with complete freedom, and attack they do. Fully 70% of Chinese television dramas have plots related to war with Japan, he tells us, and in 2012 alone 700 million imaginary Japanese were killed in Chinese movies. Mr. French’s findings on this count are ominous: “Up until the present day,” he writes, “East Asia has never proven large enough for two great powers to coexist peacefully.” Unlike some other works on this subject, however, Mr. French takes a measured tone overall, doing much to temper the alarm that readers might feel about China’s rising power. The country’s advantage in coming from behind militarily will soon fade, he writes, leaving the country with insupportable costs if it wishes to keep advancing its naval capabilities at the same rate as in recent years. Even more important, he points to the enormous demographic shift under way in China as the population ages and birthrates fall far short of replacement. China is on course to have more than 329 million people over the age of 65 by 2050, while the younger, working-age population is set to plummet. The inexorable aging of the population will, Mr. French predicts, restrain the country’s ability to project power in the future. It will halve the size of the military-age population while saddling workers and the government with enormous expenses to care for the elderly. He suggests that the incredible pace with which China is currently trying to assert control over the South China Sea is driven by President Xi Jinping’s awareness that the country has a window of at most 20 or 30 years before demographics catch up to it and such an expansion becomes impossible. This is a very timely book, which the author brings up as close as possible to the present day. Since it was clearly completed before last fall’s presidential election, however, much of what he describes as the essential, continuing role of the United States in maintaining East Asian stability has now been thrown into uncertainty. The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been repudiated. The new administration’s plans for American involvement in the region are unclear. As it stands, Mr. French sees the active hand of the U.S. Navy as having been the primary if not sole check on China’s ambitions in the South China Sea. While his analysis assumes a continuance of that role, he does, significantly, give a glimpse of a potential future with limited U.S. involvement, pointing to the possibility of a stronger coalition emerging among the countries on China’s periphery. Regardless of China’s size and strength, Mr. French notes, its neighbors easily outweigh it both in population and military power; the armies of just six of those neighboring countries combined would be more than twice the size of China’s. So there are many possibilities ahead, not all of them dark, not all of them involving Chinese domination. “An old era is passing,” Mr. French writes, “even if the contours of what is yet to come have not truly announced themselves.” Those words resonate even more strongly now than they did when the author wrote them
|