“What do you think of the French Revolution?” Chinese supremo Deng Xiaoping was once asked.
‘It’s too early to tell,” replied the pragmatic reformist. Deng was not being coy; his answer typifies the way in which China views history. In a country about to celebrate its 4 705th calendar year on February 7, it is not centuries but millenia that count.
It’s a popular notion that the 21st century might belong to China, just as the 20th was the so-called American Century. Much of the reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos has focused on the so-called rise of Asia, and how India and China could not only counterbalance but also surpass the West. In general, the Western media has been overheated and fearful at the prospect, and utterly lacking in the sort of historical perspective and patience of Deng’s answer. China’s rise is surprising only if its position as the world’s most powerful nation until about 200 years ago is discounted.
It is conveniently forgotten, or even not known, that China and India accounted for almost two-thirds of the world’s manufactured products until Britain and other European powers pursued greatness on the back of colonial conquest and destruction of local manufacturing throughout Asia.
Empires are a contentious issue, of course. China itself has always maintained that is it not, and has no ambition to be, an imperial power. But for Rob Gifford, in his informed and insightful China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Bloomsbury), ‘— China is the Last Great Empire — wanting to go forward as a modern nation-state, but encumbered with the constraints of an empire that can only be held together by force”.
Gifford notes that ‘few Chinese people admit this”. Even if one disagrees with him, Gifford knows a great deal about contemporary China, having spent two decades there, studying and later working as Beijing correspondent for National Public Radio from 1999 to 2005.
Gifford said a long goodbye to China in the northern summer of 2005, travelling for a second time the great trunk road, Route 312, from Shanghai in the east to Korgaz in the west, on China’s border with Kazakhstan.
It’s a journey epic in proportions — 4 800km — but intimate in scope, as Gifford gives us the thoughts and words of ordinary Chinese, from the Old Hundred Names truck drivers who give him lifts to the people of the ‘Aids villages” who contracted the virus from selling blood. Very usefully, he provides pronunciation guides to names, not only of cities and towns along the way and important figures in Chinese history, but of all his interlocutors.
Add judicious sprinklings of contextualising history and wisdom from his reporting experiences in the country and the result is a people’s perspective of — and prospective for — China, a look at the country from the bottom up, and all the more valuable and poignant for that. (In that it brings to mind South African poet Robert Berold’s sensitive record of his experiences teaching and living in China for a year, Meanwhile Don’t Push and Squeeze, published here by Jacana Media late last year.)
China’s relentless pursuit of the cutting edge in everything arises in part from a desire to regain its position in the world. As John Darwin notes in his magisterial but accessible After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (Allen Lane): ‘The greatest puzzle in Chinese history is why the extraordinary dynamism that had created the largest and richest commercial economy in the world seemed to dribble away after 1400.”
China led in the technical ingenuity and social innovations demanded by a market economy, writes Darwin, and so it should have ‘accelerated towards, and through, an industrial revolution” rather than the West. China is one part of Darwin’s fascinating fabric, which proceeds from Tamerlane’s (relative) failure to establish the ‘world island” — Eurasia — as a single empire.
The book sets Europe in the much broader context of Eurasia, North Africa and the Middle East (though ‘Middle East” is still very much a European construct, a theme that Darwin does not take up). Crucially, it identifies the European brand of empire from others: this qualitative difference is in expropriation of land and people, not merely their accumulation.
Most significantly, Darwin is sceptical about what he pointedly encloses in quotation marks as ‘globalization”, and he hints quietly that vernacular cultures and the nation state can indeed withstand ‘the invasive effects of the world of free movement in information, people and goods”.
Such resistance arguably has already begun. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso) by the great Marxist sociologist Giovanni Arrighi contends that the greatest historical theme of the second half of the 20th century is the economic renaissance of East Asia. That is exactly right: it is a rebirth, not a rise from nowhere. (Liberal and neo-conservative commentators can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that among the preconditions for what they call China’s ‘rise” was the industrialisation-by-nationalisation that Mao Xedong set rolling.)
Arrighi has a profound thesis: ‘The failure of the Project for a New American Century and the success of Chinese economic development, taken jointly, have made the realisation of Smith’s vision of a world-market society based on greater equality among the world’s civilizations more likely than it ever was in the almost two and a half centuries since the publication of The Wealth of Nations.”
Arrighi can be opaque, even impenetrable, both in his books and New Left Review articles. Acknowledging that, his preface here allows that readers might skip certain sections and chapters, but he maintains that they will still be able to grasp the book’s two prongs: the renaissance of East Asia and the true fruition of Adam Smith’s thought in 21st-century Beijing.
Though the first seems unquestionable, almost part of conventional wisdom, Arrighi is cogent and very technical in making his arguments. But it is his second thesis that is revolutionary because it reminds those who know and informs many who claim to but don’t what Adam Smith really advocated: not a free-for-all benefiting a handful of rich and powerful nations, but a non-capitalist market economy that produces wealth for all nations.
It is just such an economy that Arrighi foresees arising in China in this century. He is persuasive, but maybe we should heed Deng and respond, ‘It’s too early to tell.”