As China struts the world stage in the lead-up to the Olympics, its behaviour
has been more revealing about future relations than anyone could have imagined.
ERIC ELLIS examines its track record.
SOME time about 2025 but possibly as soon as
2015, China will take over from the United States as the world’s largest
economy.
Money is power, and from then Beijing will make the rules for the world, much as Washington has done since it became number one early last century, its pre-eminence cemented by its absolute victory in World War II and confirmed when the Soviet empire collapsed.
China will be everywhere, in business, politics and international fora, anywhere it wants to play. It will be the elliptical riddles of the People’s Bank of China chairman speaking for $US1 trillion-plus in foreign reserves that money market screen jockeys will hang on, no longer Ben Bernanke’s at the US Federal Reserve.
China’s imminent supremacy disquiets those it will displace, the West and allies, but, historically, it’s simply a restoration of the established order. China boasted the world’s biggest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries, the missing two being the past 200 years, when the world has been at its most interconnected and entwined. It is the US and the European powers before it that are the historical anomaly.
It will have taken barely 30 years since The Great Designer Deng Xiaoping swung open China’s doors for Beijing to reclaim its global pre-eminence. No nation in history has advanced its economy so far and so quickly as China has since 1978.
But what will it be like to live in a China-dominant world? What sort of world will it be when Beijing, this current undemocratic autocratic incarnation of it, runs it?
The Pilgerists among us may disagree, but Pax Americana has been good to Australia. It’s almost like our proxies – our cousins! – have been in charge. For the most part, Australians and Americans share a common language, culture, recent heritage and societal values – a regard for democracy and the rights of the individual being just two of them. Life under this American yoke has anchored Australian security, guaranteeing our economy and prosperity. We even live like Americans; lavish lifestyles of extravagant consumerism practised in large single-family dwellings in identical sprawling conurbations. Australia became a nation while America has been boss.
But what of a Pax Sinica? Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, got a glimpse of it in 2003 when President George W. Bush of the US and President Hu Jintao of China addressed the Australian parliament within a day of each other. Brown and fellow Senator Kerry Nettle jeered Bush’s speech, highlighting the plight of Australian prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba. Where Bush accepted their outburst with good grace and later shook hands with Brown, China’s protocol officials were going ballistic. Their man was up the next day, and the Green duo were planning to raise Tibetan rights as Hu spoke, something the Chinese could not possibly countenance; his address was, after all, to be broadcast on Chinese state television. The Chinese demanded– by its foreign minister no less – that Australia silence protesters in its own parliament, threatening the Speaker if anyone dared interrupt Hu. Brown and Nettle were suspended from parliament for 24 hours, entrenching China’s role as Australia’s new “sheep’s back” guaranteeing our prosperity is safe, that is until the next time Beijing sees a problem.
That came when China’s Olympic officials were fashioning the route of Olympia’s first global relay for its supposedly sacred flame. Dangling an Olympian sword of Damocles, Beijing warned prospective countries on the itinerary, mostly unreliable – as Beijing sees democracies – Western nations such as Australia, that if there were problems with the torch progress “China would conclude it was not a friendly country”. In today’s China, the term friend, or pengyou, is a loaded and sometimes scary one, applied and withdrawn to suit. Beijing’s implication is clear: embarrass us in the year we parade our triumphant global accession and you will be penalised, excluded from our favours, from getting rich as we do.
For all those who fashionably rail at Pax
Americana and its excesses, a Pax Sinica would not be nearly as benevolent or
benign. As Brown knows after Bush shook his hand, it’s possible to fundamentally
disagree with the US but be able to engage it, debate and even persuade it to a
middle ground and still be friends. Freedom of speech and information help. The
US has been guilty of many bad things – for example, Guantanamo and the Abu
Ghraib outrages – but the reason we know such abuses have taken place is because
it’s the nature of its democracy that it renews. The US, common to most
democracies, healthily outs wrongs and the people who perpetrate them.
That doesn’t happen in China. It’s ruled by a rhetorically sclerotic, xenophobic
party dictatorship that won’t debate, much less be accountable. On many
contentious issues, China simply demands its interlocutors accept its position –
such as insisting that Taiwan is part of China, albeit a renegade part – before
contact is even made, let alone advanced. China begins a discussion by first
stating its indisputable correctness, dictating the terms of discussion and
shouting, spurning and demonising those who would seek to negotiate or amend
China’s absolute truths. As Rupert Murdoch discovered while wasting billions
trying to do business there, only those who do not challenge the regime are
permitted intimacy and advancement with it.
Suspicion is the starting point and it’s from
there that meaningful engagement is attempted. It’s almost impossible to
disagree with Beijing without it resorting to name calling, as London’s last
governor in colonial Hong Kong, Chris Patten, discovered when he proposed a
semi-democracy for the then British colony in the mid-1990s. Beijing simply
pretended he didn’t exist, but only after describing him as a “whore of the
East”, a “serpent”, a “criminal condemned for a thousand generations” and, my
personal favourite, a “tango dancer”. That Hong Kong should lack suffrage was
“an historical fact which brooks no disagreement”.
That’s an oft-used rhetorical favourite in Beijing, an unarguable declaration
applied to anything it chooses. “How can someone not love their motherland?” is
another, usually applied to the utter rejection that Tibet or Taiwan (insert
Beijing’s land claim of choice and China’s manifest destiny can extend to
anywhere Chinese junks have sailed) is anything other than “an inalienable part
of China.”
Australian academic Geoff Wade says that in judging a Pax Sinica, it’s important
to separate the Chinese as a people from the regime of the day. Chinese people,
he says, do not recognise much of the violence and inhumanity which has been
waged through history by the Chinese state precisely because of the way it was
recorded in Chinese historiography and has been represented to the people,
either through official histories or in today’s (party-controlled) media.
But one deals with the China that is, not the one that the rest of the world might want. And as today’s China abandoned communism for capitalism, so the party replaced dated and embarrassing ideology with contrived rampant and raucous nationalism to maintain power and relevance. This regime fetes people and companies and nations that agree with “the Chinese people”, while claiming, undemocratically, to speak for them. Disagreement means “not showing sincerity to China” and insincerity inevitably risks exclusion. A “friend of China” is someone who rolls over, as Yahoo did in offering up the names of its Chinese dissident subscribers in return for continuing to do business there. It explains the Sinophilic Kevin Rudd’s recent emphasis on the Mandarin term zhengyou, or true friend, seeking a nuanced glimmer of linguistic daylight to suggest an intimate so close to be permitted criticism, for one’s own good. In the post-1949 communist China, as Rudd would know, a “great China expert” is the highest compliment Beijing can pay. It tends to mean someone who agrees with it, the more craven the better.
Those that don’t agree are demonised and humiliated. When the foreign press in Beijing did its job to report that China is beset by turmoil in its Tibetan south-west and Islamic west, it was accused in a state-orchestrated campaign of lying. The Chinese took matters personally and weren’t discouraged from doing so as Beijing uncorked the spigot. The contact details of individual correspondents made their way to combative Chinese websites, and targeted reporters were besieged by death threats and personal abuse. When the torch relay descended into chaos in Paris, rather than report the event, the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language organ China Daily saw fit to abuse France. “Pride and prejudice cast a shadow on this ancient civilisation,” the paper huffed. A Chinese blogger on one of those state-sanctioned sites captioned a photograph of a French pro-Tibet protester “remember him … he’ll die a terrible death”. When the torch swung through Canberra in April, a Chinese embassy-organised mob abused anyone who dared suggest China was anything other than something to be loved. Dissenters claimed they were roughed up. The Dalai Lama, a man Beijing should have realised by now is hardly about to march triumphantly into Lhasa and reclaim Potala Palace and an independence Tibet never had, is described as a “wolf wrapped in a habit, a monster with a human face and animal’s heart”. It’s all revealingly unhinged, and speaks to a catastrophic misreading in Beijing of how the world sees China.
And it opens a portal through which we can view our imminent Sinocentric future.
Olympic guardians justified their awarding of the Games to Beijing with heroic assurances it would herald a liberalisation of rights and freedoms in China. But that hasn’t happened, and it was never likely to. Beijing’s neanderthal response to the episodes of recent months underline that for all its impressive economic advances since Mao’s dark era, China has actually evolved a very small distance. In parading a shiny new China in a $54 billion sportsfest it has designed to win itself, Beijing’s autocrats have resorted to snarling the default rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution at its naysayers, demonising them out of all proportion to their real or imagined crime.
China will exact retribution for the torch farce, and anything else that doesn’t follow its Olympian script, blaming everyone but itself. Beijing’s number two in Tibet vows that those who disrupt the torch relay “will be dealt with severely”. That reckoning won’t happen this Olympic year but communist memories are long and bitter and reprisals are inevitable as China fashions an emerging Sinosphere commonwealth of tributary states, flattered when they flatter, abused and excluded when they don’t.
If the Olympics have been transformed into less a celebration of sport than an eloquent projection of the host country’s national identity, Beijing’s Games have so far been more revealing than we could’ve imagined.
Eric Ellis, a former China correspondent for
The Australian Financial Review, writes for Fortune Magazine from South-East
Asia.