A world captured by China

China’s Global Strategy Under Xi Jinping, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, Oxford University Press, £22.99

The world view from modern China can be captured by an old map. The example of a Cheonhado or ‘all under heaven’ map, illustrated in this book, was produced in Korea around 1800. According to the authors, Korea was at that time one of the closest and most loyal of China’s vassal states.

It is a strange cartographical concept, something that one would expect to see in antiquity. Imperial China is at the core of concentric circles, a civilising power radiating authority and benevolence on the world. Around it cluster tributary states offering homage and tribute.

This was the concept of tianxia, ‘all under heaven’, which, the authors argue, is Xi Jinping’s organising principle for China in the 21st century. They say that the supreme leader, who came to power in 2012, has great ambitions for China. His four ‘global initiatives’ on governance, security, civilisation and development aim to remake the liberal international order for a new era.

The authors are critical but cautious, affirming that China is building an alternative world order. Yet it does not seek to replace the existing one – it wants to capture and transform it.

Both authors are established scholars. Tsang is Director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and Cheung is a lecturer in Politics at King’s College, London. Their earlier work, The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, examined the Chinese leader’s governing philosophy.

They paint Xi as a revolutionary figure who has overturned a celebrated injunction by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader until his death in 1997. Their preface cites that oft-misquoted edict in full: ‘Observe calmly, secure our position, deal with events imperturbably, hide our capabilities and bide our time, adroitly hide our weaknesses, do not claim leadership.’

Xi is having none of that. The authors describe a ‘first pivot’ to rally the ‘Global South’ (a term they rightly question) and to change the United Nations into an institution that works in line with the tianxia order. So far, so reassuring.

The ‘second pivot’ calls for China to retake Taiwan as an essential part of its dream of national rejuvenation. Xi’s global strategy requires the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to seize Taiwan by force, if necessary, once Beijing can be sure of a clear majority at the UN to support its claim.

The authors review current scholarship, which makes for exciting intellectual discussion. But the roll call of eminent Sinology fails to provide, in their view, an accurate assessment of China’s intentions.

The Chinese objective under Xi, they affirm, is not to replace the United States as the primary decision maker on global affairs ‘but to effectively remove America from that pedestal by establishing China as a separate power centre’.

Obviously, the restoration of Taiwan to the People’s Republic without the consent of its 23 million Chinese people would break the American security system in East Asia and would end the concept of ‘strategic ambiguity’, which has kept the peace and delivered prosperity since the end of the Second World War. For Xi, the authors say, reunification with Taiwan would ‘deliver in a spectacular way an exercise of power or authority that would project Chinese pre-eminence in both regional and global contexts’.

Academics, and indeed generals and strategists, devote gigabytes of analysis to predicting the threat of war and the outcome of such a conflict. This book is bleakly realistic about the Chinese leader and his system. But it is neither doom-laden nor predictably conformist to one line or another.

Unlike some of their peers, who may be nervous about disturbing the consensus (‘China is misunderstood, except by us’), or fearful about visas, endowments or access, Tsang and Cheung make clear where they stand: ‘The liberal international order is worth defending’, they say. ‘It was put in place to help the world avoid the mistakes that plunged humanity into two devastating world wars in quick succession.’ Armed with this clarity, they assess the possibilities for deterring Xi Jinping’s military adventurism while countering Chinese diplomacy and economic power.

As long as Xi lives and remains the supreme leader in China, the country’s global strategy will be ideologically based and there is little, if anything, the United States and the democratic West can do to change that, they argue. Wisely, the authors assume that he will enjoy political and natural longevity. The leader’s political philosophy, which is now known as Xi Jinping Thought, is ‘the underlying driver guiding China to pursue the transformation of the international order into one that is Sinocentric’.

But what is tianxia? Here the authors provide an excellent essay describing an alternative international order rooted in centuries past and explaining its relevance to the outlook of Chinese leaders. In their assessment, from the Chinese perspective, this is not about seizing leadership from the United States but about making the international order more ‘democratic’.

For Xi, the tianxia order characterised history’s greatest era when China was the paramount power in East Asia, the most civilised part of the world. As the tributary map showed, this was a world in which power radiated from an immobile China while the states around it submitted to its grandeur.

However, the authors point out that the new Sinocentric view is not history but history as Xi imagines it to be, a construct blended with his Marxist beliefs, his Leninist mentality and a fervent party-centric nationalism. Like so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s cultural, philosophical and historical claims, it is a distorted version of events created to serve the party’s interests.

The authors say that tianxia established a ‘Pax Sinica’ to varying degrees in East Asia and parts of Central Asia for more than 1,500 years between the founding of the Han Dynasty in 202 BC and the end of the 19th century, when the Qing Empire collapsed in the face of aggression from the British Empire, other western powers and Japan.

Geographically, Chinese authority ran only through East and Central Asia, but the tianxia paradigm was universal in its conception. It was limited only by the military and administrative constraints of the pre-modern Chinese state. The world beyond existed in those concentric circles with China at the core. Countries in the nearest circles enjoyed the closest links and greatest benefits from China and were therefore the least barbaric. Far off powers, such as the Britain of George III, lay beyond the pale.

There are echoes for today’s Chinese policy. China maintained suzerainty over most of its close neighbours, who sent tribute and acknowledged the son of heaven’s superiority by kowtowing, literally kneeling and bowing with the forehead touching the ground, before the Emperor, who gave them gifts more valuable than their tributes. His mandarins even organised trade fairs for the tributary states, which earned profits from commerce with China and each other.

The authors explain that tianxia extended westwards during the Han Dynasty as the Silk Road trading routes developed. Imperial power reached its height during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) when a Chinese fleet twice the size of the Spanish Armada sailed as far as the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa.

Then China turned inwards, destroyed its fleets at the imperial command and stopped sending missions abroad. The message of today’s China, that it is not a colonialist, exploitative nation, derives from this period. Even tributary states were usually left to run their own affairs so long as they acknowledged the top power. Some, including Korea and Vietnam, modelled their governments on Chinese administration, imported the written language, adopted Chinese technology, and turned to Confucianism.

The authors point out that a concept of ‘Grand Harmony’ accompanied this order. The Communist leader Hu Jintao, in power from 2002 to 2012, emphasised harmony as part of his political doctrine. The soft power message delivered by Xi Jinping emphasises the tradition. However, the authors are sceptical: ‘This peaceful image of tianxia that Xi projects was contradicted by the reality that China systematically used or threatened to use force to keep tributary states in line’, they say.

They also dissent from Xi’s claim that development and a flourishing civilisation depended on a stable order, pointing out that some of China’s most creative periods of innovation, invention and thinking occurred in times of disunity, such as the Warring States era from 475 to 221 BC, a historical perspective that they say is suppressed by Xi.

The traditional concept of tianxia, like the doctrines of Confucius, largely receded after the Republic of China succeeded the Qing dynasty in 1912. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, chose to adhere to the concept of national sovereignty born in Western Europe under the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Communist China strode on to the world stage at the Bandung Conference in 1955, at which newly emerging powers established the non-aligned movement on Westphalian principles for peaceful coexistence.

While Mao espoused socialist internationalism, ideological rivalry with the Soviet Union and the complexities of individual national movements persuaded Beijing to step back. The experiment with worldwide revolution ebbed away in the 1970s when China had to deal with internal problems and sought stability through a rapprochement with the United States.

There is a Marxist and patriotic perspective, too, on concepts of power and submission. Leftist scholars in China devote extensive work to the study of Imperial Japan’s philosophy in the 1930s, which was sometimes known as ‘all four corners under heaven’, a vision according to which the benevolence of the Japanese throne would extend to peoples everywhere. China, of course, was a victim when the militarists put this into practice. Tianxia is not like that.

Thus the authors conclude, without being prescriptive, that radical Chinese policy can be constrained by circumstances or deterred by patient diplomacy conducted with seriousness and purpose. The latter may be some time in coming but, for now, this study by Tsang and Cheung offers a brisk, refreshing voice in the temples of Sinology.