Survival
Global Politics and Strategy
ISSN: 0039-6338 (Print) 1468-2699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsur20
China and the ‘Pivot’
Lanxin Xiang
To cite this article: Lanxin Xiang (2012) China and the ‘Pivot’, Survival, 54:5, 113-128, DOI:
10.1080/00396338.2012.728349
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2012.728349
Published online: 01 Oct 2012.
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Date: 03 October 2015, At: 01:58
China and the ‘Pivot’
Downloaded by [FU Berlin] at 01:58 03 October 2015
Lanxin Xiang
The Obama administration seems to have toned down its rhetoric on AsiaPacific security, abandoning the fancy but problematic phrase ‘pivot towards
Asia’ and replacing it with the more prosaic ‘rebalancing’. This does not
mean the content of US policy is very different. On the contrary, the Obama
administration continues its military build-up in the region, aiming at a
military posture that can only be described as ‘absolute superiority’. Over
the past two years, Washington has put together a comprehensive ‘containment’ package in Asia that includes a new military doctrine of air–sea
battle; launched a game-changing economic project called the Trans-Pacific
Partnership; initiated the ‘rotation’ of US marines in Australia; and stationed coastal battleships in Singapore. More alarmingly, the United States
is making clear attempts to re-establish a naval presence in Subic Bay in the
Philippines, and in the coveted Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. Both were key
US naval bases during the Cold War.
Trust deficit
While the Obama administration blames China for the current state of affairs,
especially Beijing’s sudden ‘assertiveness’ after the president’s visit to China
in November 2009,1 Chinese leaders worry that they could be facing a new
cold war. For years, mainstream Chinese and American analysts refused to
see this coming, preferring to bury their heads in sand. Until the emergence
Lanxin Xiang is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies
in Geneva. He is a Contributing Editor to Survival.
Survival | vol. 54 no. 5 | October–November 2012 | pp. 113–128DOI 10.1080/00396338.2012.728349
114 | Lanxin Xiang
of the ‘pivot’ formulation, the most provocative expression used to refer
to the containment of China was ‘hedging’, reflecting some flexibility and
ambiguity. No one talks about hedging now. Unsurprisingly, the hawks
in the Chinese military have the full attention of the leadership, and have
received a funding boost. There is even a demand from the military to reenter the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee in the coming
18th Party Congress, from which it has been absent since the 15th Congress
in 1997, when the party decided to push for the professionalisation of the
military to reduce its political power. Not too long ago, the Beijing elite were
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still debating whether or not Deng Xiaoping’s famed policy dictum ‘hide
one’s capabilities and bide one’s time’ (taoguang yanghui)
No one
talks about
hedging now
– the opposite of ‘assertiveness’ – should still be observed;
the majority consensus was an emphatic ‘yes’. Now, the
US ‘pivot’ has prompted President Hu Jintao, speaking
at a recent conference of the People’s Liberation Army
Navy, to publicly call on the military to ‘speed up naval
transformation, deepen and widen the efforts to prepare
for future military struggle and solidly push for modernization’.2
More significantly, Vice-President and presidential heir apparent Xi
Jinping, when visiting the United States earlier this year, dispensed with the
usual vague language of ‘strengthening strategic trust’ with Washington,
instead raising the possibility that the strategic differences between the two
countries might be irreconcilable. The previous official approach was to
‘smooth over any differences’ (mi he fenqi), a tactical move; the new catchphrase is to ‘control and manage the differences’ (guan kong fenqi), a major
shift to a strategic perspective.3 This is no ordinary change of tone; it is
viewed as a timely response to the policy pursued by the Americans. The
days of strategic ambiguity on both sides have apparently ended, and it is
probable that the new leadership under Xi will attempt to build what it considers a more realistic framework for the relationship.
The ‘control and manage’ approach may imply, firstly, a realisation that
conflict with the United States can no longer be avoided within the current
framework of engagement; the so-called Strategic and Economic Dialogue
has contributed little to building mutual trust despite the fact that Hu and
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 115
Obama have met at a record 12 summit meetings in less than four years.
Secondly, the new approach may suggest that China’s focus will now shift
towards maintaining a true strategic balance, as if during a cold-war stalemate, for the single purpose of avoiding a full-fledged confrontation.
While in Washington, Xi quoted a Chinese pop song: ‘May I ask where
the path is? It is where you take your first step.’4 This is the title song for a TV
series adapted from a classic Chinese novel about a famous Tang Dynasty
(618–971 BCE) monk and his three disciples, who endured enormous hardship in exploring new passages to India. Xi was apparently suggesting that
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Sino-US relations should find a new path, one not limited by the existing
bilateral mechanisms of interaction. In any case, it is likely that Xi, in the
face of an unambiguous US ‘pivot’, will give top priority to Chinese military
preparedness based on the traditional ‘offensive defence doctrine’, a project
that has already begun in earnest. From Beijing’s perspective, many symbolic acts in Washington clearly point to the emergence of a new cold war. In
particular, the Chinese strongly object to the way Americans usually frame
the issue of strategic trust in moral terms, blaming China for any mutual
distrust because of their own paranoid obsession with China’s internal
problems. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assertion, in a May 2011
interview, that Chinese leaders, by resisting democracy, ‘are trying to stop
history, which is a fool’s errand’, is typical of this view.5 Similarly, an editorial that recently ran in the Washington Post purporting to explain ‘why
there is a “trust deficit” with China’ could not resist indulging in a humanrights lecture, concluding, ‘What the president ought to do … is explain
to the new leader [Xi] why, for the United States, China is untrustworthy:
because it continues to imprison courageous people’.6 Even the most hardened realists at the Pentagon are obsessed with universalist concepts such as
the ‘global commons’; and although US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta,
when speaking at the recent IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, stressed
that he rejected any suggestion that ‘the increased emphasis by the United
States on the Asia-Pacific region is some kind of challenge to China’,7 such
assurances lack credibility in Beijing. As a Global Times lead editorial quickly
chided, Panetta’s ‘denial may not be a 100% lie, but no one in the whole
world probably dares to take this statement as truth’.8
116 | Lanxin Xiang
Indeed, there are signs that Washington’s China policy is on the cusp
of an ‘NSC-68 Moment’. National Security Council Report 68, issued
shortly before the Korean War, was the key US government document that
expanded America’s Cold War focus from Europe. The original NSC-68 was
quickly vindicated by the Korean War, but it was buttressed by extraordinary confidence in two key beliefs: firstly, that communist regimes would
eventually launch a military attack, most likely by using ‘proxy powers’ to
do the job outside Europe; and secondly, that cost was no object. Not only
could the Americans afford to overextend their military around the world,
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but a large-scale military industry could be expected to stimulate the
domestic economy. Today, the mood in Washington is somewhat different.
The belief that China will definitely challenge America’s global position
persists, but is not firmly grounded, and the cost of resistance has become
a serious concern. The irony is, while Americans continue to make constant
reference to their desire to ‘improve the strategic trust that we must have
between our two countries’, as Panetta stated at the Singapore conference,9
the Chinese side has begun, for the first time, to use the explicit phrase
‘trust deficit’.10 Beijing apparently wants to open a serious discussion of
this deficit in realpolitik (but not moral) terms, for if there is no basic strategic trust between the two countries, most other areas of potential Sino-US
cooperation will become meaningless. Beijing is unlikely to cooperate with
Washington on such issues as North Korea, Syria, Iran or Afghanistan if
such cooperation could potentially help the United States in a zero-sum
game with China.
The perils of pivots
Shortly before Obama’s visit to China, Deputy Secretary of State James
Steinberg offered a new conceptual paradigm for the US–China relationship
known as ‘strategic reassurance’. As he put it during a speech at the Center
for a New American Security on 5 October 2009,
strategic reassurance rests on a core, if tacit, bargain. Just as we and our
allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s ‘arrival’
... as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 117
the world that its development and growing global role will not come at
the expense of the security and well-being of others.11
The Chinese were intensely interested. Said the People’s Daily:
Steinberg took the words out of our mouth. On China’s core security
concerns, China actually needs strategic reassurance from the US. Ceasing
weapon sales to Taiwan and stopping hostile surveillance activities in
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China’s surrounding sea areas are two of them.12
In retrospect, the Steinberg Moment, had it lasted, would have been superior to the current policy. Obama’s ‘pivot’ approach has merely produced a
classic vicious cycle, in which each side continuously misreads the other’s
strategic mind, offering something the other side does not want (such as a
‘G2’ arrangement or an external guarantee of maritime security in Asia), or
asking for something the other side cannot give (such as the drastic appreciation of the renminbi or active support for regime changes in the Middle
East). From Beijing’s perspective, Washington’s strategy towards Asia has
most of the key features of a cold-war strategy: a military posture stressing
overwhelming superiority and effective deterrence; an ideological position
that seeks to delegitimise China; and a plan of building or reviving a regional
diplomatic bloc or bilateral military alliances in China’s neighbourhood. Of
course, Washington never admits that this amounts to a containment strategy, but if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like
a duck, it’s a duck. As Vice-President Xi put it in a Washington Post article
shortly before his visit to the United States, ‘At a time when people long for
peace, stability and development, to deliberately give prominence to the
military security agenda, scale up military deployment and strengthen military alliances is not really what most countries in the region hope to see’.13
American strategic planners seem to embrace any concept that symbolically reflects a game-changing sentiment, such as ‘pivot’, ‘return’ or
‘rebalancing’. At first glance, such attitudes appear to carry with them the
risk of destroying the most crucial bilateral relationship in the world. After
all, neither side is using so much as veiled language to cover their clashing
118 | Lanxin Xiang
views on regional security and global governance. But, as the potential consequences of undermining the bilateral relationship become more obvious
in the coming years, so will solutions. The truth is, even if the United States
succeeds in building a military containment scheme in Asia, Beijing will
not allow its national interest to be dictated by outsiders ganging up on
China. A comprehensive arms race has already started, and any diplomatic
isolation of China will be met with counter-measures. The key issue has
indeed become how to ‘control and manage’ a highly militarised security
environment in Asia. Without effective management, the situation could
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progressively worsen, producing the kind of vicious strategic cycle seen
between Germany and England in the late nineteenth century or the Soviet
Union and the United States during the early stages of the Cold War.
At the same time, ending strategic ambiguity has its merits, precisely
because the contours of Sino-US competition in the region will become
more predictable. For example, Washington has a penchant for advertising and sensationalising new military weapons or doctrines to deter its
rivals and to discourage them from any thought of catching up technologically. But not only could this practice lose its intended effect by triggering
a serious arms race on the Chinese side (rather than deterring any moves
toward modernisation), it may also let China off the hook for its ‘lack of
military transparency’, a customary accusation that Washington and its
allies have laid upon Beijing for decades. Instead, Chinese military transparency – a key but until now unobtainable US objective – may be achieved
by tracing China’s predictable countermeasures vis-à-vis the Pentagon.
Washington may find that it has lost the moral high ground, however, as
the ‘lack of military transparency’ ball is lobbed back to the US court. As
long as Washington does not publicly admit that a cold war is being waged
in Asia, Beijing will have less need to avoid the bad publicity of building its aircraft carriers and anti-ship weapons systems, and it will become
much easier to justify its continued military modernisation. In other words,
China’s strategic confidence may actually increase, and as Chinese military
capacity rises, Washington may find it even harder to achieve its strategic purpose by shifting the bulk of its military power, especially its naval
power, to Asia-Pacific.
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 119
Paradoxically, a US-initiated cold war could help China to alter its strategic behaviour and provide a game-changing opportunity for China to swing
global public opinion. After all, the Chinese still support mainstream opposition to any international system of hegemony in global politics. And as
the magic formula of ‘democracy equals prosperity’ loses credibility and
validity, the successful Chinese road to economic development will become
more appealing. In addition, American attempts to hinder China’s military
modernisation are unlikely to garner much sympathy in the developing
world, where they will be seen as a desperate move by the United States to
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rescue its status as the world’s hegemon and to defend its ‘second to none’
position.
Moreover, the American strategy in Asia may not be
sustainable in the long run. During the original Cold War,
the Soviets never dared to engage the United States in
economic competition, notwithstanding some agitated
rhetoric from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the
This time
Washington
may not win
famed 1959 ‘kitchen debate’ with Vice President Richard
Nixon. Today, however, ‘the only indispensable superpower’ is also a
super-indebted power, and its biggest external creditor happens to be its
presumed chief strategic rival. Is it logical and workable to encircle one’s
own banker militarily? Or, as many Chinese are starting to wonder, is such a
strategy designed to provoke a military incident that will provide an excuse
to default on the debt? Like religious wars, cold wars, if they do not turn hot,
are primarily about gaining the upper hand in a moral debate. This time,
Washington may not win. The hard fact is, the Washington Consensus is
moribund, the American Dream is broken and America is, in David Calleo’s
expression, in ‘morbid decline’.14
Furthermore, America’s ‘pivot towards Asia’ ultimately depends on its
partners, the Asia-Pacific ‘coalition of the willing’. This coalition is in fact
divided and fragile, and consists of a group of states whose governments
are facing major political troubles at home. From Washington to Tokyo,
Manila to Canberra, it is only a collective sense of internal weakness that
has created an ad hoc common identity with which to face an uncertain
challenge from China. The rest of Asia may not be interested in jumping on
120 | Lanxin Xiang
America’s bandwagon. Asian partners endorse American preponderance in
the region mainly for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. They are
not really willing to live with American ‘dominance’ in the sense of dictating regional affairs through the imposition of a bipolar competition which
will force them to take a side.
China has been able to build a stable network of relationships with its
neighbours since the end of the Cold War. Despite recent setbacks and mistakes, its regional appeal remains strong. China offers a unique example of
a country with a non-democratic system that nevertheless has a dynamic
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economy and a relatively strong state. It has its own problems, of course,
but as Washington’s Asian partners understand well, the future of China
will be determined by internal factors, such as the problems of economic
slowdown, income inequality and official corruption. The Chinese system
will not collapse under mere foreign pressure. Ironically, even though China
feels somewhat isolated in this absurd cold war, time may still be on its side,
if it can rejuvenate itself through another round of serious and sustainable
reforms. Thus, the Chinese leadership may continue to be predominantly
inward-looking and refrain from taking hasty actions over territorial or
other disputes with its neighbours, such as a military clash over the South
China Sea.
Mismatched mindsets
To reverse the trend towards a Sino-American strategic showdown, one
must first of all understand the psychological mismatch between the two
countries. No one knows how long a US-led cold war in Asia could last.
Much depends upon whether Americans will eventually abandon a deeply
rooted mental disposition towards viewing world history through the logic
of ‘rise and fall’, most visible among the neo-conservatives who are attempting a comeback with Mitt Romney. This rhetoric is notably unhelpful in
dealing with US–China relations today, yet the morbid fear of someone
overtaking America’s superior position provides a leading motivation for
those in favour of a containment policy towards China. The prospect of
China’s GDP surpassing the United States’ in less than 20 years has spurred
a great debate in the West, but it is a debate that depends on the rhetorical
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 121
framework first promoted by Edward Gibbon and Oswald Spengler and
later revived by Arnold Toynbee and Paul Kennedy. Discourse on ‘rise
and fall’ is an Anglo-American proclivity with a Eurocentric bias. Thus, the
current concern is over whether China will integrate into the existing (that
is, Western-dominated) liberal world order or seek to destroy it.
In his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Paul Kennedy argued that the
Chinese leadership ‘seems to be evolving a grand strategy altogether
more coherent and forward-looking than that which prevails in Moscow,
Washington, or Tokyo, not to mention Western Europe’.15 That this insight
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came at such an early stage of the Chinese reform process is impressive, and
it has proven more enduring than the views of current authors who enjoy
the advantage of observing China’s reform with hindsight. In the 1990s,
predictions of China’s collapse were commonplace, with titles such as The
Coming Collapse of China becoming instant best-sellers, but none of these
predictions has come to pass. The teleological fantasy underlying all these
predictions, that all regimes will eventually become liberal democracies, has
been shown to be wrong.
Now that the ‘China collapse’ trend has run its course, the ‘China superior’ thesis is taking over. Many intellectuals in the West, particularly on the
left, have launched a feisty defence of China’s economic and even political
system. The Chinese themselves have been rather bemused by this trend,
which has produced a stream of hilariously titled publications such as When
China Rules the World, The Beijing Consensus and Maonomics: Why Chinese
Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do.16
Neither approach seems relevant to Chinese realities. The truth is,
China’s current trajectory is not best described as a ‘rise’, but rather as a restoration. The country has had huge trade surpluses and reserves before: as
late as 1820, China’s GDP accounted for 32.9% of the global total, and most
of the world’s silver reserves were in Chinese hands.17 The real challenge
posed by China today lies not in what it is doing, but in what it will not
do. Specifically, it will not pursue wholesale Westernisation, and it will not
accept, in their entirety, the existing, Western-derived ‘rules of the game’.
But it is absurd to assume that the Chinese will establish a new ‘model’ to
replace the Western one. The Chinese have never had the missionary urge,
122 | Lanxin Xiang
and model-building is not part of the culture. To build a model requires
either ontology or teleology, but neither has a home in Chinese thought.
The key question in the Chinese tradition is ‘where is the way?’ (or Tao), but
never the Cartesian, ontological ‘what is it?’. In other words, politics is by
nature a contingent act, and it is futile to harbour any ambition for influencing the future, however ‘scientific’ the prediction may seem.
The kind of ‘rise and fall’ analysis popular in the West aims at discovering
a universal pattern of great-power behaviour, despite the fact that China has
never been a typical great power. The country has no interest in challenging
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the liberal order on ideological grounds, because the Chinese believe that
any order can only be brought down by its own faults. No
Chinese
leaders do
not think in
the same
terms
doubt the liberal order has weakened. This does not mean
the Chinese system has been strengthened as a result. The
paradox is, the Communist Party of China has engineered
one of the greatest social and economic reforms in human
history; but the population has become restless and angry
about the regime itself. Confucian political logic, not Western
democratic theory, has undermined the party’s legitimacy:
the party’s failure to ‘rule by virtue’ has threatened its
‘Mandate of Heaven’. China’s future will be determined by
internal factors, just as that of the liberal order will. If the West understands
this, it might interact with China more effectively than by following the ‘rise
and fall’ logic.
It is important to remember that Chinese leaders do not think in the
same terms as their American counterparts. The Chinese view of history
is cyclical, not linear, and hence does not aim towards a predestined end.
According to the cyclical view, dealing with legitimacy questions at home
is a never-ending process, one in which foreign relations play only a minor
part. This can be seen in the way that China has long eschewed colonisation
and territorial grabs for resettlement. Moreover, the Chinese believe that
every system has its own fundamental flaws. Even the American political
system, today rent by deep political divisions and deadlock, has demonstrated its inability to resolve the tensions created by the country’s physical
and moral decline. Simply on the basis of its own weaknesses, it may not be
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 123
up to the task of maintaining America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent
physical and moral power.
America’s ‘morbid decline’ coincides with the coming to power of a
new generation of leaders in Beijing. This generation does not personally
remember the Second World War and was brought up in a vehemently antiimperialist environment, but this does not mean it will be more nationalistic
and xenophobic. For one thing, it will soon face acute problems of political legitimacy at home. The Communist Party’s survival depends upon
three forms of political legitimacy: revolutionary credit, actual performance
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and the moral character of the leadership, all three of which could be challenged in the near future. Previous generations could still invoke their own
heroic participation in the Long March and othe revolutionary struggles
to make direct claims on the right to govern, something the future leadership, especially the princelings (the descendants of the first generation
of revolutionaries) who are likely to take power over the next year cannot
do. They cannot inherit revolutionary credit from their fathers. Secondly,
the princelings as a group have demonstrated little Confucian virtue, for
they have obtained the biggest slice of national wealth through power plays
rather than hard work. Thirdly, the fifth generation of leaders will inherit an
economy that may reach its peak in the near future and begin to slow down
or even halt. After all, no national economy in history has sustained unfettered growth indefinitely.
In the dynastic era, the emperor was considered the ‘son of heaven’, but
his worthiness had to be proven by the welfare of his subjects and his ability
to guarantee order and harmony. In today’s China, no more than two generations can genuinely claim any credit for participating in the revolution.
Attempts by the princelings to promote their own revolutionary credentials,
as disgraced Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai tried to do by encouraging the singing of ‘red songs’ (while simultaneously filling his own pockets
with a large share of the nation’s wealth), have failed. After all, revolutionary movements such as Bo’s ‘red song’ campaign need to be sustained by a
kind of theocracy. But China has become a faithless country: official ideology and revolutionary idealism are things of the past. More importantly,
efforts to invoke revolutionary heroes have only deepened popular mistrust
124 | Lanxin Xiang
of the system, as the princelings’ behaviour and lifestyle is in sharp contrast
to the asceticism and idealism of the early Communists.
In the dynastic era, government bureaucrats kept part of the taxes they
collected as a kind of bonus for services rendered, though with the expectation that the rest of the money would be handed over to the state. What
today’s Communist cadres are doing is worse, for they often collect direct
‘rents’ merely because they hold office. Modern Communist bureaucrats
are too busy collecting capital to read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital; they know
nothing about Kantian notions of man’s propensity for evil and are hardly
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yearning for salvation in any spiritual sense. Since Confucianism deals only
with the problems of this world, life remains a series
The Communist
Party has no
choice
of events, rather than a whole coherently orientated
toward a transcendental end. Thus, the only power
it can provide for the guidance of human conduct is
familial piety based upon a belief in ancestral spirits.
If one’s primary duty is toward specific human beings,
living or dead, it is easy to see how a ruler whose
political legitimacy was essentially inherited would find it difficult to avoid
abusing power.
Today, the Chinese people have grounds to challenge – potentially
through widespread social protest – all three dimensions of the Communist
Party’s legitimacy. To avoid such a fate, the Communist Party has no choice
but to launch political reforms, even if limited ones. Dealing with official
corruption would be a popular move, but without political decentralisation, the vested interest group represented by the princelings would be
extremely hard to crack. Some form of political pluralism would be useful
as a decompression valve, particularly now that the complex demands of
economic globalisation have increased the burden of governance beyond
what the current Chinese system can bear.
It remains to be seen whether the fifth generation of Chinese leaders
will grasp the opportunity to rescue the party and the state. Fortunately, Xi
Jinping is tough, congenial but also pragmatic. He represents a generation
that is, counter-intuitively, the most ‘mature’ of the three generations that
have taken power since the revolutionary veterans faded from the scene.
China and the ‘Pivot’ | 125
The reason for this is accidental: this generation just happened to experience certain key moments in the history of the People’s Republic. The two
generations before them were technocrats, beneficiaries of both the Mao and
Deng eras. The Jiang Zemin (third) generation, for example, not only had
the opportunity to study in the pre-1949 college system, but also benefited
from the reconstruction that followed the revolution. Many of this generation’s members, including Jiang himself, were even able to study in foreign
countries, albeit only those within the Soviet sphere. Members of the Hu
Jintao and Wen Jiabao (fourth) generation are in fact the most limited in
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experience, but also a most lucky generation, for this group was able to complete college before the Cultural Revolution and managed to secure jobs
with relatively handsome pay when Deng Xiaoping decided in the early
1980s to recruit young technocrats into the party hierarchy.
The fifth generation has suffered the most from the ups and downs of
China’s post-revolutionary history. The members of this generation saw
their educations disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and many, such as
Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, the premier-in-waiting, were sent down to the
poorest countryside for a harsh ‘re-education’ programme. (Xi was sent at
the age of 16 and remained in the countryside for six years.) Such formative experiences not only hardened their will, but also exposed them to the
bottom of society, allowing them to see China’s real problems. Once the
Mao era ended, new opportunities to study at college became available to
them, as did opportunities to expose themselves to the Western world. This
experience of rising through the party ranks under such sharply contrasting
social and political conditions has produced an intellectual maturity that no
other generation could really lay claim to.
Because many of China’s fifth-generation leaders have ‘princeling’ backgrounds, China watchers in the West tend to think of them as pampered
and fragile, but this is to misread their collective identity and character. This
generation is pragmatic and flexible, but also intensely patriotic (though not
intensely nationalistic), for they have witnessed the tumultuous development of the People’s Republic and understand how difficult it is for a poor
society to become a prosperous one. A peaceful international environment
has provided a decisive opportunity for China, one that must not be squan-
126 | Lanxin Xiang
dered for short-term gains. Many among the fifth generation have a strong
sense of mission to promote the well-being of the people, and if the system
needs serious repair, they are perhaps less likely to drag their feet in launching serious reforms. Their unique sense of history and political stamina in
politics and foreign relations will be a decisive factor for years to come.
Although Beijing’s repeated assertions of its ‘peaceful rise’ have fallen
on deaf ears in the West, Chinese Confucianism has always stressed
moral adjustment to the world, not rational domination of the world. The
Americans, however, base their moral superiority in foreign relations on
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a set of universal values, including a ‘rise and fall’ perspective on world
history. The two views could not be farther apart. The life-hardened fifth
generation sees no need to accept any American tutelage, as previous generations did. Indeed, Xi’s life experience is arguably much richer than that
of Obama. Even though he has had only very limited foreign-affairs experience, Xi seems to have grasped the gist of the Sino-US relationship, as seen in
the his policy shift towards ‘control and management’. In the coming years,
the Chinese leadership may demonstrate greater willingness to confront
America’s cold-war mindset head-on, but with controlled measures. In the
long run, this approach may prove more effective in engaging Washington.
If the new cold war lasts for a while, China will have time to strengthen its
national security, but if it fizzles out quickly, China’s moral image could
reap the benefits.
Notes
1
For an authoritative view on
China’s alleged assertiveness, see
Jeffrey Bader, Obama and China’s
Rise (Washington DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2012), especially
chapter seven, ‘Dealing with an
Assertive China’.
2 Cao Zhi and Li Xuanliang, ‘Hu Jintao
huijian haijun dangdaihui daibiao’
[Hu Jintao Receives Representatives
of the PLA Navy Party Congress], 6
December 2011, http://www.gov.cn/
ldhd/2011-12/06/content_2012872.
htm.
3 Xi first used this phrase during a
meeting with Henry Paulson in
Beijing on 6 December 2011, and has
since repeated it many times. See,
for example, Xie Huanchi, ‘Xi Jinpin
huijian Baoersen’ [Xi Jinping Meets
Paulson], People’s Daily, 7 December
2011, http://politics.people.com.cn/
GB/1024/16533654.html; and the report
on his visit to the Pentagon published
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8
9
10
by the Central People’s Government
of the People’s Republic of China, 14
February 2012, http://www.gov.cn/
ldhd/2012-02/15/content_2067672.htm.
See ‘China and America Have
Wisdom, Ability and Ways to
Maintain and Develop a Good
Relationship’, Xinhua, 14 February
2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/
world/2012-02/15/c_111528380.htm.
Surprisingly, the Western media did
not pay much attention to this remark.
Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘Hillary Clinton:
Chinese System is Doomed, Leaders
on a “Fool’s Errand”’, Atlantic, 11 May
2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/
international/archive/2011/05/hillaryclinton-chinese-system-is-doomedleaders-on-a-fools-errand/238591/.
‘Why There is a “Trust Deficit” with
China’, Washington Post, 11 February
2012, http://www.washingtonpost.
com/opinions/why-there-is-a-trustdeficit-with-china/2012/02/10/
gIQAjR1x6Q_story.html.
Leon Panetta, ‘The US Rebalance
Towards the Asia-Pacific’, speech at
the 11th IISS Asia Security Summit,
the Shangri-La Dialogue, 2 June
2012, http://www.iiss.org/confer​
ences/the-shangri-la-dialogue/
shangri-la-dialogue-2012/speeches/
first-plenary-session/leon-panetta/.
‘We Should Not Fight with Americans
with Force, but with Wisdom and
Tolerance’, Global Times, 4 June
2012, http://opinion.huanqiu.
com/1152/2012-06/2784041.html.
Panetta, ‘The US Rebalance Towards
the Asia-Pacific’.
Cheng Guangjin and Tan Yingzi,
‘Vice-President Xi’s Trip to Address
“Trust Deficit” with US’, China Daily,
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
10 February 2012, http://www.
chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-02/10/
content_14573690.htm.
For a video of the speech, see http://
www.cnas.org/node/3466.
‘Strategic Reassurance? Yes,
Please!’, People’s Daily, 29 October
2009, http://english.people.com.
cn/90001/90776/90883/6797307.html.
‘Views from China’s Vice President’,
Washington Post, 12 February 2012,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
world/asia_pacific/views-fromchinas-vice-president/2012/02/08/
gIQATMyj9Q_story_1.html.
David Calleo, ‘American Decline
Revisited’, Survival: Global Politics
and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–
September 2010, p. 215.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of
Great Powers (New York: Random
House, 1987), p. 447.
See Martin Jacques, When China Rules
the World: The End of the Western World
and the Birth of a New Global Order (New
York: The Penguin Press, 2009); Stefan
Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s
Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic
Books, 2010); and Loretta Napoleoni,
Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists
Make Better Capitalists Than We Do (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).
Angus Maddison, ‘Chinese Economic
Performance in the Long Run: Second
Edition, Revised and Updated
960–2030), Development Centre
of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development,
2007, Table 2.2a (‘Shares of World
GDP, ‘1700–2030 AD’), p. 44, http://
browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/
product/4107091e.pdf.
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