Four CHINA

Four CHINA

Introduction

Like India, China, and indeed all agrarian civilizations, fluctuated from empire to fragmentation and back again. But compared with India, China developed a much more hierarchical political and interstate system. Even though India had its exponent of universal empire in Kautilya, it never developed anything like China's theoretical and practical obsession with hierarchy and unity. China's principle of social order, though rooted in family, was, in contrast to Hinduism's mainly social order, both social and political. In China, there was always a presumption that when an existing dynasty became too weak to maintain unity, a new one would arise to claim the Mandate of Heaven and pull the country back together again after a period of division.

Until the nineteenth century, China was relatively lightly connected to the other sedentary civilizations of Eurasia, and during its long history was consequently able to develop, and maintain for millennia, a distinctive theory and practice of world order. Both China and Europe were at the ends of the Eurasian system, which made them relatively detached from the other major centres of civilization. Ancient Greece and Rome were in close touch with other civilizations in the Middle East, which were in turn in direct touch with South Asia. Medieval Europe was a civilizational backwater, though it was deeply influenced by having been part of the Roman Empire for several centuries. On the basis of its Roman-Christian legacy, Europe began a long and defining military encounter with Islamic civilization from the eighth century AD. China, however, had only arms-length relay trading and cultural contact with other Eurasian civilizations through the Silk Roads. China was effectively penetrated by the diffusion of Buddhism over many centuries. But in terms of trade and commerce, apart from the early fifteenth-century voyages of Zheng He, few Chinese ships ventured beyond the South China Sea. Trade was mostly carried by foreign ships, and by the ninth century AD there is evidence from tax records that more than one hundred thousand Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Persians were living in the commercial settlements of Canton. The Silk Roads were mainly relay trade, where goods moved through many local trading points. China's local military challenge came mainly from the pastoralist, nomadic steppe barbarians to the north, who the Chinese saw as culturally inferior no matter that they could often defeat China militarily.

Before its unification in two two one BC, China was not in much contact with outsiders and evolved mainly as a self-contained world order which fluctuated between various degrees of unity and fragmentation. Much of classical Chinese thinking about world order, including Legalism and Confucianism, was formed during this time when China itself was fragmented into multiple, and often warring, states. After two two one BC, unity was the dominant theme within China, though periodically interrupted by invasions from the peoples of the steppe and sometimes long transitional periods of fragmentation when one dynasty was falling and another rising or several dynasties existed simultaneously. As elsewhere in Eurasia, China was not infrequently ruled by steppe dynasties; these were mainly Manchu and Mongol, whereas Turkic dynasties tended to dominate in South and West Asia.

After unification, China also became engaged in varying degrees with the wider world around it, with the Silk Roads under the Han dynasty becoming a transmission belt for ideas, goods, and diseases across Eurasia. Post-unification, China was therefore both engaged as a player in a world order that extended beyond itself and, sometimes, temporarily reverted to being a fragmented system in its own right (most recently between nineteen eleven and nineteen forty-nine with the warlord period and the civil war). If we compare China's history and political theory about world order with Europe's in this respect, they come out as near opposites. In China, the principle of unity was normatively dominant from an early point, though in practice the system suffered periodic breakdowns and fragmentations. In Europe, the principle of unity, though always present, was relatively weak normatively, despite having the compelling, and much admired, image of Rome behind it. Individual politics and dynasties might aspire to bring the continent under their rule, but in practice and in theory the desire for independence and self-government remained strong enough to prevent that outcome. The balance of power idea triumphed, and no attempt to form a durable European empire succeeded.

This duality of China as both an international system and civilization in itself and a player in a wider international system has to be kept in mind when trying to understand the Chinese/Confucian view of world order. Edward Luttwak takes this duality very seriously in strategic terms, seeing in China:

a deeply rooted strategic culture that is both intellectually seductive and truly dysfunctional. Its harmful consequences have marked the historical experiences of the Han nation, supremely accomplished in generating wealth and culture from earth and water by hard work and wonderful skill, but exceptionally autistic in relating to the non-Han, and therefore unsuccessful in contending with them whether by diplomacy or by force. Nor is this culture at all appropriate for the fluid conduct of inter-state relations among formal equals, as opposed to the management of a China-centred tributary system.

This unique insulation from direct military and political encounters with other settled agrarian civilizations perhaps goes some way to explaining the particular and distinctive form and character of Chinese thinking and practice about world order and international relations. Whereas Western thinking and practice were eventually drawn towards sovereignty, territoriality, international anarchy, war, and international society, Chinese theory and practice were drawn towards hierarchy, Tianxia (all under heaven), and the Mandate of Heaven, which combined to form the tribute system of relations. In the Chinese system, war, diplomacy, and trade all embodied quite different practices and understandings from those either in India or in the West. What is now called soft power played a much larger and more political role in the Chinese system than it did for India, where the diffusion of Indian culture and religion was largely separate from the state. It is common to note that China's relations with its civilized neighbours to the east (Korea and Japan) and south (Vietnam) were relatively peaceful and that its culture spread much more by acceptance than by imposition. That said, China's relations with its nomadic neighbours to the north were much more warlike, and its internal politics periodically descended into extensive violence and power politics during dynastic transitions. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, for example, tells a graphic story of ruthless power politics in the unification of China under the Qin dynasty, and China's history contains many turbulent and violent transitions between dynasties. Yasuaki Onuma argues that China's insistent claim to superior status over all others, even if that claim could not always be enforced, prevented the emergence of thinking about international law within the Chinese sphere. China's claim to be the 'Middle Kingdom' was an assertion of cultural as much as material superiority, and Chinese practice and thinking often do not fit all that comfortably with Western concepts such as great powers, empire, and suzerainty.

Thinking

Yuri Pines argues that China's history generated a different view of politics and world order from that which unfolded in the modern West. He focuses particularly on the extremely violent experience of the Warring States period that led up to the unification of China, interpreting this as being so traumatic that it instilled in Chinese culture a permanent fear of the dispersal or separation of power. The Warring States period and the turbulent Spring and Autumn period that preceded it were the golden age of Chinese philosophy and political theory, and the trauma of these times drove many of these thinkers, Confucius most notably, to search for arrangements and practices that would prevent any repetition of it. Thus, whereas the West eventually learned the lesson that political pluralism both at home (democracy, separation of powers) and abroad (an anarchical international society based on separated sovereignty and territoriality and an international society of states) was to be desired, China came to the opposite conclusion. The lesson of the Warring States period, and of many other periods of disunity in Chinese history, was that political pluralism was a recipe for a ruthless round of fighting and disorder that would last until someone could once again reunify the country and accept the Mandate of Heaven to reign over all. Hierarchy in all relations and unity at home were thus China's default political preference, and anarchic separation of powers its nightmare. Hierarchy was a system of symbolic order. At times it came close to empire, especially within China, and sometimes in its relations with Vietnam and the steppe nomads. But in many of its external relations, it allowed too much local sovereignty to fit comfortably into the concept of empire as normally understood.

Pines' interpretation is, of course, a heroic simplification of a much more complicated reality. Chinese philosophy and political theory does not begin and end with Confucius but is a very deep, rich, and varied resource, influenced among other things by Buddhism and Daoism. It notably includes Legalism, an equally long tradition of Chinese thinking, running alongside Confucianism and interacting with it, which has some similarities to Western Realism/power politics. Legalism advocates the construction of both a strong state and a strong power. First formulated by Shang Yang and later by Hanfeizi, both philosopher-politicians, Legalism focuses on domestic rule but also has clear implications for interstate relations and world order. It holds that in order to conquer or defeat enemies and to regulate the 'all under heaven', a ruler must control his own people first. To quote the most important Legalist text, The Book of Lord Shang, 'In the past, those who were able to regulate All-under-Heaven first had to regulate their own people; those who were able to overcome the enemy had first to overcome their own people'. And the way to achieve this was through strict laws backed by harsh punishment. 'When the people are weak, the state is strong; hence the state that possesses the Way devotes itself to weakening the people'.

Hui observes the extreme ruthlessness of state-strengthening to overthrow the balance of power system during the Warring States period and its influence on the Qin dynasty that first unified China. The Qin dynasty was short-lived, and Confucian and Daoist thinking was revived during the next major Chinese dynasty, the Han, who also introduced Buddhism into China, creating a plurality of political and social thought. Nonetheless, the political and administrative legacies of the Qin, especially the creation of a centralized professional bureaucracy, created a durable impetus in China's political system for strong and authoritarian rule. Indeed, an echo of Legalism can be found in current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is widely seen as creating the most authoritarian Chinese regime since Mao and who has cited Hanfeizi to justify the need for a country to have strong leaders upholding the law (rule by law, rather than rule of law). Thus, Xi quotes the following words of Hanfeizi: 'No country is permanently strong, nor is any country permanently weak. If those who impose The Law are strong, the country will be strong; if they are weak, the country will be weak'.

In the case of Chinese thinking about world order, there is again the difficulty in disentangling the domestic from the international. Territoriality, and with it the distinction between inside and outside, is much blurrier than it is in the European tradition. China was, in the centuries before the Qin unification, both an international system and civilization in its own right, while later becoming a unified player in a wider international system with non-Chinese polities. But in China's case it also concerns the universalist aspects of Chinese thinking about world order. The Chinese/Confucian view of world order had three distinctive and intertwined components: a strong sense of hierarchy as the preferred social order; a universal sense of space/territory (Tianxia - all under heaven); and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven linking rulers and people. There are two additional ideas rooted in traditional Chinese culture that played into how the tribute system worked: relationalism and face. We are fortunate in having contemporary Chinese IR scholars who have made sustained attempts both to recover classical Chinese thinking about IR and to relate it to both contemporary (Western) IR theory and current Chinese foreign policy. These five ideas combined to create the practice of the so-called tribute system, which defined how the Middle Kingdom related to those outside the Chinese cultural sphere.