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The “China Challenge” as Viewed from a Chinese Perspective

A fundamental difference exists between the notions of “China threat” and “China challenge”: The former completely ignores how the Chinese people perceive the problems facing their nation’s development, whereas the latter regards these problems as both Chinese and international in their essence. Quite simply, the adoption of a “China challenge” approach requires an understanding of the problems raised by China’s development from a Chinese perspective.

      If one adopts such an approach, it is not difficult to find that while the advocates of the “China threat” thesis usually fix their vision on the “inevitable” negative consequences of China’s development, the majority of the Chinese people, especially Chinese intellectuals, are more concerned about whether or not their country is in a position to overcome a variety of hurdles in the process leading to development and modernity.¹⁴ Ironically, China’s phenomenal economic growth in the past two decades has caused less satisfaction and sense of fulfillment than frustration and sense of crisis among the Chinese, especially the intellectuals.

      The reform-and-opening process has resulted in profound, yet paradoxical, changes in China’s polity, economy, society, and culture. On the one hand, it has released the productivity and creativity that had long been suppressed by the rigid Maoist political, economic, and ideological control system, making the Chinese people freer and more prosperous in general. If this trend continues, it will eventually lead to a China of prosperity and democracy. On the other hand, it has caused widespread and serious political and social dislocations, forcing the Chinese people to face a whole series of new and uncertain questions they never would have encountered absent the introduction of the reform-and-opening policies. Some of these questions, such as the pressure on the country’s environment, the gap between people’s expectations and the reality of change, and the increasing division between rich and poor, are common to any developing country in its course of accelerated development (although China’s unique demographic and geographic features make the magnitude of these problems greater than in other cases). A few questions, though, are of a distinctively Chinese nature, and they constitute the core of the “China challenge” discussed below.

Transforming the Chinese Communist State

The first such question concerns the transformation of the Chinese communist state. Simply put, because of the comprehensiveness of the reform-and-opening process, the Chinese communist state is facing a profound legitimacy crisis.

      From a historical perspective, the CCP has justified its one-party reign by emphasizing two of the Chinese Communist revolution’s fundamental missions: that the revolution would create in China a new, communist society characterized by universal justice and equality, and that it would change China’s weak-country status and revive its central position on the world scene. Despite all the difficulties he had encountered, Mao never gave up his embrace of the first mission. His continuous revolution, in retrospect, while failing to end political privileges in Chinese society, succeeded in creating a relative egalitarianism in China’s economic life (though at a low standard of living). Deng Xiaoping’s reform-and-opening policies, in challenging the low standard of living left by Mao, have created profound economic inequality within Chinese society, thus undermining Maoist egalitarianism as both an ideal and a social reality. The Chinese Communist Party today, as Cornell University political scientist Thomas J. Christensen points out, “has all but obliterated the second of the two adjectives in its name.”¹⁵ As a result, the legitimacy of the Chinese communist regime has been seriously called into question.

      Under these circumstances, the post-Mao Chinese government began to attach more importance to the revolution’s second mission in an effort to legitimize its existence. Consequently, a central myth of the communist narrative of modern Chinese history—that if the revolution had not been successful, China would have remained a weak, corrupt, and divided country with no status on the world scene—has been made the single, most important justification for the existence of the CCP’s exclusive rule. Since the early 1980s, the party has consistently carried out campaigns to promote “patriotic education” among everyday Chinese (which has been characterized by confusing the boundary between “China” and the “Chinese communist state”). As a central part of these campaigns, the party repeatedly called upon the entire nation to study China’s humiliating modern history, as well as how much it had been changed by the Chinese Communist revolution, so that it would lead to the conclusion that “had there not been the Communist Party, there would have never been a new, powerful China.”¹⁶

      In a deeper sense, this is not just a crisis entangling the Chinese communist state. It epitomizes a fundamental puzzle facing Chinese society in the post-Mao era: If the ideals embodied in communism are no longer in a position to bind the nation together and to direct and define the nation’s path toward modernity, which “ism” (if any) could take over the mission? The failure to answer this basic question has resulted in a lingering “belief crisis” among the Chinese population, shaking their faith (especially that of the younger generation) not only in any political ideology but also, and more seriously, in the very necessity of maintaining any faith.¹⁷

      As a reaction to the extraordinary moral emphasis during the Maoist era, this prevailing nihilist social psychology betokens a deepening moral crisis in Chinese society. A direct result of this belief crisis in the Chinese polity is the fundamental weakening of the government’s controlling capacity, causing, among other things, widespread corruption of government and party officials, which, in turn, has further deepened the existing moral crisis.

      What is ironic is that although it was the failure of the Chinese communist state that should be responsible for this moral crisis, one of its direct political consequences is that it enhances the popular conviction in the need for the Chinese Communist government to remain in power. The logic is simple: Without the communist regime, despite all of its deficiencies, things in China could be worse; in the worst-case scenario, even the Chinese nation and society could suffer from total disintegration.

      All of the above reveals the extreme complexity involved in the transformation of the Chinese communist state. Although entangled in a profound legitimacy crisis, the CCP, as the only well-organized controlling political force in mainland China, has been, and in the foreseeable future will continue to be, able to maintain its one-party reign by arguing that otherwise China will be unable to survive the tremendous pressure of total societal transformation. While it is certain that in the long run this situation will change (discussed in more detail in the section on development and democratization below), it should be emphasized that such change will be primarily the result of the Chinese people’s own efforts. Any attempt to impose such change from outside may turn it into a dubious foreign enterprise, thus jeopardizing the prospect of successful change in the future. This is particularly true, given that the Chinese people are also facing the challenges of how to identify (or re-identify) “China” and its position in the world, and how to rationalize the attendant rising tide of nationalism.

Identifying “China” and Its Position in the World

How should the Chinese people, facing a Western-initiated spread of modernization worldwide, identify the land, population, society, and culture that had been known as “China”? Correspondingly, how should they identify China’s position in the world? No other questions have occupied a more central position in defining the agenda of modern Chinese history. Yet the ongoing need to answer these questions, and the frustration resulting from the inability to do so, constitute another core element of the “China challenge” that will confront the Chinese people in the twenty-first century.

      Despite their philosophical cant, these questions do have weighty temporal dimensions. First of all, they concern China’s territorial integrity. In terms of its territorial size, today’s China is largely the result of Manchu (Qing) expansionism from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, which created a vast, multiethnic empire. During modern times, Western and Japanese incursions threw China into profound national crises, leading to the disintegration of the Qing Empire. After a series of military defeats by the end of the nineteenth century, China had ceded Taiwan to Japan, Hong Kong to Britain, and Macao to Portugal, and many parts of Chinese territory had been claimed as foreign “spheres of influence.” The collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 opened the door for Outer Mongolia’s independence, while at the same time making China’s sovereignty claim over Tibet no more than nominal.

      The profound national crises facing China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed one of the most important background elements for radical revolutions to emerge and to dominate the political agenda of modern China. As discussed earlier, the Chinese Communist revolution justified itself as the only solution to transform China from a weak and divided into a unified and strong country. To maintain China’s territorial integrity thus became a central issue that any Chinese government, be it a democracy or a dictatorship, must take as a goal of the highest priority in formulating its internal and external policies.

      In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, achieving China’s territorial integrity remains an unfulfilled mission for the Chinese. While Hong Kong has returned to the PRC’s jurisdiction (followed by Macao in 1999) after more than a century of foreign colonial rule, the separation between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, which began in 1949, shows no sign of approaching a conclusion. Moreover, because of the widening gap between levels of economic development, different forms of political rule and, more important, the changing consciousness of self-identity of people living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the prospect of the unification between the mainland and Taiwan seems more remote than ever. So what will “China” become in the twenty-first century? One unified China including both mainland and Taiwan? Or two Chinas—one People’s Republic of China and one Republic of China? Or one China and one Taiwan? This is a serious challenge that the Chinese people must encounter, and for which they must find a reasonable solution.¹⁸

      How to identify “China” is also a question about how to identify the “Chinese.” During the imperial era, “Chinese” was a vague concept with no clear criteria for precise definition. While the Han people naturally formed the majority of “Chinese,” the criteria for being Chinese were far more ambiguous and complex than just a person’s ethnic background. The most important standard seemed to be one’s inner acceptance of the supreme authority of the Chinese emperor, the “Son of the Heaven” (a position not always occupied by a Han Chinese). During this era, being “Chinese” basically meant being an obedient subject of the Chinese emperor.

      The disintegration of China’s imperial system made these criteria of defining “Chinese” obsolete. With the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912, and the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese governments during different periods made a series of efforts to identify both “Chinese” and Chinese citizenship. The founders of the ROC announced that the “Chinese” were composed of five different “races”: Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Hui (Muslim). In the 1950s, the PRC began to classify the ethnic groups constituting China’s population in more specific ways, finally splitting “Chinese” into fifty-six different ethnic categories, with Han as the overwhelming majority. In the meantime, the PRC government formally announced in 1955 a policy of not recognizing dual citizenship: overseas Chinese had to choose either to maintain their Chinese citizenship or to adopt a foreign citizenship.

      Yet with China’s continued integration into the international community, and with the deepening of the crisis facing the Chinese communist state, the official definition of “Chinese” began to encounter serious challenges. Within China, the reform-and-opening process has reduced the controlling capacity of the Han-dominated central government and at the same time created more political space for people of minority ethnic groups to develop a self-consciousness that might differ from the official “Chinese” identity. As a result, in such regions as Tibet and, more recently, Xinjiang, voices from among the non-Han ethnic groups calling for the right to determine who they are have begun to rise and, occasionally, turn into action. All of this, together with the emerging trend of regionalism and the widening gaps between coastal and interior provinces and between urban and rural populations, has constituted the basis for some China experts in the West to raise seriously the possibility of the emergence of a “divided China” in the twenty- first century. Many Chinese, especially intellectuals, view this possibility with alarm, and even have appropriated the words of China’s national anthem (which was composed in the 1930s, when China was facing profound national crises as the result of Japanese aggression) to assert that “the Chinese nation has reached the most dangerous juncture in history.”¹⁹

Pursuing Economic Reforms and Promoting Political Democracy

It is with this sense of crisis that the Chinese are addressing the key dilemma of pursuing economic development and promoting political democracy. In actuality, the Chinese have tried to find satisfactory answers to this dilemma since the early days of China’s quest for modernity. For example, during the May Fourth and the New Cultural Movements in the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals had argued that in order to modernize China, it was necessary to embrace both “Mr. S(cience)” and “Mr. D(emocracy).” Eighty years later, this dilemma remains unsolved.

      China’s search for establishing democratic institutions certainly is tortuous. As Chinese intellectuals have by now widely accepted, this difficulty results from, in the first place, the lack of a democratic tradition in China’s history. Indeed, throughout the premodern period, it was autocracy, rather than democracy, that dominated Chinese political philosophy. During the modern era, the term “democracy” was introduced into China’s political life, but it was often defined and practiced in ways nothing like “rule by the people.” A revealing example in this regard is Mao Zedong’s adoption of a “people’s democratic dictatorship”; though “democratic” was the defining adjective, Mao’s regime was anything but a political institution with checks and balances.

      In theory, the age of “reform and opening” holds new prospects for China to develop genuine democratic institutions; in reality, however, there exist many obstacles in China’s path toward democratization. The most difficult obstacle lies in the fact that democracy is not just a set of rules and regulations that can be easily imposed upon a people lacking some sort of experience with democratic values. In short, democracy is a way of life, and a successful transition from autocracy requires the people’s inner acceptance of democratic principles; such an acceptance will come only through a gradual process. It is also extremely difficult for China’s Communist leaders, especially the generation of revolutionary veterans who had controlled political power through bloody struggles, to accept democratic principles. Indeed, China’s path toward democratization is destined to be uneasy.

      All of this, however, does not mean that democracy is inimical to China. During the age of reform and opening, the pursuit of democracy has been a persistent and evident theme at every stage of its development. Indeed, with the progress of China’s market-oriented economic reforms, a new understanding of the citizen’s rights and obligations has emerged along with the spirit of free competition. As a result, democracy as way of life is taking root in Chinese society. The most conspicuous revelation of such, as indicated by several recent studies of Chinese politics and society, is a system of direct elections that has been adopted in many Chinese villages, districts, and counties in the past decade, fundamentally changing the political structure of Chinese society.²⁰ In the long run, one can expect China’s market-oriented economic reform to create further conditions for the spread of democracy as a way of life, eventually making the most populous country in the world a genuine democracy.

      Yet it should be emphasized that in the short run, China’s economic development will not necessarily always be accompanied by progress in political democratization. In fact, China’s market-oriented economic reforms may cause setbacks in the process of political democratization in the foreseeable future. First, economic development will raise people’s expectations of more affluence, making “how to make more money” a central social concern. As a result, popular enthusiasm for political democratization may give way to the sole pursuit of financial gain. Second, the authoritarian government may create and perpetuate the popular impression that it is responsible for achievements in economic development; indeed, such political control is widely believed to be crucial for maintaining relative social stability, thus reducing the pressure on the government to embrace political democratization programs. Third, economic development will inevitably cause instability in the existing social and political order, arousing the popular fear that the introduction of dramatic political reform at the same time may lead to further instability and disorder. Consequently, popular support for rapid political reform may temporarily diminish. Such is the dilemma of economic development and political democratization China now faces and will continue to face well into the next century.

      Some Western observers of China’s development mistakenly assume that a simple correlation should exist between the progress of economic reform and the advance of political democratization, as if the former will bring about the latter under any circumstances and in any given period. If economic development fails to bring about immediate progress in political democratization, these observers will lose patience and point to such failure to cast serious doubt on China’s ability to turn into a democratic country through its own efforts. It will take time, perhaps decades, for the two processes to go hand in hand, resulting in the successful democratic transformation of China’s state and society—if by then “China” still exists.

The “China Challenge” Is Not Merely Chinese

At the end of the twentieth century, China is at a crucial historical juncture. The reform-and-opening process has fundamentally changed China’s isolated international status, while at the same time making the Chinese state less suppressive and Chinese society more open and plural. And yet the final outcome of this process is by no means certain. From a Chinese perspective, the hope that China will succeed in meeting the tremendous challenge of transforming state and society and thus change into a land of prosperity and modernity (including the adoption of democratic political institutions) remains very promising. In the meantime, however, the Chinese, especially the intellectuals, have been frustrated by the negative effects of the reform-and-opening process, leading to the fear that the Chinese state and society may disintegrate from the pressure of change.

      Therefore, from a Chinese perspective, the “China challenge” has a destructive potential. Hence China will either successfully face the challenge, thus becoming a great nation of prosperity and democracy, or succumb to it, resulting in the nation’s disintegration. In either case, because of its huge territory and population, China’s fate will not only concern the Chinese themselves; it is a matter of global significance.

      It should be emphasized here that in neither case will China become a fundamental threat to international peace and security as perceived by the advocates of the “China threat” thesis. If the reform-and-opening process finally brings economic prosperity, social stability, and democracy to China, it will simultaneously transform China into a real “insider” of the international community, willing to observe a broader range of international legal norms and regulations. Moreover, according to the widely accepted scholarly observation that genuine democracies do not fight with one another, it is plausible to believe that a democratic China will not threaten other democracies in the world.

      If China fails to hold up under the extraordinary pressure brought about by total state and societal transformation and disintegrates as a result, it will be too weak to pose a threat. However, the world may see an entirely different “China threat”: The country’s nuclear arsenal could get out of control; its environmental protection efforts could completely collapse; or more than a billion Chinese could wreak havoc in neighboring countries through mass out-migration. In such a way, it would be impossible for China to play a key role in promoting regional and world stability and peace.

      If there is anything other countries should do to help China, it is to help it realize the first possibility and avoid the second. Because of the global nature of the “China challenge,” by doing so they are also helping themselves.

TOC | Summary | Foreword | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | About the Author

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