These are days when it may not be apt to say ‘China’ to Google or vice versa. Quite understandably, ‘China crisis’ elicits more than 22,000 finds on the search giant’s ‘news’ section. Contrary to common fears, however, Giles Chance cautions that it would be a mistake for Westerners to assume that China’s system is doomed because it is different to their own.
“China’s political system does not appear to be threatened, in spite of the fact that some Westerners feel that it should be. This is probably because most Chinese see it as operating adequately and meeting China’s development needs.”
It might seem to a Western observer, brought up on Rousseau, the rights of man, and the Fifth Amendment, that the Chinese would at some point have to rebel against a one-party dictatorship based on a discredited communist ideology, he writes in ‘China and the Credit Crisis’ (www.wiley.com). “But there are few signs of suppressed desire for a multi-party system in China. Instead the indications are that many Chinese would simply like the present system to work better, with less corruption and abuse of power by insiders.”
Large parts of Chinese society now subscribe to middle-class property-owing and consumption values, the author notes. “Chinese people appear not to dislike the idea of inequality in itself, but to resent it when it arises from the exercise of power or status, and not from success in a competitive environment.” Interestingly, “when asked in one survey to rank a number of activities – including developing one’s own career, consumption, leisure, political participation, and family life – most respondents ranked political participation last.”
Weakness of the West
China’s relative immunity to the financial destruction wrought by the tsunami from New York has convinced many Chinese that the West doesn’t have all the answers, and China will be safer and can do better if it follows its own instincts, observes the author. “In fact, the Chinese have always treated advice given them by outsiders, such as foreign governments and advisors, with care, insisting on the uniqueness of China’s own situation, and even on occasion ignoring external views and prescriptions.”
In Chance’s view, the apparent ‘financial and moral weakness of the West’ serves to confirm China’s belief that the solution to its economic and spiritual development needs can be found within China’s own history and philosophy. He sees little scope for an alignment of the Western ideas (of freedom, individual thought and behaviour) with the two ancient strands of Chinese philosophy, viz. the Confucian order and obedience, and the Taoist unity with nature.
Looking back, the author says that China stopped feeling sorry for itself and started living again around the mid-1990s. This was marked by the return of young Chinese who had gone overseas to be educated at the West’s glittering universities, and to work for leading Western law firms, banks, consulting companies, and multinationals, he narrates.
The credit crisis has ended the Chinese love affair with the West and focused attention back to China, the author avers. “In 1999, half of my MBA class at Peking University were Chinese who wanted to work for foreign companies in Beijing and Shanghai. In 2009, half were Europeans, Koreans, Americans, and Canadians who wanted to learn Chinese and work in China.”
Most Chinese people, says Chance, feel that the credit crisis has confirmed the Chinese system, even with its disadvantages, as more stable, and therefore more dependable and desirable, than the Western system.
Ancient dominance
A sophisticated and meritocratic Chinese governing class organised and controlled a country which, at its economic height in the early 1700s, accounted for around one-third of the world’s population and economic output, the author reminds.
“From China’s ancient dominance, today’s Chinese draw their innate sense of superiority and sophistication. From its nineteenth-century demise at foreign hands, they draw their determination never again to be humiliated. From the reunification of China under the communists they draw their independence and spirit.”
A grim scenario that the book postulates is of how a series of misunderstandings between China and the US can lead to an anti-West coalition, comprising Russia, China’s friends in Africa and Latin America. Such a division of the world again into two armed camps, each led by a superpower, would cut global growth, and lead to local fights over resources, the author warns. Thankfully, though, “The peaceful route forward is much more likely simply because it serves everyone’s interests, particularly China’s, much better.”
Now that America’s financial weakness has handicapped it, the Chinese Government feels that showing leadership is the best way to advance its agenda, Chance decodes. He believes that China’s goal is not world domination or to go to war with America, but to develop China to its full extent.
“This is a task that will fully occupy it for the next 100 years and more, and will increasingly engage it with the rest of the world. In turn the world will occupy itself more and more with China.”
Imperative read.
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