David P. Goldman
Tablet, Oct. 20, 2022
“China is utterly unlike the United States, and it is difficult to make sense of the difference without knowing the country and its history.”
An Empire of Emperors: What Is China, and Why You Should Worry About It
Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a larger population at higher living standards than any other part of the pre-modern world. But China’s riparian civilization was also fragile, subject to periodic drought, famine, and flood, leading to civil unrest, barbarian invasion, and prolonged periods of chaos.
All this compelled China to turn inward. Its forays into the broader world were brief and abortive. No more; China can feed itself and control natural disasters. It has turned outward to the world and is seeking its place in the sun. This is a grand turning point in world history. For most of the past five thousand years, China has been the world’s most populous and wealthiest civilization in the world, but largely indifferent to events outside its borders. Now its ambitions are turned outward. Its 2,500-year-old system of elite formation now embraces the ten million students who take the annual college entrance exam. It has absorbed tens of thousands of the best Western scientists and engineers into its project for technological dominance, above all through Huawei, its bridgehead in the world market. And it proposes to extend its imperial principle of assimilation through infrastructure to the whole of the Eurasian continent, through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people. Sadly, the distinction between “good people” and “bad state” is a misjudgment on which America’s China hawks and China doves agree. Since the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in 1979, the liberal foreign policy establishment has argued that economic liberalization inevitably would lead to political liberalization. That didn’t happen. The China hawks argue that the Chinese people will rise up and overthrow their Communist overlords if the United States applies sufficient pressure, by placing tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. That won’t happen, either. … SOURCE