The 21st century will be the Chinese century -- maybe we should all learn to speak Chinese already

1. Why Washington Can't Speak Chinese -- by Lanxin Xiang

The world's preoccupation with China's sudden rise as an economic superpower is a matter of some bemusement among Chinese political leaders and intellectuals. Massive trade surpluses with the rest of the world? The embrace of free markets and globalization? The Chinese have been there before. As we see it, this is not China's rise, but rather its restoration to its historical position of global influence.

Today's restoration constitutes China's third great encounter with the West, following the Jesuit missions of the 16th century and the Opium Wars of the 1800s. The current encounter -- this time between equals -- will produce much more than economic competition with the United States. As China's economic strength grows, no one, not even the Chinese ourselves, can prevent China's influence from spreading into politics, values and ideology. It is in those arenas that conflicts with the United States can arise, and unfortunately, it is precisely in those areas that misunderstandings between the two nations run rampant.

When I was the Henry Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress two years ago, I was both amused and appalled to learn that most China policy analysts in Washington were still focused on Western political concerns such as how to democratize China or old-fashioned security issues such as how to strike a balance of power within Asia. As a result, I frequently encountered books and articles about the region with sensationalistic and melodramatic titles, such as "Taming the Red Dragon." Aaron L. Friedberg, who later was Vice President Cheney's deputy national security adviser, served up such works as "The Struggle for Mastery in Asia."

Such are the preoccupations of a self-proclaimed indispensable superpower. This hubris was as evident in the Bush administration as it had been among President Bill Clinton's foreign policy elite. Except for a sober corner at the National Intelligence Council, Washington seemed to have turned into ancient Rome, believing it could manage the world singlehandedly, with or without friends.

Sadly, when it comes to China, most Washington think tanks have stopped thinking. Perhaps hoping to double their research funding, U.S. analysts tend to decouple China's domestic politics from its foreign policy and assess the two separately. Many also assume that Chinese leaders will shift their behavior only in response to well-designed external pressures, completely disregarding the role of domestic realities. (Perhaps this is why poor Chinese-language competence in Washington think tanks is no deterrent to the proliferation of China-related reports, briefing papers and strategies.) Only neoconservatives such as Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and Pentagon adviser Michael Pillsbury seemed to understand the link between a country's external behavior and its internal politics, though whether they fully understand China is a different matter.

Chinese leaders never separate the domestic from the external. When Mao Zedong met Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972, Nixon made a somewhat flattering remark: "You have changed the world." Nixon, of course, was referring to the Cold War bipolar system. But Mao's answer reflected a different view. "No, I did not change the world, only the downtown or perhaps suburban Beijing." He was thinking of domestic politics, lamenting that his Cultural Revolution, as brutal as it was, failed to change the Chinese way of life.

Whatever grand global visions Chinese president Hu Jintao might trade with President Bush in his visit to Washington this week, one thing is certain: When Hu wakes up every morning, foreign policy is far from his mind. Are farmers satisfied with the recent government decision on agricultural taxes? Would a revaluation of the yuan push millions of low-wage textile workers into the streets? And why is former president Jiang Zemin still active in politics behind the scenes? Such concerns dominate Hu's daily activities.

Washington's policy elites hardly deserve all the blame for the lack of mutual understanding. For a long time, Chinese leaders have been incapable of explaining China to the outside world. When the Chinese invent a foreign policy theme, they often deploy coded language that leads to more confusion than clarity on the international front.

A good example is Beijing's recent drive for a non-ideological foreign policy under the motto of "China's Peaceful Rise." Publicly, Chinese leaders stress the twin intentions of the Peaceful Rise: embracing economic globalization and avoiding a Cold War-style confrontation with the West. In reality, the concept is muddled. If China's ascent concludes peacefully, what happens once it reaches the top? Could it then use force to seek global hegemony? And since no country remains on top forever, how would China deal with an eventual fall?

The concept's inventor, a former Communist Party propaganda chief named Zheng Bijian, is a key adviser to Hu. He recognizes that the Chinese Communist Party has a legitimacy problem at home and must undergo reforms for one-party rule to survive. The Peaceful Rise is essentially a way of seeking a soft landing for China's political system -- a global peace offering that masks the leadership's true intention of prolonging its grip on power by maintaining economic momentum.

Zheng's Peaceful Rise has met strong resistance from the Chinese Foreign Ministry as well as the People's Liberation Army. The former criticizes the effort as a self-indulgent pipe dream, while the latter attacks it for tying the military's hands in case Taiwan must be dealt with by force.

Strangely enough, it was the Americans who rescued Zheng's line from near extinction. Last September, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick officially embraced the Peaceful Rise in a major speech in which he also called on China to become a responsible "stakeholder" in global affairs. The term confused China's leaders; Zheng (along with some Washington think tankers) took it to mean that China would become an equal partner with the United States, while others interpreted it as a reference to gambling with high stakes. Either way, the U.S. policy elite appears divided on the Peaceful Rise. The neocons dismiss it as just another communist plot, whereas realists such as Zoellick seem happy to play along with the notion of Chinese self-restraint.

The Iraq war showed two sides of the West -- one Greek (Europe) and the other Roman (the United States). With the two increasingly split, China is finding space to restore its tradition, power and role in the world. The decline of America's global appeal means that the world is seeking ideas beyond the simplistic Bush model of "with us or against us." For Chinese leaders, politics needn't be a stark choice between dictatorship and democracy -- there can be alternatives that maintain diversity and multiculturalism. The European Union has already become a genuinely secular community in contrast to the religious trend in the United States; through its integration project, it has officially moved beyond the logics of good vs. evil or balance of power and hegemony. There is also no lack of eager audience for Chinese values in Latin America, which has been burned by the Western liberal model before.

Unfortunately, the task of explaining China to the world remains in the hands of propaganda chiefs such as Zheng who know very little about geopolitics. Their task is even called "external propaganda," hardly a promising starting point. Simply parroting vague foreign policy slogans will not produce a peaceful landing for the Chinese political system; to the contrary, China's current value-free foreign policy only reveals to the world that China has not developed a political and cultural message to go with its commercial clout.

If China insists on the validity of its own development model at home, it must effectively explain how the world can remain safe for all civilizations. China's leaders must prove -- rather than just assert -- that China's restoration will not produce an inevitable conflict with the superpower of the day.

(xiang@hei.unige.ch Lanxin Xiang is director of the China Center at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.)


2. Containing China -- by Michael T. Klare

Slowly but surely, the grand strategy of the Bush administration is being revealed. It is not aimed primarily at the defeat of global terrorism, the incapacitation of rogue states, or the spread of democracy in the Middle East. These may dominate the rhetorical arena and be the focus of immediate concern, but they do not govern key decisions regarding the allocation of long-term military resources. The truly commanding objective -- the underlying basis for budgets and troop deployments -- is the containment of China. This objective governed White House planning during the administration's first seven months in office, only to be set aside by the perceived obligation to highlight anti-terrorism after 9/11; but now, despite Bush's preoccupation with Iraq and Iran, the White House is also reemphasizing its paramount focus on China, risking a new Asian arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences.

President Bush and his top aides entered the White House in early 2001 with a clear strategic objective: to resurrect the permanent-dominance doctrine spelled out in the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for fiscal years 1994-99, the first formal statement of U.S. strategic goals in the post-Soviet era. According to the initial official draft of this document, as leaked to the press in early 1992, the primary aim of U.S. strategy would be to bar the rise of any future competitor that might challenge America's overwhelming military superiority.
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival... that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union," the document stated. Accordingly, "we [must] endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."
When initially made public, this doctrine was condemned by America's allies and many domestic leaders as being unacceptably imperial as well as imperious, forcing the first President Bush to water it down; but the goal of perpetuating America's sole-superpower status has never been rejected by administration strategists. In fact, it initially became the overarching principle for U.S. military policy when the younger Bush assumed the presidency in February 2001.

Target: China

When first enunciated in 1992, the permanent-dominancy doctrine was non-specific as to the identity of the future challengers whose rise was to be prevented through coercive action. At that time, U.S. strategists worried about a medley of potential rivals, including Russia, Germany, India, Japan, and China; any of these, it was thought, might emerge in decades to come as would-be superpowers, and so all would have to be deterred from moving in this direction. By the time the second Bush administration came into office, however, the pool of potential rivals had been narrowed in elite thinking to just one: the People's Republic of China. Only China, it was claimed, possessed the economic and military capacity to challenge the United States as an aspiring superpower; and so perpetuating U.S. global predominance meant containing Chinese power.

The imperative of containing China was first spelled out in a systematic way by Condoleezza Rice while serving as a foreign policy adviser to then Governor George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. In a much-cited article in Foreign Affairs , she suggested that the PRC, as an ambitious rising power, would inevitably challenge vital U.S. interests. "China is a great power with unresolved vital interests, particularly concerning Taiwan," she wrote. "China also resents the role of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region."

For these reasons, she stated, "China is not a ‘status quo' power but one that would like to alter Asia's balance of power in its own favor. That alone makes it a strategic competitor, not the ‘strategic partner' the Clinton administration once called it." It was essential, she argued, to adopt a strategy that would prevent China's rise as regional power. In particular, "The United States must deepen its cooperation with Japan and South Korea and maintain its commitment to a robust military presence in the region." Washington should also "pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance," and bring that country into an anti-Chinese alliance system.

Looking back, it is striking how this article developed the allow-no-competitors doctrine of the 1992 DPG into the very strategy now being implemented by the Bush administration in the Pacific and South Asia. Many of the specific policies advocated in her piece, from strengthened ties with Japan to making overtures to India, are being carried out today.

In the spring and summer of 2001, however, the most significant effect of this strategic focus was to distract Rice and other senior administration officials from the growing threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. During her first months in office as the president's senior adviser for national security affairs, Rice devoted herself to implementing the plan she had spelled out in Foreign Affairs . By all accounts, her top priorities in that early period were dissolving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and linking Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan into a joint missile defense system, which, it was hoped, would ultimately evolve into a Pentagon-anchored anti-Chinese alliance.

Richard A. Clarke, the senior White House adviser on counter-terrorism, later charged that, because of her preoccupation with Russia, China, and great power politics, Rice overlooked warnings of a possible Al Qaeda attack on the United States and thus failed to initiate defensive actions that might have prevented 9/11. Although Rice survived tough questioning on this matter by the 9/11 Commission without acknowledging the accuracy of Clarke's charges, any careful historian, seeking answers for the Bush administration's inexcusable failure to heed warnings of a potential terrorist strike on this country, must begin with its overarching focus on containing China during this critical period.

China on the Back Burner

After September 11th, it would have been unseemly for Bush, Rice, and other top administration officials to push their China agenda -- and in any case they quickly shifted focus to a long-term neocon objective, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the projection of American power throughout the Middle East. So the "global war on terror" (or GWOT, in Pentagon-speak) became their major talking point and the invasion of Iraq their major focus. But the administration never completely lost sight of its strategic focus on China, even when it could do little on the subject. Indeed, the lightning war on Iraq and the further projection of American power into the Middle East was intended, at least in part, as a warning to China of the overwhelming might of the American military and the futility of challenging U.S. supremacy.

For the next two years, when so much effort was devoted to rebuilding Iraq in America's image and crushing an unexpected and potent Iraqi insurgency, China was distinctly on the back-burner. In the meantime, however, China's increased investment in modern military capabilities and its growing economic reach in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America -- much of it tied to the procurement of oil and other vital commodities -- could not be ignored.

By the spring of 2005, the White House was already turning back to Rice's global grand strategy. On June 4, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a much-publicized speech at a conference in Singapore, signaling what was to be a new emphasis in White House policymaking, in which he decried China's ongoing military buildup and warned of the threat it posed to regional peace and stability.

China, he claimed, was "expanding its missile forces, allowing them to reach targets in many areas of the world" and "improving its ability to project power" in the Asia-Pacific region. Then, with sublime disingenuousness, he added, "Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?" Although Rumsfeld did not answer his questions, the implication was obvious: China was now embarked on a course that would make it a regional power, thus threatening one day to present a challenge to the United States in Asia on unacceptably equal terms.

This early sign of the ratcheting up of anti-Chinese rhetoric was accompanied by acts of a more concrete nature. In February 2005, Rice and Rumsfeld hosted a meeting in Washington with top Japanese officials at which an agreement was signed to improve cooperation in military affairs between the two countries. Known as the "Joint Statement of the U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee," the agreement called for greater collaboration between American and Japanese forces in the conduct of military operations in an area stretching from Northeast Asia to the South China Sea. It also called for close consultation on policies regarding Taiwan, an implicit hint that Japan was prepared to assist the United States in the event of a military clash with China precipitated by Taiwan's declaring its independence.

This came at a time when Beijing was already expressing considerable alarm over pro-independence moves in Taiwan and what the Chinese saw as a revival of militarism in Japan -- thus evoking painful memories of World War II, when Japan invaded China and committed massive atrocities against Chinese civilians. Understandably then, the agreement could only be interpreted by the Chinese leadership as an expression of the Bush administration's determination to bolster an anti-Chinese alliance system.

The New Grand Chessboard

Why did the White House choose this particular moment to revive its drive to contain China? Many factors no doubt contributed to this turnaround, but surely the most significant was a perception that China had finally emerged as a major regional power in its own right and was beginning to contest America's long-term dominance of the Asia-Pacific region. To some degree this was manifested -- so the Pentagon claimed -- in military terms, as Beijing began to replace Soviet-type, Korean War-vintage weapons with more modern (though hardly cutting-edge) Russian designs.

It was not China's military moves, however, that truly alarmed American policymakers -- most professional analysts are well aware of the continuing inferiority of Chinese weaponry -- but rather Beijing's success in using its enormous purchasing power and hunger for resources to establish friendly ties with such long-standing U.S. allies as Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia. Because the Bush administration had done little to contest this trend while focusing on the war in Iraq, China's rapid gains in Southeast Asia finally began to ring alarm bells in Washington.

At the same time, Republican strategists were becoming increasingly concerned by growing Chinese involvement in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia -- areas considered of vital geopolitical importance to the United States because of the vast reserves of oil and natural gas buried there. Much influenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Geostrategic Imperatives first highlighted the critical importance of Central Asia, these strategists sought to counter Chinese inroads. Although Brzezinski himself has largely been excluded from elite Republican circles because of his association with the much-despised Carter administration, his call for a coordinated U.S. drive to dominate both the eastern and western rimlands of China has been embraced by senior administration strategists.

In this way, Washington's concern over growing Chinese influence in Southeast Asia has come to be intertwined with the U.S. drive for hegemony in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. This has given China policy an even more elevated significance in Washington -- and helps explain its return with a passion despite the seemingly all-consuming preoccupations of the war in Iraq.

Whatever the exact balance of factors, the Bush administration is now clearly engaged in a coordinated, systematic effort to contain Chinese power and influence in Asia. This effort appears to have three broad objectives: to convert existing relations with Japan, Australia, and South Korea into a robust, integrated anti-Chinese alliance system; to bring other nations, especially India, into this system; and to expand U.S. military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.

Since the administration's campaign to bolster ties with Japan commenced a year ago, the two countries have been meeting continuously to devise protocols for the implementation of their 2005 strategic agreement. In October, Washington and Tokyo released the Alliance Transformation and Realignment Report, which is to guide the further integration of U.S. and Japanese forces in the Pacific and the simultaneous restructuring of the U.S. basing system in Japan. (Some of these bases, especially those on Okinawa, have become a source of friction in U.S.-Japanese relations and so the Pentagon is now considering ways to downsize the most objectionable installations.) Japanese and American officers are also engaged in a joint "interoperability" study, aimed at smoothing the "interface" between U.S. and Japanese combat and communications systems. "Close collaboration is also ongoing for cooperative missile defense," reports Admiral William J. Fallon, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command ( PACOM ).

Steps have also been taken in this ongoing campaign to weld South Korea and Australia more tightly to the U.S.-Japanese alliance system. South Korea has long been reluctant to work closely with Japan because of that country's brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and lingering fears of Japanese militarism; now, however, the Bush administration is promoting what it calls "trilateral military cooperation" between Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington. As indicated by Admiral Fallon , this initiative has an explicitly anti-Chinese dimension. America's ties with South Korea must adapt to "the changing security environment" represented by "China's military modernization," Fallon told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7. By cooperating with the U.S. and Japan, he continued, South Korea will move from an overwhelming focus on North Korea to "a more regional view of security and stability."

Bringing Australia into this emerging anti-Chinese network has been a major priority of Condoleezza Rice, who spent several days there in mid-March. Although designed in part to bolster U.S.-Australian ties (largely neglected by Washington over the past few years), the main purpose of her visit was to host a meeting of top officials from Australia, the U.S., and Japan to develop a common strategy for curbing China's rising influence in Asia. No formal results were announced, but Steven Weisman of the New York Times reported on March 19 that Rice convened the meeting "to deepen a three-way regional alliance aimed in part at balancing the spreading presence of China."

An even bigger prize, in Washington's view, would be the integration of India into this emerging alliance system, a possibility first suggested in Rice's Foreign Affairs article. Such a move was long frustrated by congressional objections to India's nuclear weapons program and its refusal to sign on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Under U.S. law, nations like India that refuse to cooperate in non-proliferation measures can be excluded from various forms of aid and cooperation. To overcome this problem, President Bush met with Indian officials in New Delhi in March and negotiated a nuclear accord that will open India's civilian reactors to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection, thus providing a thin gloss of non-proliferation cooperation to India's robust nuclear weapons program. If Congress approves Bush's plan, the United States will be free to provide nuclear assistance to India and, in the process, significantly expand already growing military-to-military ties.

In signing the nuclear pact with India, Bush did not allude to the administration's anti-Chinese agenda, saying only that it would lay the foundation for a "durable defense relationship." But few have been fooled by this vague characterization. According to Weisman of the Times , most U.S. lawmakers view the nuclear accord as an expression of the administration's desire to convert India into "a counterweight to China."

The China Build-up Begins

Accompanying all these diplomatic initiatives has been a vigorous, if largely unheralded, effort by the Department of Defense (DoD) to bolster U.S. military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.

The broad sweep of American strategy was first spelled out in the Pentagon's most recent policy assessment, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), released on February 5, 2006. In discussing long-term threats to U.S. security, the QDR begins with a reaffirmation of the overarching precept first articulated in the DPG of 1992: that the United States will not allow the rise of a competing superpower. This country "will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States," the document states. It then identifies China as the most likely and dangerous competitor of this sort. "Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional U.S. military advantages" -- then adding the kicker, "absent U.S. counter strategies."

According to the Pentagon, the task of countering future Chinese military capabilities largely entails the development, and then procurement, of major weapons systems that would ensure U.S. success in any full-scale military confrontation. "The United States will develop capabilities that would present any adversary with complex and multidimensional challenges and complicate its offensive planning efforts," the QDR explains. These include the steady enhancement of such "enduring U.S. advantages" as "long-range strike, stealth, operational maneuver and sustainment of air, sea, and ground forces at strategic distances, air dominance, and undersea warfare."

Preparing for war with China, in other words, is to be the future cash cow for the giant U.S. weapons-making corporations in the military-industrial complex. It will, for instance, be the primary justification for the acquisition of costly new weapons systems such as the F-22A Raptor air-superiority fighter, the multi-service Joint Strike Fighter, the DDX destroyer, the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, and a new, intercontinental penetrating bomber -- weapons that would just have utility in an all-out encounter with another great-power adversary of a sort that only China might someday become.

In addition to these weapons programs, the QDR also calls for a stiffening of present U.S. combat forces in Asia and the Pacific, with a particular emphasis on the Navy (the arm of the military least utilized in the ongoing occupation of and war in Iraq). "The fleet will have greater presence in the Pacific Ocean," the document notes. To achieve this, "The Navy plans to adjust its force posture and basing to provide at least six operationally available and sustainable [aircraft] carriers and 60% of its submarines in the Pacific to support engagement, presence and deterrence." Since each of these carriers is, in fact, but the core of a large array of support ships and protective aircraft, this move is sure to entail a truly vast buildup of U.S. naval capabilities in the Western Pacific and will certainly necessitate a substantial expansion of the American basing complex in the region -- a requirement that is already receiving close attention from Admiral Fallon and his staff at PACOM. To assess the operational demands of this buildup, moreover, this summer the U.S. Navy will conduct its most extensive military maneuvers in the Western Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War, with four aircraft carrier battle groups and many support ships expected to participate.

Add all of this together, and the resulting strategy cannot be viewed as anything but a systematic campaign of containment. No high administration official may say this in so many words, but it is impossible to interpret the recent moves of Rice and Rumsfeld in any other manner. From Beijing's perspective, the reality must be unmistakable: a steady buildup of American military power along China's eastern, southern, and western boundaries.

How will China respond to this threat? For now, it appears to be relying on charm and the conspicuous blandishment of economic benefits to loosen Australian, South Korean, and even Indian ties with the United States. To a certain extent, this strategy is meeting with success, as these countries seek to profit from the extraordinary economic boom now under way in China – fueled to a considerable extent by oil, gas, iron, timber, and other materials supplied by China's neighbors in Asia. A version of this strategy is also being employed by President Hu Jintao during his current visit to the United States. As China's money is sprinkled liberally among influential firms like Boeing and Microsoft, Hu is reminding the corporate wing of the Republican Party that there are vast economic benefits still to be had by pursuing a non-threatening stance toward China.

China, however, has always responded to perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous and muscular fashion as well, and so we should assume that Beijing will balance all that charm with a military buildup of its own. Such a drive will not bring China to the brink of military equality with the United States -- that is not a condition it can realistically aspire to over the next few decades. But it will provide further justification for those in the United States who seek to accelerate the containment of China, and so will produce a self-fulfilling loop of distrust, competition, and crisis. This will make the amicable long-term settlement of the Taiwan problem and of North Korea's nuclear program that much more difficult, and increase the risk of unintended escalation to full-scale war in Asia. There can be no victors from such a conflagration.

(Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum”)


3. The Resurgence of Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era:
China’s much-vaunted “peaceful rise” is shadowed by a resurgent nationalism that has become a key factor in the ruling party’s political calculations, says Christopher R Hughes

China is now accepted as a major force in the world’s economic and security systems, having joined the World Trade Organisation and aligned itself with the United States in the “war on terror”. And with the 2008 Olympic Games awarded to Beijing, the country is also on its way to establishing a newly respectable cultural status. Yet incidents such as the anti-Japanese protests which rocked Shanghai in spring 2005 (after Tokyo approved new school textbooks that the Chinese say played down Japan’s wartime atrocities) still raise questions about the kind of society China is becoming. How the rise of popular nationalism might influence its foreign policy is an issue of particular concern.

The resurgence of Chinese nationalism that has taken place since the mid-1990s can be seen as a “bottom up” phenomenon, with popular opinion constraining the options open to decision-makers. On one hand, China’s leaders and academics go to great lengths to present the “rise of China” as “peaceful” and emphasise “good neighbourliness” in forging relations with neighbouring states. On the other hand, popular writers win their place in a burgeoning commercial market by speaking ominously about “China under the shadow of globalisation”, or despairing over the lack of national self-confidence revealed by the proliferation of signs advertising “China’s Long Island” and “The Manhattan of the East”.

Whenever tensions rise with Washington, Tokyo or Taipei, Chinese internet bulletin boards are bombarded by correspondents demanding that their government adopt a tougher stance. The Shanghai demonstrations were merely the latest in a stream of such outbreaks, starting with the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96 (when China conducted a series of missile tests in the waters surrounding Taiwan) and running through the 1999 Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (where then-president Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia was thought to have been visiting).

Nation and class

Such a “bottom up” interpretation has to be called into question, however, by the particular nature of China’s ideological and institutional systems. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed nationalism at the centre of its claim to maintain a monopoly on political power ever since the days of Mao Zedong’s leadership. For decades, the party has consistently claimed it is entitled to hold a monopoly on political power because of its credentials as the saviour and guardian of a nation threatened and humiliated by a coalition of enemies, both within and abroad. Rather than disappearing with Mao’s demise, the narrative of the CCP leading the nation to victory in the war against Japan and in the civil-war struggle with the Nationalists has been given new significance during the period of “reform and opening” that began in the late 1970s.

At the heart of the ideological orthodoxy of “Deng Xiaoping Theory” lies a call for loyalty to the nation rather than class struggle and socialist egalitarianism. And according to ideological orthodoxy, loyalty to the nation means loyalty to the CCP.

An important aspect of this strengthening of the nationalistic elements of CCP ideology is the need to suppress popular calls for political reform that have accompanied the departure from socialist egalitarianism and class struggle. When Deng crushed calls for democracy during the “ Beijing spring ” of 1979, he insisted that what the “scarred generation” of the Cultural Revolution needed was not democracy but a revival of the patriotic values that had been cherished by the young in the days before and after liberation. Dissidents were condemned as the lackeys of enemy foreign powers.

This use of patriotism to legitimate the CCP dictatorship under “reform and opening” is what makes demonstrators and dissidents attempt to legitimate their own positions by capturing the patriotic high-ground. In response, the CCP has to constantly reinforce its own nationalistic credentials.

This was most evident when a “patriotic education campaign” was launched after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, deploying emotive memories of the “hundred years of humiliation” that began with the “ opium war ” in 1840 and finished with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Special emphasis was given to recalling the war against Japan and the civil war with the Nationalists, with traumatic events such as the 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing – considered the Japanese military’s most infamous war crime – singled out to remind the population that the CCP is the party of national salvation.

Yet despite this ratcheting up of patriotic emotions under “reform and opening”, the CCP leadership has also had to ensure that its version of nationalism is compatible with the economic requirements of attracting foreign investment and know-how. This dilemma goes back at least as far as the attempts by Confucianist reformers of the 19th century to preserve the imperial system by using foreign “functional knowledge” ( yong ) to preserve Chinese essence ( ti ). It can currently be seen in such programs as the claim to be building a Chinese “socialist spiritual civilisation”, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. While such a formula can appeal to conservatives who want to combat “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalisation” from abroad, it can also be calibrated to allow the incorporation of fashionable themes such as the “world scientific and technological revolution”.

The overall result is a peculiar globalisation of nationalism that allows some sense to be made of oxymoronic concepts like the “ socialist market economy ”. It also provides an ideological justification for the emergence of an elitist techno-nationalism appropriate for the current generation of leaders. This was systematically formulated as party orthodoxy when the theory of the “ Three Represents ” – coined by then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemim – was put alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as an element of the party line at the Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002.

Politics and voice

Social groups that have arisen under the impact of market mechanisms and the belief that science and education can “rejuvenate the nation” have been given a new political status; at the same time, entrepreneurs, technical personnel and managers of non-public and foreign enterprises have been recognised as “ builders of socialism with Chinese characteristics ”, allowing them to join the CCP.

This globalistic nationalism, however, also remains open to appropriation by actors who feel it is their duty to speak out for those whose security and welfare are being eroded under “reform and opening”, including many of the “intellectuals” and educators upon whom the party relies to safeguard and disseminate its orthodoxy. Since the mid-1980s, there has been a strong tendency for demonstrators angry over issues ranging from corruption to poor campus food to identify themselves with iconic nationalistic student movements from the past, frequently choosing to bring their activities to a head on the anniversaries of well-known patriotic movements.

Those who demonstrated in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 identified themselves with the May Fourth patriotic student movement, so-named after the demonstrations on that date in Peking in 1919, expressing outrage against the weakness of a government that allowed the transfer of German territorial possessions in China to Japan at the Paris peace conference. This is one reason why the Chinese authorities decided to stop the anti-Japanese demonstrations before the arrival of 4 May 2005.

Growing discontent has meant that nationalist politics has been fed into broader public discussions of key policy areas, especially as the internet and a commercialised publishing industry have opened up new spaces for dissent. Yet it is the particular characteristics of the CCP version of nationalism that gives such protest its broader significance.

At the root of this linkage is the way in which Deng Xiaoping Theory justifies economic reform by making it the condition for successfully opposing “international hegemony” and bringing about the “unification of the motherland with Taiwan”. When Deng listed these goals as the “three main historical tasks” for the CCP leadership in January 1980 , he created a linkage between areas of policy-making that has become a hostage to fortune for his successors.

The use by the CCP elite of symbols of the great Han cultural tradition to appeal for domestic unity, for example, does not sit well with the official policy towards the non-Han groups in the border areas of Tibet and Xinjiang: that the People’s Republic is a multi-national state in which all ethnic groups are equal. Conversely, many residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong reject the reduction of patriotism to loyalty to the CCP by using democratic notions of sovereignty when they are appealed to on the basis that they are all “descendants of the Yellow Emperor”.

Balancing the patriotic rhetoric that the CCP aims at its domestic audience has become particularly difficult to reconcile with the conduct of foreign policy since 1988, when the Beijing municipal authorities prohibited demonstrations against atrocities committed against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. For neighbouring states, the credibility of China’s “peaceful rise” has to be put in the balance with popular demonstrations against Japan and the United States, Beijing’s refusal to rule out the use of force to unify with Taiwan and a rapid arms build-up.

The current Chinese leaders now face the nightmare scenario of a presidential election in Taiwan in March 2008 (and probably a referendum related to the island’s international status), just before Beijing hosts the Olympic Games. From this perspective, the 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations are just a blip in a much broader and longer-term struggle over the legitimacy of CCP leadership.

It is true that such challenges can be seen as the result of “bottom up” pressures from an increasingly restive population. However, such problems could not be used by a variety of actors if China’s leaders did not themselves constantly deploy the nationalistic elements of Deng Xiaoping Theory to legitimate the rule of a communist party overseeing the introduction of market-based reforms. There has been much speculation over whether or not democratisation would encourage the rise of an aggressive Chinese nationalism and convincing predictions can be made both ways.

Yet what is clear from the history of “reform and opening” to date is that the dependence of a one-party state presiding over market-oriented reforms for its political legitimacy is what gives nationalist politics in China its current significance. Movement towards a more democratic claim to power is one of the conditions for reducing that dependence.