Understanding China's Global Ambitions – Part 1: A Violent Thrust Into Modernity
Understanding China's Global Ambitions – Part 1: A Violent Thrust Into Modernity
China's increasingly prevalent role on the world stage is not easy to explain, which is why I am doing it over three parts. We're doing something a bit different here: I hope you enjoy.
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For other parts of this series, please see:
Part 4 - Coming soon!
China is making more global headlines by the day. Whether it's grand international investment projects, controversial trade practices, or increased military posturing, China's role in the global system is increasingly prominent and often puzzling to observers.
We at Between the Lines have devoted past articles to China's often controversial role in the global system. People frequently ask me the reasons behind some of these events, and I, having studied Chinese history for much of my life and lived there for five years, struggle to give them brief answers. This series attempts to shed some light on what guides the Chinese system today by delving into the country's geography and social, military, and economic history.
In this first part of a four-part series, I will do my best to explain the circumstances that made China what it is and continue to guide its actions on the world stage. Parts two, three, and four - exclusively for paid subscribers - will explore how these factors continue to shape China's actions in the 21st century amid many new challenges. I cannot claim total ownership over all of the ideas presented here, as I have the works of many Chinese and Western scholars I've read over the years to thank. However, these ideas form the basis of my understanding of this subject matter, which I am happy to share with all of you.
In writing this, I hope to provide you with a better understanding of the Chinese system so that it may help you interpret ongoing and future events as they unfold. Enjoy.
China’s major rivers all flow from the mountainous west to the east coast, providing most of the country’s freshwater resources. Image source
Geography shapes history
Chinese civilization originated on the plains along the Yellow River millennia ago. Estimates vary, but this occurred sometime in the past 4,000 – 6,000 years, making it one of, if not the, oldest civilizations on earth. The Yellow River is often described as 'China's sorrow' due to its frequent shifting along the silty plains that give it its eponymous yellowish hue, causing devastating flooding that continues to this day. Because the soil of this region is among the world's richest farmland, the people living in the area developed advanced means to cope with these catastrophic floods, including highly organized societies and advanced engineering. Various dynastic kingdoms sprung up here until 221 BCE when the region united under the reign of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor and founder of the Qin Dynasty, the reported origin of the word China.
Although the Qin dynasty ended with its second emperor's violent overthrow in 207 BCE, the idea of a unified China lived on. Successive dynasties spread from the Yellow River basin, incorporating the lands and peoples of China's other major river systems – the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers. These great systems flow from massive glacial waters in the mountains of modern-day western China, India, Nepal, and Bhutan, providing the vast majority of China's freshwater resources necessary to build and sustain its enormous population over millennia. As such, extraordinary feet of hydrological engineering, such as the Grand Canal, the world's largest artificial waterway, parts of which date back to the fifth century BCE, and the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric dam, completed in 2003, continue to shape Chinese history.
China's centuries of control over these waterways and the rich agricultural lands surrounding them made it among the world's wealthiest, most populous, and advanced societies throughout most of recorded human history. The various dynasties that ruled it consisted of vast hierarchical bureaucracies needed to govern such a large, populous territory and manage its extensive infrastructure.
The ideas of Kong Qiu (Confucius) have underpinned China's historic governance systems for millennia, including placing great importance on personal moral duty and social harmony, which are necessary to keep such vast systems in place. To recruit people into vast governmental systems, young Chinese men took part in annual tests on Confucian scholarship to determine whether they would be inducted into coveted civil service jobs. To this day, students across the country take part in the annual Gaokao, a test to determine their university placement and chance at social mobility. However, rebellions against these governmental systems occurred frequently, especially as the country's various dynasties fell to corruption or other forms of misrule at several key intervals of the country’s vast history.
Internal rebellions overthrew most of China's historical dynasties, including its first and last imperial dynasties. Even when unsuccessful, these rebellions could be devastating. For example, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864 killed between 20 – 30 million people. China's current regime under the Communist Party of China (CCP) came to power through a protracted rebellion led by Mao Zedong, whose ideas on guerilla warfare live on in various global resistance movements today. For this reason, the Chinese system has always primarily looked for threats internally rather than externally. These systems tend to counter these threats by controlling nature through enormous infrastructure projects and controlling people via a massive internal security apparatus led by its vast bureaucratic institutions.
China’s vast grand canal network continues to define modern cities such as Hangzhou (pictured above). Image source
An inward-looking system forced to look outward
Given its internal focus, China's relationship with the outside world is both complex and a secondary concern to its elites. Foreigners have come to China at various times to partake in the country's periods of extraordinary economic abundance. Some suffered horrific outcomes when times turned bad: for example, forces rebelling against the Tang dynasty killed over one hundred thousand foreign merchants in what is now known as the Guangzhou massacre of 878–879 CE. However, most foreign threats to the Chinese regime historically came from the great planes to the north, with several dynasties building Great Wall projects to this effect, although the actual military effectiveness of these projects was minimal. Invasions from the north produced two significant foreign-ruled dynasties over a unified China: the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368) and the Manchu Qing(1644–1911). However, the successive rulers of these dynasties became increasingly culturally and institutionally Chinese and thus remained primarily inward-looking during their reigns.
Internally rich and with little concern for outsiders, Chinese leaders gave minimal consideration to Westerners, who began to arrive in the late medieval and early modern periods. However, Europe's discovery of the Americas, extensive seafaring, and military technological advancements created what is now recognized as a global system during this time. Given its primarily internal focus, China's rulers gave little regard to this system, but the system had a profound impact on the country nonetheless.
For example, the flow of South American-mined Spanish silver into Ming China made the empire enormously wealthy, but eventually played a role in its collapse when trade flows reversed. Although the Ming built a world-class fleet of ships that sailed as far as East Africa during this period (the early sixteenth century), the Yongle emperor ordered these destroyed in 1525, ending China's emergence as a maritime power. Had China further expanded its maritime capability during this time of abundance, rather than squandering it and eventually falling victim to the whims of the global market, world history might be profoundly different today.
In 1793, the first British embassy to China, led by George Macartney, offered modern European goods to the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. It was completely rebuffed. Moreover, the imperial court responded to Macartney in Latin, as it had no knowledge of English despite Britain's global dominance at the time. During this time, imports of Mexican silver and hearty American crops such as corn had made the Qing enormously rich; however, like the Ming before them, they remained largely unconcerned with the mercantile system that brought these goods to their shores.
Although not much of a Chinese consideration, Europe's trade imbalance with China was a growing concern to Western decision-makers. China produced much of what the West's burgeoning middle class wanted, such as tea, porcelain, silk, and other manufactured goods. Purchasing these goods required that European merchants part with vast sums of silver in exchange, causing much of the world's wealth to flow away from the West and into China. Although Western merchants sought to offset this imbalance by offering various Western products to the Chinese, China remained largely uninterested. When the British began illegally selling opium – a highly addictive drug – to China, Chinese authorities responded by burning European warehouses in Guangzhou in 1839. By this time, Europe had advanced technologically and militarily to the point that it vastly outgunned the entirety of the Qing dynasty forces. China fought and lost two wars with the West over opium – one in 1839–1842 and another in 1856–1860.
The so-called 'unequal treaties' that resulted from these wars fixed Europe's trade imbalance problem, as Western merchants could now flood the Chinese market with opium. Vast sums of wealth flowed from the country as millions of Chinese, including some 27% of its male population, became addicted to opium. In Europe and America, Chinese wealth expanded already vast family fortunes.
With China now subjugated, foreign powers carved out coastal enclaves in places such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Xiamen, and Qingdao – the remnants of which still form much of these cities' historic cores today. The Qing Empire faltered under the weight of these treaties' economic and social consequences and a series of rebellions – including the devastating Taiping rebellion – and eventually fell in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. To make matters worse, Japan, a country that once paid fealty to Chinese emperors but was quicker to adopt Western military technology and trade practices, devastated China. First, the Western powers offered concessions to Japan in China at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, despite China's participation in the victorious side of the First World War. Later, a series of Japanese invasions culminated in some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War. Today, China scholars refer to this period of the country’s history as the 'century of humiliation.'
Although the European powers and Japan primarily sought to dominate China during its century of humiliation, the United States’ approach was somewhat different. Washington participated in the international coalition behind the Second Opium War and received war reparations from the Qing government. However, President Theodore Roosevelt later negotiated a reduction in these payments by half on the condition the money instead went toward the creation of a modern university in Beijing. Tsinghua University has gone on to play a central role in China’s modernization, ranks among the world’s top academic institutions today, and counts former president Hu Jintao and current president Xi Jinping among its many notable alumni. However, some contemporary Chinese commentators argue Washington helped create Tsinghua to dominate China by other means, through a Western-educated class of Chinese technocrats. In this way, the American-Chinese origins of Tsinghua illustrate the adversarial yet interconnected relationship the two countries share today.
The Opium Wars started China’s ‘century of humiliation’. Image source
The origins of China's contemporary foreign policy
When the CCP under Mao Zedong seized power in October 1949, their movement was already defined by the evolving inward/ outward focus that continues to define the Chinese system. The CCP fought a protracted rebellion against the ruling Guomindang Party under Chiang Kai-Shek, only to stop fighting and form a United Front with the Guomindang to combat the Japanese during the Second World War. At the war's end, another foreign power, the Soviet Union, gifted the CCP Japan's vast weapons caches in Manchuria, allowing the CCP to wage a more effective civil war against the Guomindang from 1944–1949. This campaign eventually forced the Western-backed Guomindang to retreat to the island of Taiwan while the CCP seized control of mainland China. The subsequent division of the world into two Cold War camps left China and Taiwan in a prolonged and intense standoff that persists to this day.
During the Mao era, China remained primarily inwardly focused, with some outward goals defining much of China's foreign policy today. For example, 'reunification' with Taiwan became a regular rallying cry, with Beijing heavily bombarding Taiwanese-held islands near the mainland coast in 1954–55 and 1958, with both incidents involving the United States in intense standoffs. China continues to conduct military exercises in Taiwanese airspace and regularly calls for reunification through peaceful means or otherwise. With an independently governed and Western-backed island off its coast, Beijing can regularly call upon bitter feelings left over from the century of humiliation, using this as a rallying cry to unify public sentiments.
In 1951, China formally annexed Tibet, gaining control over much of the source of its most strategically important internal waterways in the Himalayas. Today, China continues to assert itself in the Himalayas, carving out pieces of territory and damming rivers at the expense of neighboring India and Bhutan. In an increasingly dry world, a country's ability to maintain control over its freshwater resources is of existential importance, especially as China now experiences more profound periods of drought combined with its perennial flooding challenges.
In 1952, Mao adopted the 'nine-dash line' map, claiming Chinese sovereignty over most of the South China Sea that extends far past its internationally recognized territorial waters. Beijing continues to press its South China Sea claims to this day as a means of asserting control over the region's vast resources and the vital trade routes that run through it.
In 1964, China tested its first nuclear weapon, gaining entry to the exclusive so-called 'nuclear club.' To this day, China continues to push military technological advancement as a matter of top national importance, devoting growing amounts of state resources toward this endeavor amid the knowledge that its profound technological imbalance with the West resulted in its' century of humiliation'.
Despite these outward power projections, Mao's China remained primarily inwardly focused, and just like previous dynastic rulers, Mao's primary focus was on grand internal projects. Attempts to transform China's economy and society in the form of the 1958–1962 'Great Leap Forward' and the 1966–1976 'Cultural Revolution' killed between 30 and 50 million people and continues to affect the country's social consciousness to this day. China's vast military and surveillance state apparatus remains primarily focused on monitoring the public and controlling dissent within the country, aware that it is from here that its primary threats likely lay. For example, China's ongoing anti-corruption campaign is broadly considered a means by which the ruling faction can eliminate its rivals with relative impunity.
China’s nine-dash line claims in the South China Sea remain hotly contested. Image source
Conclusion
China is an incredibly complex country, and explaining its emerging role in the global system requires extensive background. Here is a list of core takeaways that continue to define the Chinese system today.
Water defines Chinese civilization. Its leaders have always gone to great lengths to control it.
Throughout Chinese history, its leaders have been primarily concerned with internal rather than external threats.
China's vast population centers have long made it a global center of manufactured goods production. The wealth that flows to and from China's shores made some of its rulers among the richest on earth… and brought others to their knees.
China's entry into the current global system was violent and humiliating. This legacy continues to shape its actions to this day.
China is a relative newcomer to the global system; its institutions and tactics continue to evolve in this regard.
In parts two and three, we will look at how China continues to pursue its global goals in service to its domestic agenda amid many new challenges. These challenges include a real estate crisis, increased global protectionism, an aging demographic, and more.
Fantastic work. Looking forward to the next one.