By Johan Galtung
PENANG, Malaysia, Feb 9 2015 (IPS)

A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China – using the West in general, and the United States in particular, for comparison.

Look at a map combining world history and geography, time and space. China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions and the West as empires-birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, British and now U.S. empires – duration vs bubbles that burst, China-centric vs hegemonic.

Johan Galtung

China marginalised space peopled by South-West-North-East barbarians – outside the “Chinese pocket” between the Himalayas-Gobi desert-Tundra-Sea, except for the East China-East Africa silk roads, destroyed by Portugal and England from 1500, colonising Macao-Hong Kong.

A goal of current Chinese foreign policy is to restore the silk roads and lanes: high speed trains for Eurasia, cooperating for mutual and equal benefit, harmony.

The United States marginalises time by disregarding past history, and with the idea that creates future New Beginnings for immigrants, and New History for itself, for other countries, for the whole world.

For Daoism, valid knowledge is holistic and dialectic, based on big, complex units of thought (whole humans, China, the world) riveted by forces and counter-forces, yin-yang, good vs bad, themselves yin-yang, with what is suppressed growing and what is dominant declining until the next turn. The holon may jump from one contradiction tapering off to the next.

For the West, valid knowledge is based on subdivision and accumulation of knowledge about elements, woven together in theories.

For Mao Zedong the basic contradiction was foreign imperialism with landowners vs the people, students-peasants-workers. The 1949 revolution started a distribution vs growth dialectic with jumps every nine years (1958-1967-1976): Mao’s death, four chaotic years.“China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions and the West as empires-birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, British and now U.S. empires”

For Deng Xiaopeng, it was misery vs lack of growth. The 1980 revolution accumulated capital with farmers near cities and in Shenzen (26 percent annual growth), and re-created merchants. Then nine years distribution vs growth again: from 1989 (Tiananmen!) distribution, 1998, 2007, 2016: new focus on growth.

China draws on Daoist insights, on Confucian ideas of hierarchies with harmony, and Buddhist small community equality: Buddhism for distribution, Confucianism for growth, Daoism for jumps between them.

The West could have drawn upon the positives in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but focused on negatives for discrimination-prejudice-war-genocide – now as Judeo-Christianity vs Islam – with unused synergies.

Chinese Mandarin rulers combined rule by rules with high culture, over farmers and artisans, and merchants marginalised at the bottom; Western aristocrat rulers combined rule with force, trade and clergy benediction; later to become State, Capital, Intelligentsia. A basic difference was marginalisation vs integration of merchants.

The Chinese Emperors were Sons of the Heaven trading with those who paid tribute to the Emperor; in the West, Heaven was the only God for the whole world at all time, creating and taking life, the monarch being the only person with a Mandate from God-rex gratia dei-by the grace of God, also entitled to take life, delegated to His army.

The English refused to pay tribute, using opium wars, “gunboat diplomacy”, burning (with the French) the imperial palace instead; China was never violent outside the “pocket” (except when provoked by India in 1962).

The Mandate of the Heaven is lost when People shout in the streets, and regained by addressing their grievances and ideas in the ancient petition system – by “idea democracy, not arithmetic democracy”; the West counting votes in multi-party national fair and free elections.

The Cultural Revolution shouted in the streets against Confucian rule by older men with high education from East China, paving the way for the young, the women and West China – also in 80 million educated “communist” Party members, presumably wise enough to understand the yin-yang dialectics. Tiananmen 1989 was not about democracy, “no votes for uneducated”, but – like Hong Kong (?) – about losing their feudal position to wealthy farmers, merchants, private and state capitalists.

China is China-centric, the deep culture is still holistic-dialectic with a Western surface, the three civilisations synergy is there. So is the Chinese inability to handle the “pocket”: Taiwan-Tibet-Uighurs-Mongolians-Vietnamese-Koreans.

But China indeed went global; trading with barbarians; upgrading merchants-traders-money people; accumulating huge wealth. Mao opened up society for huge masses of Chinese, the young, women, and the West; Deng lifted the bottom 300-400 million up 1991-2004, with the communist focus on the needs of the neediest, into capitalism: capi-communism. Beijing 1980: six million bicycles 0 private cars; 2010: 0 vs five million.

The West, out-competed by BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), did more killing than learning.

China’s ruling class, steeped in culture, linked dynastic cycles to yin-yang thought, and traders to barbarians. Today’s rulers, deep in money shouting to beget more money, link money to corruption – and speculation? And competition from Latin America+Africa – shouting in the streets may send China packing – and the end of a dynasty is near.

China’s lead is not forever. Nothing ever was. Except, maybe, some China. A more spiritual dynasty, after materialist “communism”? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Cyclists in Chengdu, China, home to the world’s largest building, the New Century Global Centre. Credit: Bigstock

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

The China pavilion is a red, inverted pyramid in Shanghai that was built for the city’s bustling 2010 World Expo. While the pavilion pays some homage to China’s ancient past, it mostly shows off China’s 21^st century ambitions, with as much swagger as the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Once the visitor makes her way through the pavilion’s coiling lines, she is swept – by a series of escalators, and by the crowds pushing forward from behind – into visions of China’s future.

On display are children’s drawings of utopian places; a video that fictionalises one family’s intergenerational path from peasantry in the village to globalisation in the city; sustainable designs for various structures; and other grandeurs.  

Earlier this month, China unveiled the world’s largest building, the New Century Global Centre, in its southwest city Chengdu. The 1.7 million square metres of floor space include a 14-screen IMAX theatre, a replica Mediterranean village, a water park and an artificial sun.

China – now the world’s second largest economy – has also claimed other superlatives, by planning construction in Hunan on what is slated to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, and by completing in Zhejiang the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge.

In politics, China has stood its ground, even challenging the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, on different fronts. In April, after the U.S. State Department released its annual human rights report that in part targeted China, the Chinese State Council fired back with a report of its own, picking apart the U.S.’s human rights failures.

And when U.S. President Barack Obama hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in California for an informal, bilateral summit, it was observed as a meeting of equals.

But China’s status today belies its volatile modern history – which includes bloody upheavals, peasant rebellions, mass protests, warfare, regime changes and revolutions.

For decades, China failed to adopt the appropriate military technologies to defend against imperialists, the economic frameworks to develop and the governmental systems to maintain order. So how did China come to this moment of economic and political success? And what underlying philosophies had driven China forward to this point?

Parts of China’s history were distorted by the state-owned media, or simply purged during the Cultural Revolution, or at least suppressed by the state from collective memory.

In their new book, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century, authors Orville Schell and John Delury weave together the history of modern China through the perspectives of China’s most influential leaders.

Schell and Delury’s historical investigation covers 180 years in scope and begins in Nanjing, in the Temple of the Tranquil Seas. “It was in a back room of this temple that, in the oppressive heat of August 1842, Chinese negotiators were forced to sit with their British counterparts and hammer out the crushing terms of the Treaty of Nanjing,” they wrote.

The treaty marked the end of the three-year Opium War, China’s first major conflict with the West. It also marked the first of many unequal treaties that China would suffer through under its imperial oppressors – the U.K., Germany, Russia, France, the U.S. and Japan.

Self-dubbed the “Middle Kingdom”, 19^th-century China and its then ruling Qing Dynasty emperors were reluctant to learn from the advancing West – which the highbrowed Chinese still referred to as “barbarians”.

But after a few additional rounds of military defeats and humiliations suffered at the hands of the West and Japan, as well as increasing rates of domestic unrest, Chinese leaders acknowledged their country’s own weaknesses and worked painfully to reform them.

The book details the careers of 11 of China’s subsequent leaders. It weaves through their personal and political lives, and analyses the ideas that propelled them forward. What strings the characters together is the leitmotif “wealth and power” – a concept that morphs and accretes as the historical narrative progresses.

Schell and Delury met in New Haven, Connecticut, over dinner at the home of historian Jonathan Spence, a professor at Yale University. Delury had just finished his PhD programme under Spence and was looking for a job, and Schell – the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society – had a contract with the publishing group Random House.

Schell first hired Delury on as an associate director at the Center on U.S.-China Relations. Delury is now an assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University in South Korea. Eventually, the two decided to undertake the enigmatic task of piecing together modern China.

“History always makes sense. We thought it was our job to try to understand how it did in this case,” Schell told IPS. “Each of us brought different parts of the historical puzzle into the project.”

In pursuit of achieving “wealth and power” and restoring the country, China – now a single-party communist state – dabbled in a variety of ideologies, including “republicanism, anarchism, Marxism, Christianity and even fascism – whatever ism of the time seemed to offer the best restorative promise,” wrote the authors.

One of the most fascinating portraits in the book is that of Chairman Mao Zedong, who led China through a series of violent and oppressive revolutions, most famously the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

“Like an addict in search of the next high, (Mao) was always looking to the next campaign or movement, each more relentless, brutal and exhilarating than the last,” wrote Schell and Delury.

But through the cold lens of history, Mao’s acts may have finally cleared the burdens of China’s ancient traditions and allowed for the pragmatically minded Deng Xiaoping to reform and open up China’s economy, they wrote.

The emphasis on “wealth and power” in statecraft differs, however, from the more Western ideals of achieving democracy and individual liberties.

Even Sun Yat-Sen, the Western-educated founding father of the Republic of China, doubted democracy’s success in his newly minted country.

“Like so many other Chinese reformers and even revolutionaries, when push came to shove, Sun came down on the side of order, not the rights of the people. China’s basic challenge was not to be met by ‘merely copying the West,’ but by ensuring the overall liberty and independence of the country collectively,” wrote Schell and Delury.

The last profile in the book focuses on dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu, a professor and writer, was an active participant of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. He gained international fame after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the first Chinese citizen to do so. But Liu was unable to receive the award since he was locked up in a Chinese prison cell.

Asked why the authors included Liu, who values individual rights and strays away from the “wealth and power” narrative, Schell said, “Now, having obtained a fair modicum of wealth and power, maybe (China’s) agenda of becoming a more just, rule of law [society], perhaps even a constitutional society becomes possible.”

“Every person profiled in the book feels that democracy or republican government is good, but not until we’ve unified, not until we’re strong, not until we’re wealthier.

“So now that’s happened. Suddenly, Liu Xiaobo and people like him become much more relevant,” said Schell.