The China-to-be sees a future worth creating

ìChina: Collision Course?î by Thomas A. Metzger, Hoover Digest 2004 (No. 3), found at http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/043/toc043.html.

Good article from a scholar who seems to understand China well. I got it from a reader, Steve Ballou. Hereís the key excerpt:

U.S.-Chinese relations today involve not only a familiar list of frictions and shared interests but also a kind of diffuse tension. This is expressed most obviously in competing moral judgments: the U.S. complaint that China is undemocratic and the Chinese charge that U.S. foreign policy is hegemonic. It also entails the clash between the American belief that the leading position of the United States in the international world is entirely appropriate and the common Chinese belief that, in a normal world, China would be at the top of the global hierarchy of power and prestige. Yet it is also due to the fact that the political reasoning of both sides entails assumptions about the nature of the conditions governing all human life east and west-the nature of knowledge, of political practicability, of human nature, and of history-and the assumptions each side makes about these conditions do not make sense to the other. Culture counts-on both sides of the Pacific.

To see how culturally deep-rooted assumptions shape the Chinese outlook on U.S.-Chinese relations, one can look at a scholarly book published in 2003 on security questions in the Asia-Pacific area. It was written by Su Hao, an associate professor at the College of International Relations in Beijing, a prestigious institution under the Ministry of Foreign Relations, many of whose graduates become foreign service officers. With three years spent studying at top U.S. and British universities, Su is a sophisticated scholar well aware that relations between nations are a complex mix of trustful cooperation based on shared interests and distrustful competition stemming from conflicts of interests. In his view, however, this mixture is not a permanent feature of the international scene. It has been made obsolete by recent historical developments, such as globalization, the end of the Cold War, and global ecological problems. For Su, it is undeniable that global history is now irresistibly moving into an era when international relations will be based purely on trustful cooperation. This amazingly utopian belief of his raises few if any eyebrows in the Chinese world. The teleological vision of history from which it stems is by no means peculiar to Su or his partly Maoist ideology: it permeates just about all modern Chinese political thought.

From this standpoint, international relations cannot just focus on pragmatic discussions of specific policy disagreements. They also necessarily entail a confrontation between moral, rational nations acting in accord with the tide of history to build a world based on trustful cooperation and immoral, irrational nations acting against this global tide by continuing to treat other nations in a distrustful, adversarial way.

This culturally deep-rooted dichotomy in turn translates into a systemic confrontation between China and the United States. Given this dichotomy, few Chinese will ever conclude that the nation doing its best to follow this historical tide is the United States, not China. Their conclusion will necessarily be that, in continuing to emphasize its bilateral treaties with Pacific nations and its position of naval primacy in the Pacific, the United States is irrationally resisting the current tide of history, seeking "hegemonic" control of world affairs, and so threatening China. Such indeed is Su's conclusion, even though he greatly admires the United States and strongly favors the current rapprochement between our two nations. When one takes into account this Chinese vision of history, one can see that the tension in U.S.-Chinese relations is not created only or even mainly by specific policy disagreements. Yet this tension between China and the United States is also generated by prominent American ways of defining the nature of international relations.

I read this and I feel very good about Beijing University Press doing a Chinese translation of PNM, because it tells me that this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

I hope I get a chance to meet Prof. Su when I lecture at Beijing U next week. I want to tell him that there are plenty on our side who also recognize his global future worth creating.