‘You can never be China’s friend’
By David P Goldman – philosopher, economist, mathematician. A former investment banker for the Bank of America and Credit Suisse, writing for Forbes magazine and Asia Times.
[…] When we learn about this vastly growing Chinese global influence, we start to wonder: What is China’s grand strategy behind it?
China was the world’s dominant manufacturing power for most of the last 1,000 years. Then it dropped about 200 years ago at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The Chinese view this as a temporary aberration, and they want to re-establish China’s preeminence.
[…] The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others.
Fifty percent of their engineers are foreign.
They bankrupted their competition and hired their talent.
They have 50,000 foreign employees, and a very disproportionate amount of their research and development (R&D) is conducted by foreign employees.
So, what is their strategy? What do they want?
They want to have everybody in the world pay rent to the Chinese Empire.
They want to control the key technologies, the finance and the logistics, and make everyone dependent on them.
Basically, make everyone else a tenant farmer.
Once the Chinese achieve their goal, would they press their “tenant farmers” politically and ideologically?
[…] the Chinese are not curious about how the barbarians govern themselves as long as they’re subordinate to China, economically and technologically.
The Chinese are the least ideological people in the world and the most pragmatic.
A lot of my American friends say the problem is the wicked Chinese Communist Party which is oppressing the good Chinese people. I think that’s complete nonsense.
I see the Communist Party as simply another manifestation of the Mandarin administrative cast which has ruled China since it was unified in the third century BC.
Compared to the Russians, with their schools for spies and their subsidies for local Communist parties and so forth, the Chinese have no interest in such things.
The ideological ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party are vastly exaggerated […]
What holds China together is the ambition of the Mandarin cast.
China has always been a very disparate set of ethnicities and languages, and so forth.
What holds it together is that the Chinese Empire has recruited, through the Mandarin system, the cleverest people from the provinces and aligned their interests with the center.
What, in your view, is the biggest misconception about China in the West?
The single biggest misconception is that you have a wicked government and a good people.
The Chinese have had 3,000 years for the government and the people to shape each other.
The institution in the West that most closely resembles the Chinese system is, in fact, the Sicilian mafia.
You have a capo di tutti capi who prevents the other capi from killing each other.
Because they’re natural anarchists, they don’t like any form of government. They’re loyal to their families.
The emperor is nothing but a necessary evil. The idea of public trust and subsidiarity that’s fundamental to democracy is unknown to the Chinese.
What holds a country of anarchists together, if not the emperor?
There’s an old joke about [former American President] Eisenhower and [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ben Gurion from the 1950’s.
Eisenhower tells Ben Gurion, “It’s hard to be president to 200 million Americans.”
And Ben Gurion says, “It’s even harder to be prime minister of 2 million prime ministers.”
Well, China is a country of 1.4 billion emperors.
Everyone wants to be an emperor.
Everyone strives for his own and his family’s power.
There’s no sense of Res publica.
Certainly no Augustinian sense of common love to hold a country together.
What holds the country together is ambition. Therefore, it’s critical that the meritocracy be fair.
Xi Jinping’s daughter goes to Harvard, but no Chinese president can get his child into Peking University unless she gets the right score on the gaokao, the university entrance exam.
So, all hope is not lost for the West when the Chinese ‘capo di tutti capi’ is educating his offspring in one of America’s Ivy League schools?
Well, the one thing that we’re much better at than the Chinese is innovation.
As I mentioned, Huawei is very much dependent on Western employees for innovation. […]
Albert Einstein, who sat in the Swiss patent office because he couldn’t get a university job …
… and then invented the theory of relativity at his private home …
Right. This is unimaginable in China.
If you ask the Chinese what worries them the most, many will say, “How come we have no Nobel prizes?”
Eight Chinese have won the Nobel prize in sciences, but they are all Chinese who lived in America.
The Chinese system is very bad at identifying those eccentrics, like an Einstein, who make fundamental contributions. We are much better at that.
The Western idea of the divine spark in the individual simply doesn’t exist in China.
You don’t see any military confrontation emerging anytime soon?
No. If you look at the disposition of Chinese forces, it looks like a person with a gigantic head and tiny legs.
The Chinese spend $1,500 to equip a foot soldier. That’s basically a rifle, and a helmet and some boots.
Americans spend $18,000 to equip a foot soldier.
We have enormous airlift capability. We have an enormous amount of technology applied to the infantry.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) infantry is one of the most poorly-equipped and badly trained in the world.
On the other hand, their missile forces, their satellite forces, their submarines, and so forth, are extremely good. […]
Some people say that confrontation is the wrong strategy, that we should become friends. Do the Chinese have the same concept of friendship that we have?
The Chinese, as individuals, have no friends.
China, as a country, all the less so.
A peasant somewhere out in the Chinese countryside doesn’t have friends?
It was explained to me by my Chinese colleagues while I worked there that, when you’re in first grade in primary school, you look to your left and right and try to figure out whom you’re going to walk over.
In China, you have your family. Otherwise, you have inferiors and superiors. But there are no parallel institutions.
There’s no group of people coming together, spontaneously, to do something together as equals. You have a superior and you have inferiors.
There’s no concept of political friendship in Aristotle’s sense.
[…] China only has interests; it has no friends.
There’s a term that was applied to southern Italy called “amoral familism” where you’re completely amoral with dealings of the world except for your family where you have different standards.
That very much characterizes China.
It is obviously in the Chinese interest to appear “friendly.” They have launched a tremendous PR strategy buying space and time in Western media to propagate themselves as a friendly giant.
They do a very bad job, don’t they?
Because the Chinese are tone-deaf to Western sensibility, they’re very bad at conducting a dialogue in Western terms.
The thing I’m least worried about is Chinese propaganda in the West. […] the Chinese system is so alien to what Westerners want or expect that it will never look attractive to us.
[…] You can never be China’s friend.
We obviously have to do business with China. You can’t isolate 1.4 billion clever and industrious people. That’s absurd.
But one can only deal with them successfully from a position of strength.
[…] China’s violation of human rights is repugnant to us. Of course, we will complain. But that doesn’t really do anything.
The Chinese only respect power, and our power is in innovation.
Source: AsiaTimes
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You will never be Chinese
By Mark Kitto
[…] Social status, so important in Chinese culture is defined by the display of wealth.
Cars, apartments, personal jewellery, clothing, pets: all must be new and shiny, and carry a famous foreign brand name.
I am not asked about my health or that of my family, I am asked how much money our small business is making, how much our car cost, our dog.
[…] The Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat.
The country is ruled from behind closed doors, a building without an address or a telephone number.
[…] To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas.
Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesize, that once they are in position they can show their “true colors.”
Too late they realize that will never be possible.
As a publisher I used to deal with officials who listened to the people in one of the wings of that building.
They always spoke as if there was a monster in the next room, one that cannot be named. It was “them” or “our leaders.”
In that building are the people who, according to pundits, will be in charge of what they call the Chinese Century.
“China is the next superpower,” we’re told. “Accept it. Deal with it.”
It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear. As the Chinese like to say, they only want to “regain their rightful position.”
While there is no dispute that China was once the major world superpower, there are two fundamental problems with the idea that it should therefore regain that “rightful position.”
A key reason China achieved primacy was its size. As it is today, China was, and always will be, big.
(China loves “big.” “Big” is good. If a Chinese person ever asks you what you think of China, just say “It’s big,” and they will be delighted.)
If you are the biggest, and physical size matters as it did in the days before microchips, you tend to dominate.
Once in charge the Chinese sat back and accepted tribute from their suzerain and vassal states, such as Tibet. If trouble was brewing beyond its borders that might threaten the security or interests of China itself, the troublemakers were set against each other or paid off.
The second reason the rightful position idea is misguided is that the world in which China was the superpower did not include the Americas, an enlightened Europe or a modern Africa.
The world does not want to live in a Chinese century, just as much of it doesn’t like living in an American one. China, politically, culturally and as a society, is inward looking.
It does not welcome intruders—unless they happen to be militarily superior and invade from the north, as did two imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911), who became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien.
All non-Chinese are, to the Chinese, aliens, in a mildly derogatory sense.
The polite word is “Outsider.” The Chinese are on “The Inside.”
Like anyone who does not like what is going on outside—the weather, a loud argument, a natural disaster—the Chinese can shut the door on it. Maybe they’ll stick up a note: “Knock when you’ve decided how to deal with it.”
Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility.
Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathize.
Controlled by people with conflicting interests, China’s government struggles to be decisive in domestic issues, let alone foreign ones.
Witness the postponement of the leadership handover thanks to the Bo Xilai scandal.
And the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken. (I know that sounds crazy. It is meant to. It is true.)
A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force.
The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, among other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe.
A China that leads the world will not offer the chance to be Chinese, because it is impossible to become Chinese.
[…] And the Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose.
[…] There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century.
The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones.
[…] To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.
[…] The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them.
[…] Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers.
[…] There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals.
Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them.
[…] And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.”
[…] China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention.
The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems.
It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place.
Source: Prospect Magazine
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