The problem with Western commentary on China has been its overwhelming preoccupation with China ’s polity, in particular the lack of democracy and its Communist government, and, to a lesser extent, its potential military threat. In fact, the challenge posed by the rise of China is far more likely to be cultural in nature, as expressed in the Middle Kingdom mentality. Or, to put it another way, the most difficult question posed by the rise of China is not the absence of democracy but how it will handle difference. A country’s attitude towards the rest of the world is largely determined by its history and culture. The power of each new hegemonic nation or continent is invariably expressed in novel ways: for Europe, the classic form was maritime expansion and colonial empires, for the United States it was airborne superiority and global economic hegemony. Chinese power, similarly, will take new and innovative forms. The Chinese tradition is very distinct from that of the West, even though there are certain affinities, notably a shared belief in universalism, a civilizing mission and a sense of inherent superiority. Although the Chinese steadily augmented their territory as a result of land-based expansion, there has been no equivalent of Western overseas expansion or the European colonization of large tracts of the world. The most likely motif of Chinese hegemony lies in the area of culture and race. The Chinese sense of cultural self-confidence and superiority, rooted in their long and rich history as a civilization-state, is utterly different from the United States, which has no such legacy to draw on, and contrasts with Europe too, if less strongly. The Chinese have a deeply hierarchical view of the world based on culture and race. As a consequence, the rise of China as a global superpower is likely to lead, over a protracted period of time, to a profound cultural and racial reordering of the world in the Chinese image. As China draws countries and continents into its web, as is happening already with Africa, they will not simply be economic supplicants of a hugely powerful China but also occupy a position of cultural and ethnic inferiority in an increasingly influential Chinese-ordered global hierarchy.

9. China’s Own Backyard

In the early nineties books about China were relatively few and far between. The story was still, for the most part, the Asian tigers, and most Western writers seemed to park themselves in Hong Kong and Singapore and view China and the region through that prism. My first visits to the region followed a similar pattern: both island-states always seemed to be on my itinerary, partly because they provided a ready-made network of contacts and partly because English was widely spoken. Given this cultural baggage, it is not surprising that China was generally seen in derivative terms: it was all a question of when and to what extent China would become infected with the Hong Kong bug. When Hong Kong was finally returned to China in 1997, the British, self-congratulatory almost to a person, were deeply sceptical as to whether the territory would thrive in the way that it had under the British; predictably they believed that China ’s future hung on the extent to which it became like Hong Kong. In this view, China ’s prospects depended on learning from everyone else, with the recommended direction of wisdom invariably proceeding from the outside inwards rather than from within outwards. This contained a kernel of truth: the transformation of the region had, indeed, begun outside China. The role and importance of Hong Kong and Singapore in this wider process, however, is a moot point; far more significant were Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which looked far less like, and owed much less to, the West than these micro-states.

In fact, this mindset was deeply patronizing towards China. It suggested that China was an empty vessel that needed filling up with Western ideas and know-how. Certainly China had much to learn from the West, but its subsequent transformation has been more home-grown than Western import. In fact, if China ’s growth in the 1980s had relied heavily on the resources and knowledge of Hong Kong and Taiwanese entrepreneurs, by the nineties the direction of influence was in the process of being reversed, with the Middle Kingdom once more becoming the centre of influence, power and wealth. A map of East Asia in the eighties might reasonably have had the lines of influence and capital running from a miscellany of Hong Kong, Taiwan and the overseas Chinese into China itself. Now it is the opposite. The hubs no longer lie around China ’s borders but are congregated within.

While Hong Kong is still recognizably Hong Kong, economically it has been remade by China, the size of its stock exchange now comfortably surpassed by Shanghai ’s. Who now would choose to go to Hong Kong when you can find the real thing in Beijing or Shanghai? For more than a decade Taiwan has needed China more than China has needed Taiwan, with its economy suffering increasingly from its relative isolation from China. Meanwhile the reversal of the lines of causation between China on one hand and Hong Kong and Taiwan on the other are being repeated on a far grander scale across the region. Everywhere the magnet is China. Where previously the story was outside China, now all roads lead to China. China ’s growth and dynamism are spilling over its borders, infecting countless other countries far and wide, from Laos and Cambodia [854] to South Korea and Japan, from Indonesia and Malaysia to the Philippines and even Australia. East Asia is being reconfigured by China ’s rise. The agenda of the region is being set in Beijing.

The rise of China is best seen not from the vantage point of the United States or Europe, or for that matter Africa or Latin America, but East Asia. It is in China ’s own backyard that the reverberations of its rise are already being felt most dramatically and in the most far-reaching ways. If we want to understand China ’s rise, and what it might mean for the world, then this should be our starting point. The way in which China handles its rise and exercises its growing power in the East Asian region will be a very important indicator of how it is likely to behave as a global power. [855]

It is difficult to achieve the status of a global power without first becoming the dominant power in one’s own region. Britain is unusual in this respect: it acquired global hegemony in the nineteenth century even though it didn’t succeed in achieving a decisive pre-eminence in Europe. In contrast, the United States, confronted with no serious rivals, achieved overwhelming dominance in the Americas prior to becoming a global superpower in the second half of the twentieth century. China faces a far more formidable task in seeking to become the premier power in East Asia. The region accounts for one-third of the world’s population and China has to contend with two rivals, namely Japan and the United States, which stand in the way of its ambitions. Japan is the most advanced as well as largest (as measured by GDP according to exchange rates) economy in the region, while the United States, by virtue of its military alliances, bases and especially naval presence, remains the most powerful military force in East Asia. Furthermore, China shares borders with Russia to its north and India to its south-west, both of which are powerful players. China ’s path to regional pre-eminence will be paved with difficulty and is bound to be a complicated process.

History, however, offers some succour for China ’s ambitions. Until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, China enjoyed overwhelming regional dominance: it was to the Middle Kingdom that all others, in varying degrees — depending on their distance from Beijing — paid homage, acknowledging their status as the Celestial Kingdom ’s inferior. It was a hierarchical system of relations whose tentacles stretched across much of East Asia, with China at its centre. In the tributary system, as it was known, non-Chinese rulers observed the appropriate forms and ceremonies in their contact with the Chinese emperor. Taken together, those practices constituted the tribute system. During the Qing period they included receiving a noble rank in the Qing hierarchy, dating their communications by the Qing calendar, presenting tribute memorials on statutory occasions together with a symbolic gift of local products, performing the kow-tow at the Qing court, receiving imperial gifts in return and being granted certain trading privileges and protection. [856] If a ruler recognized the superiority of Chinese civilization and paid tribute to the emperor, then the emperor generally pursued a policy of non-interference, leaving domestic matters to the local ruler. It was thus an essentially cultural and moral rather than administrative or economic system. The emperor exercised few coercive powers but maintained control for the most part symbolically. The fact that Chinese hegemony was exercised in such a light and relatively superficial way enabled it to be maintained over a huge and very diverse population for long periods of time. The tributary system was far from universal, but Korea, part of Japan, Vietnam and Myanmar all paid tributes to China, while a large number of South-East Asian states, including Malacca and Thailand, either paid tribute or acknowledged Chinese suzerainty. Those countries that were closer to China in terms of geography and culture were considered to be more equal than those that were not. So, for example, China was considered the big brother, Korea a middle brother and Japan a younger brother.