Negotiating China's Rise - like it or not

THE CHINA CHOICE:
Why America should Share Power,
by Hugh White, Black Inc,190pp. 

Reviewed: 11 August 2012

It's one thing to understand the strategic challenge, another thing to put forward a sensible win-win solution, but much harder to set out a way to get there from here.  Hugh White scores well on the first two, but doesn't really address the third.  Diplomats and strategists might call the missing link "the modalities".

The choices White identifies are to be made in Washington.  Australia, we infer, will be swept along whatever course the USA adopts.

The key word in White's analysis is “primacy”, which I take to mean unchallengeable military superiority. He warns that America and its allies tend to overestimate America's ability to translate military superiority into political outcomes.   White doubts that America, even now, has the real power to prevent a determined Chinese takeover of Taiwan.  China's ability to sink American aircraft carriers with land-based missiles could not be neutralized without escalating attacks upon Chinese mainland facilities.  Mutual retaliation could reach nuclear level. Few if any American allies would support such a venture.

On the other hand, China's ability to assert power beyond its borders is also limited by the major Asian regional powers that have historical reasons to be suspicious of Chinese power - Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and others.

In my view White under-states the depth of anxiety among China's neighbours over growing Chinese power. For neighbouring nations, many of which already host significant Chinese racial minorities, have historical reasons to fear economic colonization, and increasing long-term immigration from China.  For such nations, a remote, over-fed hegemon (such as America) is preferable to a nearby, hungry hegemon, because they are less likely to move permanently into your house.

The rivalry between US and China is focussed in the Western Pacific, where China would like to establish primacy and America wants to keep it. White proposes that America and China must learn, somehow, to share power and leadership, at least within that region.

Any proposals for strategic dialogue with China must be read in the context of Sun Tzu's Art of War, whose precepts on tactics, negotiation, strategy and psychology still shape Chinese strategy. They are supremely pragmatic, whereas White argues for adoption of common principles for common benefit.

A basic rule of negotiation is that you do not give away your final position at the beginning. White goes so far as to offer, as his final chapter, a proposed text for an Address to the Nation by an American President, setting out the reasons why the United States has decided to share power with China in the Western Pacific.  It looks to me like an invitation for China to raise its demands and keep right on pushing.  What does China gain by conceding anything in that context?

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites is a former ABC correspondent in China and later participated in Asia-Pacific and multilateral negotiations for the Australian government.

Liu Xiaobo, the angry Nobel Peace laureate

NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED 
Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo,
ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, with foreword by Vaclav Havel 
Belknap Harvard Press, 355pp. 

Nobel Peace Prize laureates can be angry people.  Nobel himself spent a lifetime making explosives and selling armaments, then funded an annual prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Laureates have had warlike histories: Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger among a good few others. Most have had nothing to do with armies or peace congresses, but contributed to “fraternity between nations” by demonstrating moral confrontation against political power. Jose Ramos Horta, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama come to mind.

In 2010 the Peace Prize Committee infuriated the Chinese government by selecting Liu Xiaobo, then as now in a Chinese prison, charged with “incitement to subvert state power”. His “crimes” were purely literary, but enough to enrage the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

This book selects essays and commentaries published by Liu, at personal risk, in magazines and online from around the time of the 1989 Tian An Men incident through to Liu's final statement at his Beijing trial in December 2009.

Liu asserted then that he has “No enemies, no hatred”, but he spares nobody with his trenchant criticism of contemporary China. The Communist Party is his main target, but he also attacks less-radical Chinese intellectuals, dissidents, and those foreign fellow-travellers who make excuses for the Communist Party's refusal to grant fundamental human rights. You can't speak out like this without creating powerful enemies, and you won't persist with it unless you bear substantial reserves of anger. The line between anger and hatred is hard to define.

 The Chinese scholar-hero who dares to speak truth to power is an ancient tradition. But Liu writes off Confucius as a failure at politics who was only endorsed as a sage by later generations of dictators and emperors because he insisted on obedience to authority. Liu blames this for the “slave mentality” of modern Chinese toward their government.

Mostly, he argues for the establishment of individual rights within China. The Charter 08 document, drafted with other liberal intellectuals, attracted more than 12,000 signatories and embarrassed China's leadership in the year of the Beijing Olympics.  This provoked Liu's arrest and imprisonment for sedition.

Liu remind us what rights are currently denied to citizens of China. The separation of powers between constitution, government and judiciary, and the protection of private property including title to land, are things we have come to take for granted.

Charter 08 also calls for China to devolve its centralized system into a  “federation of democratic communities of China”. This would have sent China's right-wing neo-nationalists hopping mad, as well as the Communist Party centralists.

Liu despises the self-glorifying rhetoric that infects popular Chinese culture, the mythologizing of Chinese achievement far beyond reality, and the “bellicose and thuggish” attitudes to China's place in the world as it grows in economic strength. He angrily dismisses those Western commentators who over-praise and over-estimate China's past, its progress and its future, accusing them of naivety, patronizing fantasy, or self-serving attempts to ingratiate themselves with masters of the China growth gravy-train.

There's a lot of anger, for someone who professes to have "no hatred, no enemies".  He provokes reflections on Western society as well as on China's.

Richard Thwaites witnessed China's first modern movement for human rights in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1979, while Liu Xiaobo was a student.

Read my full review

Deng Xiaoping's life story - a true modern epic

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA.

By Ezra Vogel, Belknap Harvard, 876pp. 

In China, they play politics seriously.  We need to know how things work there, and this book will help.

From one man’s navigation through six decades of Chinese politics, we can learn much about the choices we humans make about how our societies are to be governed. Blow away the fog of ideology, and Deng Xiaoping’s choices, loyalties and betrayals could as well take place in ancient Rome or modern Washington as in Beijing. Deng’s personal saga of the acquisition, application and retention of power might attract a future Shakespeare, but for contemporary readers it's instructive to understand how this particular man,  more than any other, delivered 20^th Century China from its Maoist hell into the vital, but still turbulent, economic powerhouse we see today.

All the evidence suggests that Deng, since his days as a 16-year old Communist student in France in the 1920s, Deng never budged on the one principle that all power in China must be centralized through the Communist Party.  Communist ideology provided some core principles and objectives for the Communist program, but its main function was to define discipline and solidarity to maintain the Party's grip on power.

After the death of Chairman Mao, Deng fought bitter battles within the Communist Party leadership to promote economic liberalization, but did not hesitate to crack down hard, whether on life-long Communist colleagues or on Western-influenced student dissidents, whenever he sensed any serious challenge to the absolute power and authority of the Party.

Deng's Leninist conviction on the central role of the Party never wavered even when nepotism and corruption among the Party elite caused deep resentment among the population.  A few junior crooks could be shot, and senior ones humiliated, but the Party’s hold on power must not be challenged.

Deng’s survival through savage intra-Party struggles and ultimate rise to the top is an epic in itself.  This could be compared to surviving at the court of King Henry VIII.  Deng’s reputation for effectiveness and Party loyalty meant he always had protectors when he needed them, whereas many equally loyal but less judicious Communists were destroyed utterly by Mao, or in his name.

Any organization that sets itself above the law, as the Chinese Communist Party has always done, may fall to subversion by dominant individuals.  By the late 1960s Mao Zedong had established a virtual monarchy.  After Mao, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the one figure with the deep personal support base, and the tactical skill, to bring bitterly divided Party factions together into a viable, common program that bypassed the leftist conservatives. 

Deng in later years enjoyed recognition as “paramount leader” or “supreme leader”, but he never held or claimed Mao’s absolute authority, and he largely avoided the dangers of a personality cult.  Deng would cautiously place chosen people in key positions and wait for an alignment of events that favoured his next challenge to opponents within the Party.

There’s no evidence that Deng Xiaoping had any interest in broadening democracy for China, although there were times when he acted and spoke to mobilize liberal intellectuals, at home and abroad, so as to put heat on more conservative Communist colleagues.  Deng had promoted the capable and popular liberal Party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for their reforming vigour and openness, but when Hu and later Zhao provoked strong reactions from conservatives, whose support Deng needed at the time, he ended both their careers with very public humiliations - sacrifices on the altar of Party unity.

Vogel is a veteran sinologist who has accessed a wide range of Chinese and foreign sources, including some personal interviews with surviving key players or those close to them.  He assembles insights never available to those of us who were trying to cover these events as they occurred. 

Because of the Party’s vigilance, sinologists are often reluctant to jeopardize future access to their privileged sources. Vogel abstains from challenging the Communist Party’s central claim that China can have only Leninist one-party rule, or chaos.  He notes, however, that memoirs of key figures, including former liberal Premier Zhao Ziyang and conservative politician Deng Liqun, could not be published in China, but were published in Hong Kong.

Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in Beijing in the years Deng Xiaoping achieved pre-eminence in China’s leadership, 1978-83.

Read the full review here..

Old China Hands - Rogues or Heroes of the Revolution?

SHANGHAI FURY

Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China

By Peter Thompson, Heinemann, 530pp.

Plenty of  foreigners write plenty about China every day, from the fawning to the ferocious.  Many write with the best of intentions, doing their best to seem impartial and to "explain" China to readers. I've done that myself.  Others write for an audience that is inherently hostile to China, playing up the perceived threats and inferiorities of  a strengthening, but still alien, modern China.

Not many who write popular histories of China acknowledge that they are taking a specifically "foreign" point of view.

In  this book,  journalist and author Peter Thompson has sifted through the public records, autobiographies and newspaper files of  Australia, Britain and the English-speaking Treaty Ports of China prior to 1949, to remind the current generation of Australians about how many Australians played notable roles in Chinese affairs through the last years the Manchu Dynasty, through the 1911 birth, decline and fall of the Republic of China, and into the 1949 establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China under the iron control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Australians were among the earliest 19th Century opium traders, gunboat “free trade” opportunists, missionaries, scholars and adventurers of Canton, Shanghai and the Yangtze valley.   Some, like  G E Morrison and William Donald, combined influential journalistic careers with powerful inside advisory roles to important players in Chinese republican politics, from the Boxer Rebellion onward.

There were also a disreputable cast of opportunists, including some who collaborated with the Japanese regime occupying Shanghai 1939-45.

  

Numbers of Australian-Chinese took aspects of their Australian experience back to China.  The biggest Shanghai department stores, Sincere and Wing On, were founded by Australian-Chinese on Australian models, as were numerous progressive newspapers, trading houses and fledgling democratic movements.  The Australian links are generally ignored by American or European writers of Chinese histories.

Thompson's anecdotal history mainly reflects the views and recollections of non-Communist and anti-Communist particpants in Chinese affairs, as well as being an unapologetic chronicle of foreign interventions, big and small, in China. It may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect to modern sinophiles, but it is a good read for the non-specialist with an interest in modern China, or for the jaded specialist interested in a fresh overview. Having reported from China myself for five years in the past, I recognise that when it comes to Chinese history, the alien perspective may be as valid as the local.

Read my published review here...