Opinion | Columnists
Return of Chinese civilisation
An awakened China has proven the superiority of its way over the grand Western theories of 'a clash of civilisations' and triumph of the West at 'the end of history'.
- By Nathan Gardels, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:52 September 15, 2008
- Image Credit: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
When scholars from across China gathered in Shanghai recently in the afterglow of the Olympics to assess their country's role in the world, their pride shone as bright as the waxing Mid-Autumn Festival moon.
More than a patriotic triumph, the "best games ever" were seen as a knockout blow against a West on the wane after 500 years.
To those charged with thinking professionally about China's future, the Beijing Olympics marked the advent of a new era in which the Middle Kingdom would emerge again out of the mists of history - not as a hegemonic superpower, but as the superior civilisation in a post-American world.
Whether one agrees with this view or not, it is unquestionably the driving spirit behind the powershift in the world order today and bears a close hearing in the West.
Among the political heavyweights at the third annual World Forum on China Studies, convened in a monumental Stalin-era exhibition hall now dwarfed by a towering sea of neon-rimmed, Godzilla-scale skyscrapers, was Zheng Bijian.
He is the former vice-chair of the Central Party School, confidant of the current Communist Party leadership and author of China's "peaceful rise" doctrine.
Zheng argued that China's dream of escaping Western subjugation since the Opium War (1840-42) had finally been realised in the "new awakening" of the past 30 years of "reform and opening up".
Now awakened, the whole nation was engaged in sorting through "a hundred schools of thought" about the way ahead in a globalised economy.
Indicative of the civilisational time frame in which the Chinese see themselves, Zheng compared this historical moment to the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) and the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.)
In the view of this party ideologist, an awakened China had proven the superiority of its way over the grand Western theories of "a clash of civilisations" and triumph of the West at "the end of history" through solving the "riddle of the century" by abruptly lifting hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty and underdevelopment.
This success had proven, beyond any empirical doubt, the neo-Confucian wisdom of Deng Xiaoping to "seek truth from facts" and, step by step, like feeling one's way across a shallow river, "constructing socialism" in tune with local characteristics and rising in peaceful development.
This offers the world a third way between the models of conflict or domination that emanate from the Western mind.
The reawakened Middle Kingdom, according to Zheng, "would not be puffed up with self-importance, divorcing itself from economic globalisation and modernising with the door closed".
Nor would the new China "belittle itself" with dependence on the West but "act independently with the initiative in our own hands."
This new China, Zheng argued, would resist the path of the rise of the Western powers "with their colonialist plundering of the world's resources in the process of industrialisation" as well as the ill-fated paths of the "military nations such as Germany and Japan who waged wars to reshape the world".
The new China would also avoid seeking superpower hegemony like the former Soviet Union "under the cover of the so-called world revolution".
Instead, based on its remarkable success, the new China would seek an "open, non-exclusive and harmonious" relationship with all others to "mutually open up the route to world development".
Resurgent
Lest the resurgent Confucian sentiments behind this worldview might be lost on the rest of the world, other prominent thinkers underlined the civilisational character of China's project.
Zhang Xianglong of Beijing University's philosophy department highlighted the "non-universalist" nature of Confucianism and thus the emphasis on truth being grounded in particular, concrete circumstances instead of universally applicable standards - whether the Western concept of universal human rights and democracy or the Marxist idea of universal laws of development.
Because of its non-universalism, Confucian civilisation seeks "pragmatic discourse" with others following their own path rather than seeking to lord it over them.
Tan Chung, who for many years was the dean of the Centre for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, views the Beijing Olympics not just as the coming-out party for the new China, but for the reappearance of the Confucian sensibility in world affairs.
In Tan's view, China, as has been the case historically, is not interested in maximising power through the conquest of territory like a superpower, but in the integration of civilisations through harmonious co-existence.
Tan is particularly struck by the 5,000 years of harmonious coexistence between India and China - marred only by the 20 years between 1958 and 1978 when both civilisations were infected with Western nationalist notions - as well as by the fusion of cultures in Central Asia known as "Serinda" or "Indochina" in Southeast Asia.
"In the Western hemisphere," as Tan labels it, "all the brilliant ancient civilisations such as Babylonia, Egypt, Greece and Rome have become ruins without being handed down. This was because there was no 'geocivilisational paradigm' among them. The 'geopolitical paradigm' pushed them to scramble for territory and indulge in mutual destruction. The basic difference between Eastern and Western hemispheres lies here."
For Tan, the success of the Olympics will allow China to "bid farewell to the sorrowful feelings of history, discard the pursuit of power and return to its civilisational vocation of advocating a culture of harmony."
Of course, no one need be naive about what the influence of a neo-Confucian China means for Western values in the coming century.
And it goes without saying that the exercise of Confucian authority is not beyond the brutal enforcement of internal harmony against rebellious children, as everyone remembers from Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But it would be equally foolish for the West, whether out of ignorance or cynicism, to dismiss the profound civilisational impulse behind China's rehabilitated self-image. For anyone who cares to look, it is written all over the proud face of post-Olympic China.
Nathan Gardels is the editor in chief of NPQ and Global Services of Tribune Media Services.
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