Tracing China's Long Game Plan

Tracing China's Long Game Plan

Mini Teaser: Many Western observers think China is due to liberalize as it rises. Yet Chinese reformers have long favored Western ideas merely as a means to a different end: wealth and power.

by Author(s): Jacqueline Newmyer Deal

At the end of the nineteenth century, China suffered its most devastating defeat up to that time when it lost to Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War. On the heels of this trauma, the reformist scholar Liang Qichao, an intellectual heir of Wei Yuan and Feng Guifen, penned a preface to a new edition of Wei’s work on Legalism and statecraft. He wrote: “Those who open themselves to the new will prosper and grow strong. But those who confine themselves to the old will diminish and become weak.” Liang Qichao’s mentor, Kang Youwei, an adviser to Cixi’s nephew when he reigned as emperor for 102 days in 1898, published in that same year a book called Datong Shu (Book of Grand Harmony).Even as Kang was engaged in the practical task of advising a weak Qing emperor on how to reform and shore up his regime, he was conjuring a harmonious utopia. Kang had studied in the same scholarly circle as Wei Yuan and was in agreement on the linearity of history, the ultimate goal of datong and the usefulness of realpolitikin the intervening period. Mao later told the sympathetic Western reporter Edgar Snow that he was a big fan of Liang and Kang and as a young man would “read and reread those books until [he] knew them by heart.” As the Chinese-educated, Kentucky-based political scientist Shiping Hua has pointed out, subsequent CCP leaders have not hesitated to hold out datong as the ideal while endorsing alternative near-term goals that seem more attainable for the present. He argues that “the persistence of Grand Harmony as an ideal also suggests that China’s evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely.” The recurrence of datong across successive generations of CCP elites, including the virulently anti-Confucian Mao, reflects an entrenched Chinese tradition that puts the collective ahead of the individual and endorses realpolitik at home and abroad pending the arrival of the ever-elusive Grand Harmony.

Despite the focus of China’s late nineteenth-century reformers on modernization and their generally heterodox stance toward Confucianism, datong was not the only classical Confucian principle that they revived. Scholar-activists such as Wei and Feng also emphasized the traditional Confucian virtue of humiliation and packaged it into a force for modernization. Wei recalled the Confucian aphorism, “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.” And Feng wrote, “Once one feels a sense of shame, nothing is better than self-strengthening.” Like datong, the motif of chi (“shame” or “humiliation”) endures to this day in China. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen’s successor as head of China’s Nationalist movement, established National Humiliation Day, and the holiday continues to be observed. As Schell and Delury point out, many of the most popular tourist destinations for Chinese domestic travelers commemorate moments of Chinese defeat and devastation at the hands of Western or Japanese forces. These sites often take liberties with history; the state-run Opium War Museum, for example, erroneously includes the United States in the ranks of China’s opponents. A regime that persistently highlights national humiliation and manipulates history to galvanize the population for struggle is not a regime on the verge of recognizing the individual rights of its citizens or embracing the current international order.

Although many of the figures covered by Schell and Delury considered democracy a source of the West’s strength and therefore mustered at least an instrumental interest in it, none ended up a democrat—again, with the exception of Liu Xiaobo, currently imprisoned and not likely to gain much of an audience in China. Although Feng Guifen admired Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, he was, in Schell and Delury’s words, more of a “participatory authoritarian” than a democrat. Liang Qichao started out in favor of democracy before deciding that China wasn’t ready for it. As noted, despite Sun Yat-sen’s endorsement of republicanism, he never fully embraced the premises of the liberal social contract and eventually came to admire Leninist party organization. Chiang Kai-shek was out of the same mold: “While Chiang splattered his speeches and writings with references to ‘constitutional democracy,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘freedom,’” write Schell and Delury, “he did so in much the same way as had Sun. . . . For him, these were vague, long-term aspirations, nowhere near as important in China’s immediate struggle for survival and national rejuvenation.” The pattern is of flirtation with, but never true conversion to, liberal-democratic principles. Accordingly, Wealth and Power’s query as to whether China’s leaders’ quest for international prestige might lead them to democratize seems to represent a wisp of optimism rather than a realistic projection for China’s future.

AN ALTERNATIVE vision of China’s future comes from a rare source that Schell and Delury mention but neglect to mine fully. Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on Sea Powers was published in 1843, four months after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, which removed British warships from the Yangtze. This is the treatise in which Wei remarked on the mutual dependence of British military and commercial power. But as the scholar Jane Kate Leonard has observed, Wei goes well beyond this diagnosis of British success and presents a blueprint for Chinese naval modernization and geopolitical strategy. Elements of it could have come from an official planning document from the 1980s, so closely does Chinese behavior over the past several decades track with Wei’s recommendations.

Wei begins from the idea that Western states derive their power from a network of bases that facilitate domination of maritime communications and trade. He cites not only the British ports in Africa, India, Ceylon and Singapore, which conferred influence over the Strait of Malacca, but also the Dutch facility at Batavia, which afforded access to the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. He further concluded that China was not in imminent danger of invasion, so long as the Western powers had not penetrated mainland Southeast Asia, Nepal or Japan. (Had he lived long enough, Wei might have seen Japan’s assault on Southeast Asia at the outset of World War II as a prelude to Japan’s further incursions into China and thus judged his assessment to have been validated.) That said, Wei believed that the Western powers’ network of bases in the region clearly destabilized the old tributary order—at China’s expense—and positioned the West to threaten the Chinese coast. Against the backdrop of this analysis, Wei’s Treatise proceeds to prescribe a course of diplomatic and military actions through which China might fortify itself.

The Treatise recommends that China focus its diplomatic efforts on mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, along with Japan, which later demonstrated its ability to rebuff the West in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and Nepal. Following the logic of yiyi zhiyi, Wei argued that Beijing should play external powers off against each other and use diplomacy with tributary states to weaken them. For instance, he suggested trying to balance the British presence at Hong Kong by giving France and the United States access to Guangzhou (then called Canton). He further recommended seeking support against the other Western powers from Russia—going so far as to advocate encouragement of Russian action against the British in Afghanistan and northwestern India, which would allow the Nepalese to destroy the British at Bengal. Such a chain of events would leave the British position in Singapore exposed, so that Thailand, in conjunction with Vietnam, could attack.

The world and the map have clearly changed in the 170 years since Wei penned this plan. Japan has been locked in an alliance with the United States since 1945, and the British no longer govern Hong Kong or India, are no longer on the ground in force in Afghanistan and are not the Western country that China most fears. But the essence of Wei’s recommendations still resonates and even seems to explain China’s recent diplomatic choices. Consider China’s charm offensive vis-à-vis Southeast Asia over the past few decades and the more recent inroads that China has made in India’s traditional sphere of influence, including Nepal. Consider, too, Beijing’s apparently tightening relations with Moscow, which deny other potential rivals the opportunity to form an anti-Chinese coalition with Russia. Finally, there also seems to be a modern-day analogue to Wei’s argument that pressure on British positions in other parts of Asia would yield dividends for the Chinese in their near abroad. In the context of Beijing’s efforts to cultivate a range of partners in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including America’s enemies, it would seem possible to substitute the United States for Britain and the Middle East for India and perceive the same indirect logic in operation—the need to divert and weaken the great power most threatening to China’s East Asian ambitions.

Complementing this diplomatic strategy, Wei offered a set of naval-modernization recommendations that track even more closely with China’s military modernization over the past few decades. The blueprint begins with measures to shore up China’s coastal defenses in the short term. Next is the development of long-term defenses, along with a reorganization of the military and the promotion of innovation within it. Finally, the country would be prepared to emerge as a serious naval power—defending its key ports, possessing a network of strengthened bases, acquiring and developing advanced military technologies, and fielding a naval force that is smaller but qualitatively better than its predecessor. Since the early 1980s, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has pursued a strategy that exactly mirrors the Wei concept. Successive PLAN leaders have progressed from boosting the defense of China’s ports to increasing the distances from China’s coast over which Chinese forces can operate and interdict hostile forces. Today’s terminology for this effort refers to “island chains,” with the “first island chain,” bordered by Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines, a nearer-term goal than the “second island chain,” bounded by the Ogasawara island chain, Guam and Indonesia. According to this vision, the PLAN’s final step would be to push out to the blue waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans under the protection of its new aircraft carriers.

Pullquote: If China continues on its present trajectory of economic and military expansion, it will become a bolder actor in the world, not a more democratic or responsible one.Image: Essay Types: Book Review