China Perspectives: Insights and Analysis

By Daryl Guppy

Just as in the 13th century, China remains poorly known and widely misunderstood. Most people, politicians included, cannot name any Chinese political leaders other than President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, but have no problems in reeling off the names of half a dozen US political figures.

If you want books that are critical of Chi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guppytraders
• Release date: Dec 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922553089

Book preview

Part I

TRADE AND PREJUDICE

From the 7th to the 10th centuries, China was the most advanced global trading agent in the world, navigating multi-jurisdictional borders, facilitating cross-border currency exchanges, exporting new technology to the West and in turn importing the best of new ideas. The pottery kilns at Jingdezhen used mass production lines long before Henry Ford stumbled across the idea. They churned out products for the Middle East, Europe and Asia with market-specific designs. Unlike the West, China’s trade did not rest on conquest and subjugation of trading partners, and it’s this difference that makes China’s ambitions so difficult for the West to understand today. China relies on a stable, global rules-based order as a foundation of international trade. Like all members, it games the World Trade Organization system to its own advantage, but this is different to the strategy of open sabotage pursued by the United States. This section examines the way these competing ideas of trade underpin today’s trade wars, how China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative fits into this context, and the way we can continue to do business in this environment.

Chapter 1

A TRIBUTE TO TRADE

Many in the West embrace the idea that, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ The Taoist sage Laozi puts the alternative: ‘If there is to be peace in the world … there must be peace between neighbours.’

President Xi sees trade as a defensive tool, and this understanding runs as a common thread through Chinese history. President Trump sees trade as a weapon to be wielded to force others into submission. This cultural heritage means the West most often sees trade through this historical lens, believing countries have an obligation to trade and that trade can be used as a weapon. Because they think this way, they also believe China thinks the same way.

President Xi fully understands the way the West uses trade as a weapon. China has a century of occupation by European powers as evidence of this thinking. However, China continues to use the ‘right’ to trade as a tool of diplomacy, not as a weapon of war, although Western leaders, bound by historical blinkers, often fail to see the difference.

These interpretations are broad brush strokes interrupted by specific short-lived counter examples and by expansion led by the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the late 13th century. However, this broad brush remains a useful analysis tool to examine essential philosophical differences and the way China uses trade to try to achieve peace between neighbours. It is the difference between the right to trade and the obligation to trade.

The Chinese trade system was a system of tribute built around mutual trade and the right, but not obligation, to trade. China exchanged goods with its neighbours in return for its neighbours not threatening China’s borders. China was interested first and foremost in using trade as a method of ensuring security against attack on China by the surrounding states.

Western thinking equates tribute with a tax paid by vassal states. In the Chinese system, tribute was part of a reciprocal gift giving – a process that even today defines even the smallest of Chinese business relationships. The return gift from China was the right to trade with China. The cost of the reciprocal gift giving to the Chinese treasury was economically ruinous. Some scholars argue that it is this ongoing trade deficit that effectively weakened the Ming dynasty to the extent that it was vulnerable to a successful attack from the less powerful Manchu.

The Chinese system of tribute involved giving the surrounding states the right to trade with China in exchange for a guarantee they would not attack China. The Great Wall, in all its iterations, was built to protect China from the western Eurasian Steppe Xiongnu nomads and their successors, who would not accept this bargain. The Great Wall in Western China largely defines the limits of Chinese expansion. The surrounding states were bought off with trade agreements and trade privileges to create a buffer against attack.

It was a worthwhile bargain because, without a doubt, the China culture and society was worthy of emulation. The Chinese influence across modern Asia is not a result of coercion or colonisation. Nor is it a result of the Chinese diaspora who, for the most part, remained on the lower rungs of their adopted societies. The influence at higher levels of society results from a historic desire to emulate the culture, the science and the civil society of China as the leading regional civilization over more than 4,000 years.

Contrast this understanding with the Western understanding of ‘tribute’ which comes from Medieval European politics. Here tribute is a polite name for tax, and is synonymous with vassal states. In return for protection, and a guarantee of non-aggression, the vassal state was required to pay tribute tax to the larger state.

Unfortunately, we have confused the Western Medieval relationship between tribute tax and vassal states with the Chinese practice of using the tribute mechanism to establish peaceful relations with surrounding states. This misunderstanding impacts on our understanding of the events in the South China Sea. It colors our response to China’s preference for bi-lateral agreements rather than multi-lateral agreements. This explains why China prefers to deal bi-laterally with the other claimants to parts of the South China Sea, rather than through a collective resolution to those disputes.

It helps explain why frustrated Western leaders get the impression that their trade proposals delivered to Chinese counterparts appear to be regarded as a ‘right’ rather than an obligation to do business.

The history of Chinese foreign relations can be interpreted as a persistent desire to protect the heartland by maintaining peaceful relations with its neighbours. That desire has not changed.

Broad as they are, these strokes are as useful for understanding the Chinese peace imperatives as the broad brush strokes of American exceptionalism are for understanding the evangelical imperatives of American trade and foreign policy. There is no rapid reconciling of these philosophical differences but while they remain unacknowledged there is even less chance of reconciliation.

History, and its lasting impact, also plays alongside these differences.

Chapter 2

HISTORY COUNTS

Ask any American what happened in 1861 and he will quickly tell you it was the start of the Civil War. He may well mention the battle of Bull Run. This is a core part of the American education curriculum.

Ask what happened two years earlier in 1859 and he would probably be unable to tell you.

Ask any Chinese about 1859 and they will rapidly tell you this was towards the end of the second Opium War. They will mention the surrender of Hong Kong to the British and the sacking of Yuanming Yuan, the old Summer Palace, in 1860.

Ask what happened two years later in 1861 and she would also probably be unable to tell you.

For both groups these 160-year-old historical incidents provide important touch points to today’s events. Their influence on today’s politics cannot be discounted because the influence runs deep in the cultural fabric of each nation. For the United States this is seen most recently in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that seek a resolution to issues that have remained unresolved since the 1861 American Civil War. The toppling of statues of pro-slavery Confederate generals, and the proposal to cut the confederate flag from the Mississippi state flag, underlines the power of this historical narrative.

Agree or disagree, the impact of this American historical legacy is not disputed nor disparaged. Foreign observers may shake their head in bewilderment, but they do not seek to intervene in this domestic fracas with its large-scale demonstrations, the over-the-top police responses and the incitement to violence coming from some US leaders.

For China the influence of events from the same 1860 historical period is seen in the determination to avoid a repeat of the One Hundred Years of Humiliation. This determination manifests itself in politics and in a new-found confidence about China’s place in the global order.

Just as stone statues are a physical reminder of the Civil War, two tangible examples provide Chinese with similar reminders every day. The first is Hong Kong, which was taken by the British as booty for the second Opium War in 1860. The second is Taiwan, which was snatched in the last rush of the imperial carve up of China by the Japanese in 1895.

The legacy of Western imperial interference in the domestic policies of China means that foreign observers feel they have the right to intervene in the handling of these issues. While Western countries are content to observe the chaotic legacy of the 1861 Civil War in the United States, they do not protest when the United States and the United Kingdom want to interfere with the domestic politics of China that has its roots in the same historical period.

These historical forces flow equally strongly in both societies but receive the global tick of legitimacy in only one. Any mention of the Opium Wars or of the Century of Humiliation is greeted with rolling eyes in the Western media. The subtext is clear – that’s in the past, so get over it. This failure to understand how history impacts on the present distorts Western understanding of China.

For decades Western societies have been inundated with a flood of American drama that glorifies the Western cowboy with his rough gun-driven justice. The successors to the cowboys are the heavily armed ex-policemen who mete out personal justice when the legal system lets them down.

This historically-based US narrative of cowboy justice is widely accepted as an integral part of popular culture, spread particularly through its films and television products.

China is now producing its cinematic equivalents of the American Western or police drama with films distributed in the West including Operation Mekong and the Wolf Warriors series. However, these are held up in the West as an unacceptable promotion of force that does not serve the cause of justice.

‘Wolf’ diplomacy

The protection of borders and the application of ‘rough’ justice is legitimate if the action is American, but somehow not legitimate if the action is Chinese. This classification extends beyond the cinema screen.

The heroes of these stories call themselves wolf warriors and are the progenitors of the so-called ‘wolf’ diplomacy – a pejorative term now used to describe any Chinese diplomatic action which is disagreeable to the West.

It is alleged that Chinese ‘wolf’ diplomacy is used to coerce the West, but President Trump’s threat to withdraw from NATO, US Secretary of State Pompeo’s threat to ‘disconnect’ from the state of Victoria in Australia because of its involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative, and his media blitz to defend the drone-strike killing of Iranian major general Soleimani are accepted as simply part of the normal Western diplomatic discourse.

China’s ‘wolf’ diplomacy is in many ways a departure from the long historical tradition of Chinese diplomacy. This rested in part on the strategy of Watching the Fires Burning Across the River, where entering the field of battle is delayed until all the other players became exhausted fighting amongst themselves.

Global relationships are changing, but they cannot be easily disentangled from the strictures of the past. One historical event in the United States caused deep and ongoing divisions. The other historical event in China became a cause of enduring unity. The impact of both events should not be underestimated nor ridiculed when assessing current policy stances.

The Belt and Road

Reviews for China Perspectives

[frances · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Much needed voice of reason amid the anti-China hysteria. Well-substantiated and relevant to the post COVID era.