Let us Understand the Chinese - II

[ricky_v]

i have a 2 parter on the thread topic
part 1: on the discussion of the china as the isolated civilisation

now, throughout all discourse, we arrive at the following relevant civilisations / world views:
1. the western european with its roots in philosophy of greece, political structure of rome and maritime power / trade legacy of carthage
2. orthodox + slavic
3. islamic areas: hardiness of arabs, political machinery of the persians, sword of the turks
4. indic subcontinent

these 4 have a common legacy in the sense that they have all competed in one way or another with each other, have been connected in a continuous land form, and in an intangible manner of speaking can be broadly classified as 1 complete civilisation because of the long history of mutual give-and-take

the 5th civilisation is the sinic one, and is differentiated from the others in the sense that they were physically cut off from this 1 civilisation; you have the silk route, and the usual tales of jade and porcelain and silk from far-away, rich lands, but that is through the relatively limited interaction of trade and not through the wholesale clash and competition of civilisations

the chinese civilisations in this regard, of the civilisations that still matter, must thus be considered unique, yes, they developed regional competitions from koreans, japanese, jurchen / manchu and most importantly through the mongols, but a competition on a civilisation level was not something that the chinese faced till relatively contemporary times

the vaguely defined han began as one of the many tribes inhabiting the areas that would later become the capital region of many chinese empires, but they subsumed tribes so that they to became han, an ideological marker more than a genealogical one, and as we all know from recent history, ideology breeds truer than any genealogy, and in this context, "han" must be considered to be refined / civilised, as opposed to the barbarian tribes, a sentiment than is still prevalent in modern-day chinese. This repeats across ages, where the tedium of chinese society always reverts to its median and wave after wave of barbarians become han, becoming civilised and endorsing ritual as those before them.

This lack of competition on a civilisational becomes a problem, the chinese discover gunpowder only to use them as fireworks, they have the finest navigational instruments, but only have 1 world tour with no permanent settlements, but when they come in contact with the wider world, they expand rapidly, only for the median rationalisation of societal structure to kick in forcing them back into the lulled strictures of rituals and peaceful cohabitation 

now, the question must be asked at this juncture, should not the many conquests by the mongols artificially link the chinese to the 1 civilisation, and this is where the matter becomes tricky

in a roundabout way, the question to the above question is what is the mean shift of the modern chinese (modern in this context denotes c. 1945, after ww2, human civilisation as a whole is a different beast altogether) from that of the ancient chinese? for the most important and stressed about point of the chinese culture is the focus on ritual, not tradition, which drifts, holding onto the blurry outline of the ideals, never religiosity, which is the biggest cause of human shift in thought before the advent of modern-day science and for many, is still, if only to give tongue to the nameless void, but ritual, and ritual must be the exact at every instance

the first real schism of this chinese journey can be though to occur during the time of the ming dynasty, the traditional northern monarchy is broken after many empires, and the mandate now has to take refuge in the trade-minded, quick-tongued south; this would be the first time than an ancient chinese from myth would be discomfited if brought to experience his environs, the society before that is in stasis, but people used to ritual, still confirm and the ancient chinaman will not be too discombobulated

the first time that the chinese society is actually and truly riven is during the qing, when the manchu / jurchen who have viewed with a bemused expression across the river, tribe after tribe becoming docile to the established rituals, clearly demarcate themselves from the more established, civilised han, but their experiment as an uncivilised ruling elite over the civilised citizenry is cut short when the 1 civilisation in its most competitve form reaches china

the point of the post was to see the drift from the median from myth till 1945: all civilisations have undergone such changes that each era is different, but for the chinese, who underwent this transformation very late, before, following the process of rapid acclimitisation when under duress from external enemies and then rapidly reverting to their ritualised societal carapace

[syam]

Chinese unveiled their F-35 copy just right before the election day.
Are they trying to give Trump that much needed last minute push? Or they just plain taunting?

Whatever it may be, we will be one step further in our understanding of Chinese.
Missing chola ji commentary on these developments.

[ricky_v]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/on ... ana-mitter

If you dropped in to China at any point in its modern history and tried to project 20 years into the future, you would almost certainly end up getting it wrong. In 1900, no one serving in the late Qing dynasty expected that in 20 years the country would be a republic feuded over by warlords. In 1940, as a fractious China staggered in the face of a massive Japanese invasion, few would have imagined that by 1960, it would be a giant communist state about to split with the Soviet Union. In 2000, the United States helped China over the finish line in joining the World Trade Organization, ushering the country into the liberal capitalist trading system with much fanfare. By 2020, China and the United States were at loggerheads and in the midst of a trade war.

That coexistence would not be especially warm, but it would have shed the kind of friction and animosity that loom over relations today. The generation of Chinese leaders after Xi, many of whom came of age during the modest openings of the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of this century, might well want to return the country to the promise of those periods. They may also realize that entanglement in any significant military or geoeconomic confrontation will prevent China from achieving its other aims, such as reviving the economy to achieve middle-class growth at home and spread the country’s influence abroad. Beijing cannot wage a big war and still attain economic security. Its aging society and the imperatives of greater regional economic integration to sustain its growth make it harder to endure the consequences of a major conflict—or even just a more confrontational regional and global posture.

To understand where China might be going, it’s worth examining a much older pattern that underpins Chinese foreign policy. When the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, had to grapple with European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, prominent officials crafted two slogans that defined how China should deal with the Western challenge: fuguo qiangbing, or “rich country and strong army,” and zhongti xiyong, or “Chinese for essence, Western for usage.” The ideas behind these phrases have remained constant across the century and a half since they first came to prominence during the late imperial decline of the Qing.


The first drew from famous rhetoric during China’s Warring States period over two thousand years ago. The slogan distilled the country’s abiding material ambitions, its need to attain power through militarized national security and prosperity. In the last century, other great powers have deprioritized the quest for military strength, whether because of defeat in war (as was the case with Germany and Japan) or imperial decline (as with the United Kingdom, which went from being a great power at the start of the twentieth century to a middle power by its end). China has not.

The second phrase denoted the idea that a non-Western country could adopt some of the frameworks of Western modernity—such as particular kinds of military technology or constitutional and legal reforms—without sacrificing its authentic cultural self. In 1865, Qing officials discussed the opening in Shanghai of the Jiangnan arsenal, China’s first modern weapons factory, in this language. Many non-Western societies embraced similar views, including Japan, a country that modernized rapidly in the twentieth century to compete with Western states while still retaining a distinct sense of its own identity. The challenge they set for themselves was to achieve material progress and improve state capacity without becoming “Western.”

The Qing dynasty ended, but the debate about how to achieve these two national goals did not. The Chinese Communist Party always believed that forging a militarily strong and economically secure China was one of its fundamental objectives. By the 1990s, the CCP wondered whether it should follow the model of Singapore: a country that won global admiration while producing stable governance, a balance between consensus and coercion, and the ostensible adherence to what its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew called the “Asian values” of deference to authority and communitarianism.

Precisely because China is not an old-style empire, its growth largely depends on its expansion of supply chains, its investments in other countries, and its unceasing quest to embed itself in new markets. That economic ambition can easily be undone if China engages in alarming military actions. Irredentist adventurism, notably in pursuit of territorial claims in Taiwan, the South China Sea, and along the disputed border with India, could make current and potential partners wonder whether they can truly rely on China.

China may well become more confrontational in its approach to the world. Appeals to economic rationality won’t convince nationalists in the party or on social media who want to see the country assert itself on the international stage. But if China uses force to transform its regional geography, it will change the way that others see it. China might argue that its ambitions are limited, that Taiwan or the South China Sea are exceptions to its general policy of nonconfrontation. But neighbors would find it harder to trust a China that chooses to define its own boundaries and fails to demonstrate any constraints on its own power. China would not be isolated, but it would struggle to build trust and encourage other governments to accept the norms it wants to define the world: untrammeled state power and the subordination of civil rights and freedoms to economic and development goals.

e transfer of power to this jiulinghou (post-1990s) generation could encourage decision-makers in China to recognize that less is more. The country need not change its goals in the coming decades: it will still want to be a global power with a strong army and to see the world in the communitarian, authoritarian terms that suit the CCP. But future leaders may see value in moderating China’s authoritarianism in ways that would make it more powerful. Beijing’s attempts to expand its influence have been damaged by its encroachment on others and its lack of transparency and prickliness in international diplomacy. In contrast, countries such as India, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have taken pains to project themselves as cooperative actors on the international stage even when their internal politics have moved in illiberal directions. These countries have frequently pursued goals not aligned with those of Western countries, such as India’s purchase of Russian oil and weapons, but the perception that they do not seek to reshape the world order to suit themselves has in fact magnified their influence.

Future Chinese leaders could well be nostalgic for the China of the late 1990s that was able to create a more favorable, global image for itself after the disaster of Tiananmen Square. This China would still strive for prosperity and strength, but it would assume that relative openness to the world is the best way to get to prosperity and strength. Even as it eschews any aspiration to be Western, it would be keen to acknowledge that Chinese identity has always been pluralistic and draws on many external influences. At home, it would recognize that would-be totalitarian surveillance states are never guaranteed survival—see, for instance, East Germany. It would relax the kinds of controls and systems of surveillance and censorship that it is now tightening, not just with the hope of producing greater social harmony and stability but also presenting a China that is more appealing to the world.

A more moderate but still authoritarian China will not be the pluralist democratic country once dreamed of by Western politicians, such as U.S. President Bill Clinton, and senior CCP figures from earlier eras, such as former Politburo members Li Rui and Zhao Ziyang. But it may be a realistic medium-term outcome. Such a China may also resemble much of the rest of the world, as the drift toward authoritarianism in global politics seems likely to continue into the 2030s and beyond. By that time, many countries in the West, never mind the rest of the world, may have adopted more illiberal policies at home, restricting personal freedoms and the movement of people. Few countries, not even the United States, will be in a rush to advance a global campaign for liberal democracy in the years to come. In that environment, a China under less sharp-edged leadership could very well seem more compatible with the future international system. A more illiberal global atmosphere, ironically, could allow China to loosen up in areas in which doing so might expand its global influence and in which it no longer feels vulnerable to liberal counterattacks.

It would not be necessary for all of China’s ideological messages to be comprehensible across different cultures and societies. After all, it’s often said that the United States has a story that can resonate far beyond its shores, and that story helps create the country’s soft power, but in reality, the United States sells a highly particular version of itself abroad. Many aspects of American life—for instance, the view held by many Americans that freedom and the right to bear firearms are inextricable—do not resonate outside the United States. China’s internal debates, such as arguments about whether Communists or Nationalists were more instrumental in the defeat of Japan in World War II or reformulations of Marxist-Leninist theory (Xi calls himself a “twenty-first-century Marxist”), are of little interest to those outside the country. But China can still offer a vision of itself that appeals to the outside world.

There is a precedent. Modern China has produced a global ideology in the recent past: Maoism. It’s often forgotten how influential this strand of thinking was just over half a century ago. In India, in Peru, and on the streets of Paris, different rebel groups found the package of convictions that went under Mao’s name to be a potent source of ideological power. Many of the specifics of Mao’s thought were geared toward China’s own realities of peasant revolution and the search for a post-Qing political settlement. But Maoism seemed to fit a 1960s moment, when wealthy and developing countries alike were exploding in revolution against their existing systems. The vision of youthful rebellion against a calcified, aging system and of a revolutionary future anchored in the countryside offered more than enough for people outside China to use for their own purposes.


As much as many Indians mistrust China’s intentions, for instance, many Indian political and business elites evince increasingly open admiration for the Chinese system and its undeniable material achievements. In selling its example and worldview, China could draw on Confucian ideas, including the notion that collective values are more meritorious than individualistic ones. China could champion “authoritarian welfarism,” in which governments combine coercive top-down control with significant social spending to provide public goods and reduce inequality—and in so doing, highlight the perceived failures of liberal free-market capitalism. Versions of this politics have already gained adherents in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in the past decade, as liberal individualism has been increasingly called into question. China could make the case that the endpoint for a prosperous and stable society looks like what is on offer in Beijing rather than in Paris and New York.

But to cast itself as such a savior, China will need to create a society that is at least broadly prosperous and stable and whose large armed forces are capable but seldom stray from the barracks or port. That sort of China could promote the idea that the country has a unique system of political and economic thinking and strategy (zhongti, “Chinese for essence”) that nonetheless can be used elsewhere by those who care to learn from it. As China courts middle powers with this narrative, the West could find it hard to push back.

[VKumar]

China, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan.
We need to contend with these.
Later on, UK, Canada too.
Be watchful.