Understanding China

This article is taken from LA Times

By Martin Jacques

 

The dynamics of President Obama’s trip to China were markedly different from those evident on visits made by President Clinton and President George W. Bush. This time the Chinese made clear that they were unwilling even to discuss issues such as human rights or free speech. Why? The relationship between the countries has changed: America feels weak and China strong in their bilateral ties. This is not a temporary shift that will reverse itself once the U.S. has escaped from its mountain of debt. Rather, it is the expression of a deep and progressive shift in the balance of power between the two nations, one that is giving the Chinese — though studiously cautious in their approach — a rising sense of self-confidence.

Nor should we be surprised by the Chinese response. They may have appeared more conciliatory on previous visits by American leaders, but that was largely decorative. The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

Ever since the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, and through the various iterations of the Sino-American relationship over the subsequent almost four decades, there has been an overriding belief in the West that eventually China would become like us: that, for example, a market economy would lead to democratization and that a free media was inevitable. This hubristic outlook is deeply flawed, but it still prevails, albeit with small cracks of self-doubt starting to appear.

The issue here is much deeper than Western-style democracy, a free media or human rights. China is simply not like the West and never will be. There has been an underlying assumption that the process of modernization would inevitably lead to Westernization; yet modernization is not just shaped by markets, competition and technology but by history and culture. And Chinese history and culture are very different from that of any Western nation-state.

If we want to understand China, this must be our starting point.

The West’s failure to understand the Chinese has repeatedly undermined its ability to anticipate their behavior. Again and again, our predictions and beliefsabout China have proved wrong: that the Chinese Communist Party would fall after 1989, that the country would divide, that its economic growth could not be sustained, that its growth figures were greatly exaggerated, that China was not sincere about its offer of “one country two systems” at the time of the hand-over of Hong Kong from Britain — and, of course, that it would steadily Westernize. We have a long track record of getting China wrong.

Think Again: Asia’s Rise

This article is taken from:

Foreign Policy

June 2009

Minxin Pei

“Power Is Shifting from West to East.”

Not really. Dine on a steady diet of books like The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East or When China Rules the World, and it’s easy to think that the future belongs to Asia. As one prominent herald of the region’s rise put it, “We are entering a new era of world history: the end of Western domination and the arrival of the Asian century.”

Sustained, rapid economic growth since World War ii has undeniably boosted the region’s economic output and military capabilities. But it’s a gross exaggeration to say that Asia will emerge as the world’s predominant power player. At most, Asia’s rise will lead to the arrival of a multi-polar world, not another unipolar one.

Asia is nowhere near closing its economic and military gap with the West. The region produces roughly 30 percent of global economic output, but because of its huge population, its per capita gdp is only $5,800, compared with $48,000 in the United States. Asian countries are furiously upgrading their militaries, but their combined military spending in 2008 was still only a third that of the United States. Even at current torrid rates of growth, it will take the average Asian 77 years to reach the income of the average American. The Chinese need 47 years. For Indians, the figure is 123 years. And Asia’s combined military budget won’t equal that of the United States for 72 years.

China’s way of breaking Western’s encirclement || 我听到了历史的脚步声-漫谈中国的反围剿之路

作者:小民2008 中华网

2008年的春天，是一个令人焦躁的春天。小民所在的一座南方城市，天气就象抽了风儿一样，今天穿毛衣，明天穿短袖，冷热无常。每天打开电脑，铺天盖地的信息从世界各个角落涌来。。。。。。石油价格上了110美圆。煤、铁矿、有色、黄金发了疯涨价。美圆一路狂贬。一些穷国因粮食短缺发生骚乱，股市毫无规律地上窜下跳。

这期间最有标志性的事件就是发生在中国西藏的骚乱和紧随而来的奥运圣火传递引发的东西方对抗。西方媒体的歇斯底里，中国民众的义愤填膺，充斥在大大小小的论坛里。说实在的，除了非洲那个快被人遗忘的角落里的人还能保持冷静以外，地球上主要国家的民众基本上都卷入了这场似乎是东西论战的焦躁旋涡之中。

事实如此清晰，立场如此相反，为什么？我们是否忽略了这场论战后面隐藏的深远的政治、经济、社会背景？

一、 事件发生时的时代背景

如果我们把2008年放回到历史长河中，以时间为X轴，以空间为Y轴，那么我们来看一下2008年人类世界究竟呈现出一个什么样的景象。

一来呢，从社会制度上看，世界上200多个国家中，实行资本主义私有制的国家占了绝大多数，实行社会主义制度的国家不到十个。资本主义国家中典型代表有美国等二十几个国家，基本上就是老欧洲和美、加、日、澳、新；发展中的资本主义国家有一百多个，既包括俄罗斯、东欧、印度、墨西哥、巴西、阿根廷、南非等有一定前景的国家，也包括亚、非、拉非常穷困的国家。由于这些国家的政体还没有完全定型，随时存在着变化的可能性（最近可关注一下委内瑞拉），我就把他们定义为非典型的资本主义国家。社会主义国家有中国、越南、古巴、朝鲜，领头的就是咱们中国；另外还有几个号称要走社会主义道路的国家（如老挝、蒙古）。实际上，按马克思的说法，中国和越南已称不上是经典意义上的社会主义国家了，照小民说，目前世界上只剩下非典型的社会主义国家了。

除了以上两类国家外，这个地球上其余国家要么是混合制，要么是君主制，还有军阀独裁、部落联盟等奇奇怪怪的国家。因这类国家基本上在世界上没有说话的份儿，流行说法就是没有话语权，小民在本文中就忽略不计了。

“What do you want from Us?” || “你们到底想要我们怎样？”

- A Poem Dedicated to the last 150 years of this planet.
By a Silent, Silent Chinese.

===
When We were called Sick man of Asia, We were called The Peril.
When We are billed to be the next Superpower, We are called The threat.

When We were closed our doors, You smuggled Drugs to Open Markets.
When We Embrace Freed Trade, You blame us for Taking away your jobs.

When We were falling apart, You marched in your troops and wanted your “fair share”.
When We were putting the broken pieces together again, “Free Tibet” you screamed, “it was an invasion!”

( When Woodrow Wilson Couldn’t give back Birth Place of Confucius back to Us,
But He did bought a ticket for the Famine Relief Ball for us.)