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In the current issue of The Nation, John Feffer reviews six recent books about China in a piece entitled, "Big Red Checkbook." If you can't quite judge the contents of the books by their titles, you can certainly identify their theses:
¶ Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World, by Joshua Kurlantzick.
¶ Rising Star: China's New Security Diplomacy, by Bates Gill.
¶ A War Like No Other: The Truth About China's Challenge to America, by Richard C Bush and Michael E O'Hanlon.
¶ Challenging China: Struggle and Hope in an Era of Change: Independent Chinese Voices on Life in Contemporary China, Edited by Sharon Hom and Stacy Mosher.
¶ China: Fragile Superpower, by Susan L Shirk.
¶ China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power, by Rob Gifford.
As John Feffer holds each of these books up to his own understanding of China, I begin to wonder if the White House isn't carrying on about Iran as a way of distracting itself, and everyone else in power, from some sort of looming confrontation with the rulers of the Central Country.* Heaven knows the Bushies have a talent for picking fights with small-fry while avoiding opponents their own size. (What would you expect from bullies?) The question, however, remains: is China "our own size"? The books in Mr Feffer's group review offer different answers - none of them at all like Mr Feffer's own.
Mr Feffer's understanding of the China-US relationship is actually radically different, which is really why I've chosen his review for this week's Friday Front. He's light years ahead, it seems to me, of some of the writers whose work he evaluates - or at least he has made a qualitative jump that so alters the discussion that half of the books on the list emerge from the review looking overheated and irrelevant. The survivors, so to speak, are the even-numbered entries. Bates Gill's "dry but important new book" presents a highly pragmatic China that is not married to any absolutes save, perhaps, a certain contentiousness about the sovereignty of Taiwan. Even there, apparently, Mr Gill does not anticipate a foreseeable outbreak of hostilities. As Mr Feffer points out, in connection with cutting A War Like No Other off at the knees,
After all, what would Beijing do with the island after military takeover? Taiwan is no Tibet. It is a powerful capitalist country that has developed a strong taste for democracy. Beijing beware: even a small bone, if swallowed the wrong way, can prove deadly.
(I myself like to joke that Taipei will wind up conquering Beijing. possibly at the latter's invitation.)
Challenging China is a sort of oral documentary, a collection of internal criticisms of the regime that may or may not prove to be prophetic. Mr Feffer writes,
Inside China, troubling stories appear every day. There is rampant corruption. Some grow impossibly rich while many remain impatiently poor. Tens of thousands of protests break out in the cities and the countryside every year. The AIDS and SARS scandals, the harrowing coal mine disasters, the ruthless suppression of dissidents - eloquently described by Chinese activists themselves in the new collection Challenging China... - all have the potential of sapping the confidence of the population in the leadership's capacity to govern.
Activists, however, are not ordinarily at all representative of populations at large. China's population in particular has shown itself over history to be capable of periodic seismic disruptions. (By the old schedule, which called for upsets every two to three hundred years, China is not due for dynasty change at the moment, but there's no knowing if the old schedules have any value at all.) The Communist rulers are all too aware of (even if most of them are too young to be personally familiar with) the totalizing chaos that can sweep through China faster than an infectious disease, and they do what they can to prevent it with a schizophrenic dosage of accommodation and persecution, tempered everywhere by local neglect and corruption. So, while Challenging China undoubtedly provides a catalogue of errors, it sounds rather like something that might be compiled about the United States, mutatis mutandis. In the place of crackdowns on dissidents, for example, the American version might discuss the mass incarceration of young black males. And so on.
As for China Road, it sounds like a good-natured travelogue, conducted by a National Public Radio correspondent as he traverses "Route 312 from Shanghai across the expanse of China to the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert." Mr Gifford's contribution to the what-will-happen discussion seems limited to commentary on the government's furious attempt to sinicize its marginal and frontier populations - Tibetans, Uyghurs, and so on - so that, in the event of an upset (see above), "'they will be too well integrated into China to want to opt out'."
Mr Feffer doesn't share the notion, current in Washington, that it's important to figure out what China will do next. "Predicting what will happen with China is a fool's errand," he writes. "The data set is so large that it defies generalizations." And that's what the three remaining books under review have in common: they're extrapolations from generalizations. Joshua Kurlantzick is obsessed by China's checkbook, which is being used to snap up alliances and natural resources all over the world - especially where the United States is no longer highly regarded. Richard C Bush and Michael E O'Hanlon, in A War Like No Other, and Susan L Shirk, in Fragile Superpower, both foresee the same catastrophic attack on Taiwan, the gentlemen theorizing that the Chinese will see themselves as strong enough to pull off the military assertion; Ms Shirk suggesting that the Chinese will strike precisely because they're not sure of their own strength. Both arguments can legitimately set common sense aside: belligerence, whether cocky or cornered, is rarely pragmatic, and common-sense arguments against it are all too easily swept aside. But Mr Feffer declines to allow the three authors to frighten him. As for A War Like No Other: "It reads like the kind of overstatement that foreign policy analysts resort to in order to pitch skeptical editors yet another article or book on China." (Touché!) He is a bit less rudely dismissive of Ms Shirk's forecast.
Nationalism and the pride that comes with becoming once again a world power will more likely have a centripetal rather than centrifugal effect, bolstering the legitimacy of the Communist Party rather than pushing it to bet the house on a military adventure. China has ultimately borrowed a great deal from the West, and this notion of the nation-state, so alien to the Jiaqing Emperor in 1805, will prove the most influential import. Alongside its twenty-first-century economy and twentieth-century political structure, China has a very nineteenth-century sense of nationhood.
Here, at any rate, is Mr Feffer's final paragraph:
Will China overtake the United States as Europe once overtook China? Having spent so long at the top, China could teach America some lessons about imperial decline. China once believed itself the center of the world and the pivot of history. It tried to understand the rise of other great powers in its own terms rather than as a fundamentally new phenomenon. Most important, it waited too long to reform its foreign and domestic policies. Beijing could change tactics again, perhaps after the 2008 Olympics, and rely more on punch than politics. Yet, blinded by its own putative imperial glory and thinking of the world only in boxing-ring terms, Washington is the real wild card. In the contest for world leadership, the United States is the more likely one to come out swinging - and end up knocking itself out.
Intelligent Westerners no longer allow themselves the lazy cliché of regarding China as "inscrutably Oriental." But China remains very, very different from anything that has been experienced in the West, and particularly in the United States. It seems wiser to avoid making predictions on the basis of likely misunderstandings, and to concentrate instead on getting our own house, which we almost seem to wish were as inscrutable as China's, into some kind of order.
Copyright (c) 2007 Pourover Press