China’s Shifting Views on Korean Unification Fei-Ling Wang
IV. What to Do in the Neighborhood
traditional worldview are also rising and being rejuvenated, coinciding with the rise of China’s wealth and capabilities. To be sure, the Qin- Han worldview of a united world-empire has always existed in China.
On the surface, it appears to have been irrevocably weakened, diluted, and even replaced by the obvious success of the conformist foreign policies and the great gains of the PRC’s integration into the West- dominated, globalizing Westphalian world order over the past three decades. Deep down, however, Beijing has been working hard recently (especially in the past few years) to re-strengthen its traditional control over the Chinese mind with old, proven ideas and methods, as the officially stated orthodox communist/socialist ideology of the CCP has lost its appeal and now has little influence over the lives and minds of the Chinese people.
Like so many Chinese rulers before them who fully appreciate the utility and benefits of the Qin-Han empire based on a legalist core and also the imperative need for an ideological coating of thought-control, the CCP has now gone back on its past vicious criticism of Confucianism and is actively working to revive traditional Chinese ideas from the Imperial times in the name of “rejuvenating Chinese civilization” and upholding “Chinese characters.” Confucianism is once again treated with reverence, in a highly pragmatic and utilitarian way. And a state- sponsored and politically manufactured dichotomy between “the universal world” and a “special China” has rapidly emerged to explain away the contradictions between pragmatic foreign policies and the political need to rejuvenate old ideas.17Indeed, Beijing’s new effort to
17Xiang Biao, “Xunzhao yige xin shijie” (Looking for a new world), Kaifang shidai (Opening era), Beijing, No. 9, 2009.
rejuvenate traditional ideas and norms has been astonishingly extensive and impressive.
As a major aspect of this rejuvenation effort and also as part of the effort to promote China’s new “soft power” and improve its international image (and also as a great symbol of China’s rising international clout), Beijing launched an unprecedentedly ambitious program to set up and pay for joint-venture “Confucius Institutes” all over the world offering Chinese language education. The first Confucius Institute was established in November 2004 in Seoul, South Korea. By November 2010, China had set up 322 Confucius Institutes in 91 countries, enabling the Confucius Institute Headquarters (created in 2007 in Beijing under the leadership of the PRC Ministry of Education) to reach out to the whole world to teach Chinese language and culture, organize research and networking activities, host conferences and study trips to China, and sponsor many social and cultural events and exchanges.
The tianxi-yitong(all united under heaven) idea itself has also made a strong resurgence and has been re-articulated in China in recent years.
In 1995, Chinese economist Sheng Hong published an essay discussing the tianxiasystem as a key component that makes Chinese civilization fundamentally different from Western civilization.18A representative work is the now much-cited book by Zhao Tingyang, a Beijing-based Chinese philosopher, who describes the Chinese worldview of the tianxia system as “entirely different from” and opposing to the
18Sheng Hong, “Shemu shi wenming?” (What is civilization?), in Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and management), Beijing, No. 5, 1995, pp. 88-98. Wei wanshi kai taiping(To create an eternal peace), Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999.
dominant Western worldview of nation-states with its implications of balance of power, national competition, inequality, and conflicts. And the rise of China simply provides an appropriate opportunity and the necessary resources and evidence for the advancement of this set of ideas in China and all over the world.19
To foreign observers, a more noteworthy general trend in the resurgence of the world-empire idea has been its evolution from a mostly semantic, philosophical, and historical discourse to one more closely related to politics, foreign policy, and world politics.20Well-connected leading Chinese foreign policy analysts and officials have quite forcefully presented the rejuvenated and remodeled traditional idea as a legitimate alternative to and a powerful critique of the dominant Westphalian world order.21
In addition to the rejuvenation of the Qin-Han tianxiaidea, there have been numerous other efforts in the PRC in recent years to tap into ancient Chinese thoughts and experiences to provide guidance and reference for the rising Chinese power. Often times, such ideas have been blended with imported ideas ranging from the old-fashioned
19Zhao Tingyang, Tianxia tixi: shijie zhidu zhixue daolun (Tianxia system: a philosophical discourse on a world institution), Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Press, 2005, pp. 17 & 23.
20A good collection of such works is Qin Yaqing ed. Guoji zhixu(International order), a volume of Zhongguo xuezhe kan shijie(World politics: Views from China) ed. by Wang Jisi, Beijing: New World Press, 2007. Like many of the authors in the volume, Qin was trained in the West.
21Qin Yaqing, “Guoji gaunxi lilun zhongguo pai xingcheng de keneng he biran”
(Chinese school of international relations theory: possibility and necessity] in Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi(World economy and politics), Beijing, No. 3, 2006, pp. 7-13.
nationalist or even imperialist ideas of “living space” and power games of the 19th and 20th Centuries, to the somewhat discredited Marxist or leftist orthodoxies, to the latest concepts of soft power and global missions. One scholarly effort to reinterpret Chinese history and recast Chinese ideas is a re-interpretation of China’s pre-Qin history and the ideas of “international relations” prevalent at that time.22Interestingly, this line of inquiry has largely come to the conclusion that the “Western”
idea of international realism was very much present in Chinese history, as well as the equivalent of idealism and even globalism. After all, aside from the tianxia-yitongidea, the ancient ideas from China’s long history of civilization seem to have failed to offer anything very “un- Western” or unique, let alone provide any meaningful alternatives to the ideas of international relations under the Westphalian system. Such research may help to bridge the supposed gulf between “Western” ideas of politics, governance and world order and the traditional Chinese worldview.
One eye-catching theme in the Chinese discourse of international relations and foreign policy has been the view that, compared to the
“natural” and indeed more historically “stable” and long-lasting Qin- Han empire-world order, the current Westphalian system that China finds itself in is a transitional, suboptimal world order analogous to a “New Warring States” period: chaotic, conflict-filled, war-prone, undesirable, unstable and needing to be replaced or reformed. A group of well-known radical nationalist writers has published a book titled The New Warring States Erathat directly calls on China to seize
22Yan Xuetong et al, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
the opportunity to rise up by incorporating East Asia first financially and then militarily, in order to “think and act at a global height” and thus be better prepared and positioned to fight the imminent world war for control over the future of the whole world.23
23Wang Jian & Qiao Liang et al, Xin zhanguo shidai(New Warring States Era), Beijing: Xinhua Press, 2004. There have been at least a couple of less-known books with exactly the same title and similar contents published in the PRC in recent years.