The Contest of the Century

The Contest of the Century Read Free Page A

Book: The Contest of the Century Read Free
Author: Geoff A. Dyer
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this gap in all sorts of ways. Economic growth and a reputation for competent governance have been the main props. But China’s leaders have also buttressed their legitimacy with an appeal to a nationalism that is tinged with a sense of victimhood. Brittle politics at home are stimulating a more assertive voice abroad.
    In the end, thinking of China as an aspiring great power is the best way to demystify the country, to resist the temptation to either demonize or exoticize. China is neither an anti-democratic hegemon launching a new Cold War, as its more conservative critics suggest, nor the postmodern, Confucian meritocracy that some supporters imagine. China is, instead, a state which is behaving in many of the same ways that other states have behaved when they started to become very powerful.
    ——
    It is an indication of the influence of Deng Xiaoping’s
taoguang yanhui
formula that it has simultaneously been attacked by hard-liners at home and inspired fear abroad. The advice was kept secret at first, and to this day, there are differing accounts of the full text that he wrote. In the 1990s, the phrase was heavily criticized by Chinese leftists who thought it a sop to the U.S. Yet for many foreign audiences, it had a different feel. The official translation in China is “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity”; however, in the U.S., the same words have often been translated as “bide one’s time,” a phrase that contains a certain menace about future intentions. For Deng, the ambiguity was a way of keepingdifferent groups happy. He always knew that a powerful China would start competing for power and influence with the U.S. He just wanted to put off the rivalry for as long as possible.
    Such self-restraint has become harder to sell since 2008. A year before Hu Jintao stood up to speak in Tiananmen at the parade, Lehman Brothers had collapsed. The psychological fallout from the global financial crisis was particularly important in China, where predictions about inevitable American decline have taken deep root. Within the Chinese elite, there has been a long-standing argument about how China should behave toward the U.S. when China became a powerful nation: the doves said that China would be best served by playing along with the U.S.-led international system, while the hawks said China would need to stand up to the U.S. Yet it was a debate held in suspended animation. Everyone knew that Beijing would have to answer this question one day, but the priority for the time being was to focus on the building up of what Chinese officials call “Comprehensive National Power.” Just as 9/11 empowered American neoconservatives, the financial crisis ended the shadow boxing in Beijing and unleashed powerful demands within parts of the elite to begin taking on the U.S. The time to answer the question, the hawks demanded, was now.
    To warn about growing competition, however, is not to predict conflict, especially in an era when nuclear deterrence provides a powerful brake on both nations. There are no Chinese plans for the sort of territorial expansion that scarred Europe in the late nineteenth century, or for a project of global domination. Instead, Beijing has more subtle, long-term instincts about gradually undermining the foundations of American power and influence, starting in Asia and moving outward. International-relations scholars like to ask whether new powers will rise within the existing order or try to overthrow it. But neither explanation captures China’s behavior. Instead, Beijing is beginning a process of gradually trying to mold the system in its own direction, to shape rather than tear down. Chinese leaders understand the limitations that globalization places on them, and the benefits that thirty years of trading with the U.S. have brought, but they are also far more skeptical and resentful about American influence than most in Washington realize. There is nothing surprising about what China is now doing.

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