‘china anxiety’: discourse and intellectual challenges

‘China Anxiety’: Discourse and Intellectual Challenges

Yongjin Zhang

ABSTRACT

This article discusses what the author refers to as ‘China anxiety’, manifest inthe current Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China. It is argued thatbeneath the hype and hyperbole, anxieties can be detected that are no longeronly about the prospect, but increasingly about the purpose, of China’s rise topower. The author suggests that there is a particular and deeper ‘cauldron ofanxiety’ which causes, and is caused by, a certain intellectual disorientationamong those participating in the discourse. The rise of China remains apuzzle, as it presents a number of paradoxes, contradictions and ironies.The article examines two specific propositions and debates, on the returnof authoritarian powers and on the future of the liberal global order. Theauthor argues that a rising China raises a number of important questionsabout the way in which the transformation of China has been represented inthe dominant Anglo-American discourse and the knowledge of China thatsuch representations construct. The article concludes with the insight thatChina’s pathway to power poses fundamental challenges to some intellectualpremises and political wisdoms widely accepted in the West.

INTRODUCTION

For better or worse, China’s rise as superpower is a major topic of thepresent political moment. Writing in Foreign Policy, Minxin Pei (2006: 32)made the mischievously rueful comment: ‘The only thing rising faster thanChina is the hype about China’. In May 2005 Newsweek carried a specialreport announcing the arrival of ‘China’s Century’. Not to be outdone, TheEconomist ran a cover story titled ‘The Great Wall Street: How China Runsthe World Economy’ (The Economist, 2005). Time made the rise of China amore sensational topic in 2007 with its cover story, ‘China: Dawn of a NewDynasty’, claiming that ‘with the US tied down in Iraq, a new superpower

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at an international conference on ‘China Rising:External and Internal Impact’ at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan (15–16March 2011) and the ‘China Rising’ conference at the University of Bristol (5–6 December2011). The author is grateful to participants of these two conferences for stimulating discussionsthat contributed to developing some ideas in the paper. The author would also like to thank theanonymous reviewers for their critical comments, which helped improve the analytical qualityof this published version.

Development and Change 44(6): 1407–1425. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12062C© 2013 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA

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has arrived’ (Time, 2007). Outshining Napoleon, China is said to be nolonger a sleeping giant, but a hungry dragon that is not only shaking theworld (Kynge, 2009), but also going to ‘rule the world’ (Jacques, 2009). Asthe Eurozone debt crisis was unfolding, China was said to be engaged in a‘scramble for Europe’ (Godement and Parello-Plesner, 2011). Not only isChina ‘an inevitable superpower’ (Subramanian, 2011a), but the US (andthe rest of the world) are condemned to ‘living in the shadow of China’seconomic dominance’ (Subramanian, 2011b).

The speed at which Chinese economic, political and military power hasgrown in recent decades has entranced and bewildered China critics andenthusiasts alike. If explaining China’s rapid historic rise remains an intel-lectual challenge for political scientists and international relations special-ists, policy makers worldwide have to grapple with its implications for theirfuture global, regional and national policies. The current discourse in theWest on the rise of China focuses on debating the intention, projection andpurpose of a rising Chinese power. The academic and policy debates in thisregard are full of disagreements, contentions and conflicts. After all, the riseof China has significant ramifications not only for the future of China, butalso for the rest of the world.

This article addresses the impact of the rise of China with an intendedtwist. It discusses what I refer to as ‘China anxiety’ with an analytical focuson the recent Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China published inEnglish. This analytical focus is self-explanatory given the discursive dom-inance of Anglo-American concerns about China rising. This, of course, isnot to deny that there are also arguably a ‘European discourse’, an ‘Aus-tralian discourse’ and a ‘Japanese discourse’ on the rise of China.1 Someof these discourses may differ from the dominant Anglo-American dis-course in their interpretations of the rise of China, and subsequently intheir policy prescriptions (see in particular White, 2012). It is, however,clearly the Anglo-American concerns that delimit the parameters of thediscourse on the rise of China. The ‘China anxiety’ referred to in this ar-ticle is globally prevalent and, to a greater or lesser extent, shared by alldiscourses.

In the rest of this article, three arguments are advanced. First, beneaththe hype and hyperbole, anxieties exist that are no longer focused on theprospect but are increasingly concerned with the purpose of China’s riseto power. Second, a deeper ‘cauldron of anxiety’ can be discerned thatcauses and is caused by an intellectual disorientation, indeed even intellectualagonies, among those participating in the discourse on China as a risingpower. The rise of China presents a puzzle characterized by a number ofparadoxes, contradictions and ironies. Third, through a brief examinationof two propositions and debates on the return of authoritarian powers and

1. See for example, Australian Government (2012); Fox and Godement (2009); Godement andParello-Plesner (2011); Mochizuki (2007); van der Putten (2009); White (2010, 2012).

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the future of a liberal global order, it is argued that a rising China raisessignificant questions about the way in which the transformation of Chinais represented in the dominant Anglo-American discourse and that it posesa significant challenge to some Western intellectual premises and politicalwisdoms pertaining to the phenomenon of China.

A DISCOURSE OF ANXIETIES

For many centuries, China has been a fixture in the Western imagination.In the words of Jonathan Spence (1999: xi): ‘The sharpness of the feelingsaroused by China in the West, the reiterated attempts to describe and analyzethe country and its people, the apparently unending receptivity of Westernersto news from China, all testify to the levels of fascination the country hasgenerated’. Imageries of China as either the ‘Yellow Peril’ or the ‘RedMenace’ have been an integral part of Western obsessions and anxietiesabout China (Pan, 2012). The discourse on the rise of China has informed,and been informed by, these imageries. Few would deny that the Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China is a fast-moving one. Claims suchas ‘the coming conflict with America’ (Bernstein and Munro, 1997) and ‘thecoming collapse of China’ (Chang, 2001), made only a decade or so ago, nowseem light years removed from the present. Ezra Vogel’s contemplation of‘living with China’ in a non-confrontational US–China relationship (Vogel,1997) is a far cry from Bergsten’s proposed ‘partnership of equals’ or a Groupof Two (G2) in managing global economic affairs a decade later (Bergsten,2008). Gerald Segal’s (1999) poignant question ‘does China matter?’ hasbecome no more than rhetorical now.

Yet the rise of China continues to be a source of anxiety for a varietyof reasons. Those who view the power transition as a zero-sum game areconcerned that China’s rise is synonymous with American decline. Chinahas built up its soft power, Joseph Nye (2005) asserts, ‘at the expense ofthe United States’. China is also said to have mounted a ‘charm offensive’worldwide through its diplomatic, trade and cultural initiatives (Kurlantzick,2007). In an endorsement of Kurlantzick’s book, Orville Schell claimed thatChinese soft power ‘has begun to transform the world balance of power ina way that makes it essential for Americans to recalibrate their presump-tion of US pre-eminence’.2 While some argue that China is increasinglybecoming a status quo power, others are convinced that China continues tofollow Deng’s grand strategy of hiding its capacity and biding its time (Foot,2006; Friedberg, 2011; Johnston, 2003, 2007; Taylor, 2007). For Brzezin-ski (2009: 56), China remains ‘a fundamentally cautious and a patientlyrevisionist power’, and for Barry Buzan (2010: 18), China is no more than

2. See http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=9780300117035 (accessed 15November 2011).

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‘a reformist revisionist’. Aaron Friedberg (2011) goes much further andclaims that China has engaged in a ‘contest for supremacy’ with the UnitedStates in ‘the struggle for mastery of Asia’, whereas Peter Navarro (2008)predicts ‘the coming China wars’ — not because China possesses weaponsof mass destruction, but because of its invention of the weapons of massproduction.

At the same time, Robert Zoellick (2005) argues that ‘the China of todayis simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s’ and that ‘China does notbelieve that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of theinternational system’. This is at odds with the conviction of offensive realistssuch as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that China, the rising power, andthe United States, the hegemonic power, are preordained to clash violently.A rising China will inevitably challenge the hegemonic United States; thequestion is thus not whether, but when this will happen (Mearsheimer, 2001,2006; Walt, 2010). Offensive realists may indeed support their propositionby pointing out that China has increased its military spending at a double-digit rate annually in the last two decades and has a military budget secondonly to that of the United States. China’s successful attempts at testing itsanti-satellite and anti-ballistic missiles technology in 2007 and 2009 canbe cited as clear evidence of China’s strategic and purposeful challengeto American dominance in space (Lampton, 2010). China is also said tohave developed offensive capability in cyber warfare and has launched themost egregious cyber-attacks on US commercial and government networks(Lampton, 2010; The Wall Street Journal, 2013). Stephen Walt counsels atthe same time that there is no need for panic about China’s phenomenal risesince China ‘has a long way to go before it becomes a true “peer competitor”’of the United States (Walt, 2010).

The ‘cauldron of anxiety’ in the United States, to borrow the phrase ofZoellick (2005), is not just about China as a rising power but about theuncertain strategic intentions of China. In the words of Jeffrey Legro (2007:515), ‘the “rising China” problem is not just about power, but purpose’.According to Legro (ibid.: 516), neither realists nor liberals have suitablepolicy responses to China’s rise, because ‘China’s diplomatic future . . . islikely to be more contingent than either the power or interdependencepositions allow’. Legro argues that the key is to understand and to seek toshape, if possible, core ideas held by the Chinese leadership and the waythey inform China’s strategic foreign policy goals. For democratic peacetheorists, such a proposition is obviously problematic. If China remainsauthoritarian and its policy-making processes continue to be opaque, itsstrategic intentions are likely to be shrouded in secrecy. For them, nothingshort of fundamental democratic change in China would solve the problem,simply because ‘a democratic China is much less likely to find itself in a con-flict with the United States, partly because Americans will be more tolerantof a rising great power democracy than a rising power autocracy’ (Kagan,2007: 99). Others are even more concerned about the implications of a rising


authoritarian power for the future of the liberal global order championed bythe United States. The question is not whether China is likely to challengethe hegemonic power or seek to change the rules of the game, nor whetherChina and the United States are destined to come into conflict. Rather thebig question is simply, and more poignantly, ‘can the liberal system survive[the rise of China]?’ (Ikenberry, 2008). In this scenario, another question hasbeen asked: ‘will China’s dream turn into America’s nightmare?’ (Saunders,2010).

Beyond the pure power paradigm, the rise of China has instigated noless intensive anxiety. The source is China’s growing prosperity. China isto blame for the slow global economic recovery from the financial crisis.According to Paul Krugman (2010): ‘Most of the world’s large economiesare stuck in a liquidity trap — deeply depressed, but unable to generatea recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are alreadynear zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effectimposing an anti-stimulus on these economies, which they cannot offset’.Krugman proposes what he calls ‘a turn to hardball policy’ towards China(ibid.). Even an increase or decrease in China’s purchase of US Treasurybonds causes serious concerns. In July 2010, the State Administration ofForeign Exchange (SAFE) in Beijing had to go out of its way to publiclyrule out the so-called ‘nuclear’ option of dumping its vast holdings of USTreasury bonds for political purposes (China Daily, 2010).

There are also acute concerns about the ‘dark side’ of China’s relentlesspursuit of high-speed economic growth, from environmental degradationto climate change. Even before it overtook the US as the largest emitterof CO2 in 2007, China was regarded as the worst polluter. China wasaccused of having either ‘wrecked’ or ‘hijacked’ the Copenhagen climatedeal (Lynas, 2009; Vidal, 2009). Together with India, China is said to have‘sabotaged the UN climate summit’ at Copenhagen (Rapp et al., 2010).Furthermore, China’s forays into Africa raise serious concerns about itsglobal ambition beyond securing sufficient energy and resources for rapideconomic development. Its presence in Africa is seen as having significantimpact on the development path of the continent and policy decisions ofother powers involved (Alden and Hughes, 2009; Taylor, 2007). As erstwhilepariah state, China is now said to be in ‘pursuit of the pariah’ through itsenergy security strategy, which shapes its relationship with Iran, Myanmarand Sudan (Canning, 2007). Last but certainly not least, there are anxietiesabout continued human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic conflictsand rampant corruption in China, and about the Chinese Communist Party’sstubborn resistance to democratization.

There is nevertheless a real shift to be discerned in the dominant Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China compared to that of a decadeago. The difference is that there is now an underlying consensus that thistime the rise of China is for real and it is highly likely to continue, whichurgently requires an effective and rigorous response, particularly by the

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United States. Yet, Will Hutton (2007) contends, the US simply will notmake up its mind whether to contain or engage China, even though ‘thewriting is on the wall’ and the challenges posed by China’s rise are palpable.In other words, the US remains unsure about how to manage China as a risingpower. Its policies seem to have vacillated between constraining, containing,engaging, enmeshing and hedging against China’s rise, as the moment ofgreat strategic uncertainty lingers on. James Steinberg’s (2009) call that‘China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growingglobal role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others’,reflects not only the deep-seated mutual strategic mistrust between Chinaand the US, but it is also indicative of the ongoing frustration on the partof the US in trying to read China’s real strategic intentions (Foot, 2009;Lampton, 2010; Lieberthal and Wang, 2012). Looming large on the horizonis a profound unease about China as a rising power. The ‘China anxiety’ notedabove has morphed into such questions as ‘does the future belong to China?’(Zakaria, 2005); ‘what does China think?’ (Leonard, 2008); ‘what will Chinawant?’ (Legro, 2007); ‘what China wants: bargaining with Beijing’ (Nathan,2011); ‘will China’s rise lead to war?’ (Glaser, 2011); and ‘will China’s riselead to a new normative order?’ (Kinzelbach, 2012).

SURPRISES, PARADOXES AND CONTRADICTIONS

That these questions are being asked and debated both in academia andforeign policy circles is revealing. They testify to deeper anxieties which arediscernible but rarely talked about explicitly and which ultimately concernChina’s pathways to power. That is, given the apparent contradictions inthe Chinese political economy, how has China managed to rise so rapidly?How could we have got China so wrong in the recent past? These questionstake us beyond concerns expressed about an indeterminate transition ofpower, strategic uncertainties and the impact of the rise of China on thefuture world order. It suggests that prior to being a problem, the rise ofChina is first and foremost a puzzle. If we adopt a twenty-year perspective,it is humbling to observe how seriously we have misjudged China. Putdifferently, China’s political change, economic transformation and strategicpolicies since 1990 seem to have defied most anticipations, projections andpredictions by economists, political scientists and international relationsspecialists, whether from the political right or the political left, be theyrealist, liberal or constructivist. China, in other words, keeps surprising usall.

In his incisive analysis titled, ‘China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society’,Lucian Pye (1990: 57) observes that ‘in a world of grandly irrational politi-cal systems, China’s is possibly the most bizarre’. This was at a time whenChina was still acutely traumatized by the violent crackdown on the studentdemonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and doubly so due to the


demise of Communism in Eastern Europe in the same year, followed by theend of the Cold War. Yet, as Pye (ibid.: 72) also observes, ‘paradoxically,in spite of the apparent fragility of a non-institutionalized system of govern-ment, communism endures in its Confucian Leninist form, while being incrisis everywhere else’.

Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not, as some predicted,‘follow the CPSU into the dustbin of history, along with the system itspawned’ (MacFarquhar, 1991). In the early 1990s, the third wave of de-mocratization swept across the world, but it largely bypassed China. Further,contrary to what many anticipated, even the unprecedented economic pros-perity and significant growth of the middle classes in China in the last decadehave thus far not led to political pluralism or democratization. Developmenthas not led to democracy. Rather, the prevailing political development inChina today is that of apathy and stasis if not outright resistance to politicalchange among political elites. The CCP continues to monopolize politicalpower in China. ‘Flaky totalitarianism’ prevails (Patten, 2006). The PRCis still a party-state, and its political system remains authoritarian. Politicalreform has come to a halt and democratization, even at the village level, ispainfully slow. The ‘parasitic state’ (Pei, 2006: 35), the endemic and col-lusive corruption, widespread and increasingly intensified social and civilunrest, and ethnic conflict are both a consequence and perhaps a symptom ofthe systemic ills of Chinese politics. The bitter historical irony is that todayChina symbolizes what some call ‘the end of the end of history’ (Gat, 2007:59) and what others refer to as ‘the end of dreams and return of history’(Kagan, 2007). With hindsight, Kishore Mahbubani (2008: 234) observes:‘When the Cold War ended in 1989 and Europe looked confidently into thefuture while China remained deeply traumatized by Tiananmen, few wouldhave dared to predict that in the following two decades, the EU would under-perform in defending its long-term geopolitical interests while China wouldoutperform every other country in the world’.

It is therefore an even greater irony that it is this unapologetic commu-nist regime that has gone on to preside over an increasingly liberal marketeconomy in defiance of dire predictions of stalling economic growth withoutpolitical reform and democratization. Who could have foreseen in 1990 thatthe Chinese Communist Party would be ‘presiding over the most astonish-ing example of economic growth in human history. . . . Never before has somuch wealth been created by [and for] so many people in so short a time’(MacFarquhar, 2006). Putting this wealth creation in quantitative terms, onedata-crunching exercise by the IMF asserts that ‘the resulting 16-fold in-crease in a major economy’s national income during a single generation isunprecedented’ (Arora and Vamvakidis, 2010: 11). Who would have beenbrave enough to predict in 1990 that in twenty years’ time the Chinese econ-omy would grow into the second largest in the world? One measure of theimportance of the Chinese economy to the global economy today is wellcaptured in the IMF study. It concludes that ‘a 1 percentage point change in

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China’s growth sustained over five years is associated with a 0.4 percentagepoint change in growth in the rest of the world’ (ibid.: 13).

There is one other ‘change of epochal significance’ in the Chinese eco-nomic story. According to Niall Ferguson (2008: 4), ‘The globalization offinance has, among other things, blurred the old distinction between devel-oped and emerging markets, turning China into America’s banker — thecommunist creditor to the capitalist debtor’. Strange as it may sound, in theongoing financial crisis China is seen as holding the key to the success of theFederal Reserve Bank’s policy of quantitative easing to help the Americaneconomy ‘borrow its way out of debt’ (Krugman, 2009). Who could haveimagined this kind of symbiotic economic and financial relationship betweenChina and the United States back in 1990?

How has this unprecedented economic growth and apparent contradic-tions in the Chinese political economy affected state–society relations inChina? Economic transformation has certainly produced extraordinary so-cial changes. It is also arguably true that certain kinds of political dissentare tolerated within limits as total repression of dissent has been replacedby ‘targeted suppression’. What Habermas (1989) called the ‘public sphere’has notably been expanded for inclusion of what Berlin (1969) called the‘negative freedom’ of non-political discourses, particularly in the new me-dia. Reports of mass protest movements and social unrest seem to suggestgrowing tensions between state and society that may lead to an emergingcivil society contesting or resisting the state. Yet, ‘the complex and uniqueways in which the Chinese state and society evolved’ (Pye, 1990: 58) havenot changed fundamentally. Society in China continues to be fragmented.The balance certainly has not shifted from state in favour of society. Quitethe contrary. Not only does the Chinese state show no willingness to relin-quish control over society, it has enhanced its capacity to penetrate society(Perry, 2006). The change that has occurred in the relationship between thestate and society is that society’s subjection to the state is now more by con-sent rather than by coercion in the Gramscian sense of the term (Gramsci,1971).

Perhaps the biggest surprise to many international relations specialists isthat the rise of China has been a stabilizing rather than destabilizing factorfor regional security. For all its analytical rigour, the pessimistic speculationby Aaron Friedberg (1993) that Asia was ‘ripe for rivalry’ after the end ofthe Cold War has proven inaccurate. Asia’s future has not followed Europe’spast, nor has it returned to its own past (Acharya, 2003/4). Richard Betts’s(1993/4: 55) assertion that ‘a rich China will overturn any balance of power’has failed to materialize. China’s balancing behaviour had been erratic evenin the 1990s. With the regional volatility following the end of the ColdWar, ‘Asia’s deadly triangle’ (Calder, 1997) seems to have been managedsuccessfully. China has not sought regional dominance. For a region that hashistorically been fraught with conflict and war, it is remarkable that the pasttwenty years have been characterized by peace, stability and prosperity. The


rise of China is a contributing factor to this regional stability (Kang, 2003,2008).

Another unexpected development is that through socialization, China hasadopted norms such as multilateralism and cooperative security in its ap-proach to regional security. Although it is highly critical of the US for itshegemonic practices in foreign policy, it seems to have resigned itself to, ifnot quite embraced, the unipolar global order. At the same time, China reso-lutely contests some manifestations of American power. China continues todemand that the US end arms sales to Taiwan. It also does not cease to ques-tion the strategic purpose and rationale of the US bilateral security alliancesin the Asia-Pacific. More recently, China has requested the US to refrainfrom carrying out military exercises or reconnaissance missions close to theChinese coastline, or near Chinese territorial waters. However, these actionscan hardly be described as behaviour aimed at power balancing. In fact, theUS has agreed to make the establishment of ‘rules of the road’ for its navalactivities in China’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone an agenda pointin the Sino–US Strategic Dialogue. The US rebalancing (or pivot) towardsAsia implemented since 2010 (Clinton, 2011; Ross, 2012) and the increasingassertiveness of Chinese foreign policy in the last few years clearly presentnew challenges not only to Sino–US bilateral relations, but also to the Asia-Pacific regional order. That does not seem to have changed China’s overallpolicy of accommodating American power, and seeking common interests tomanage what John Kerry most recently characterized as a ‘strong’, ‘normal’and ‘special relationship’ between China and the United States (Xinhua,2013).

This is by no means to suggest that relations between China and theUS can easily be ameliorated. It remains true that ‘the clash of normativeand security interests and conflict of status aspirations make the US–Chinarelationship prone to frequent tension’ (Alagappa, 2003: 97). As Wu Xinbo(2011) complained in the Global Times, ‘China is disappointed, dissatisfiedand confused by the series of hardline policies against China in the secondyear of the Obama administration. China is worried that this is a sign of acurrent or future major reversal in US policy and strategy toward China’,and that ‘With irreconcilable interests, it is impossible to eliminate policydifferences, which limits the good relations’.

What about China’s rapidly growing military power, and the purpose ofthat power? It is true that China has been developing a wide range of weaponsystems. It acquired its first aircraft carrier in 2012. It conducted test flightsof its J-20 and J-31 stealth jet fighters in 2011–13. It is also worth notingChina’s anti-satellite (ASAT) test of 2007, the successful ABM test of 2010and the suspected development of both defensive and offensive capabilitiesin the nefarious domain of cyberspace (Lampton, 2010). Yet, as RosemaryFoot (2006: 89) has noted, ‘There is little substance as yet to the argumentthat China is engaged in directly challenging US military power’ for thesimple reason that China ‘accepts that the US military lead is so great that

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it will be surpassed either never or only in some far-distant future’. Thisassessment seems to be supported by Drew Thomson (2010), who arguesthat the Chinese military is not yet a threat to the US. In his meeting withhis US counterpart in Beijing, Chinese Defence Minister Liang Guangliecandidly and publicly admitted that China ‘was decades behind nations withmore advanced technology’ (BBC, 2011).

If China is not a clear and present threat to US primacy, there is littlesubstance to support the realist claim that a rising China’s displeasure withglobal unipolarity is bound to lead to the establishment of an anti-hegemoniccoalition to counter American power. Neither is China’s determination todevelop its economic power directed at internal balancing in order to be-come a peer competitor of the US. More generally, China has not beenpurposefully disruptive of the Pax Americana, either globally or regionally.One of China’s central strategic concerns, argues Zakaria (2008b: 106), isto avoid ‘ruffling any feathers [of the US in particular] as it steams ahead’.According to Foot (2006: 87), ‘China seems to have chosen the prudentcourse of avoiding unduly antagonizing the United States’. Indeed, in Foot’sview, ‘Beijing’s aim has been to accommodate where possible and to seekcoincidences of interest with Washington’ (ibid.: 93). It is here that one findsthe contradictory logic inherent in viewing a rising power as a status quopower and the paradoxical position of China as a ‘dissatisfied responsiblegreat power’ (Breslin, 2010).

INTELLECTUAL AGONIES: TWO PROPOSITIONS AND DEBATES

Some of the assessments and claims above are necessarily contentious andsubject to dispute. The general argument I seek to make is that ‘Chinaanxiety’ runs much deeper than concerns about the possible ‘tragedy of greatpower politics’ (Mearsheimer, 2001) and a global power shift. As Zakaria(2008a) observed, ‘American anxiety springs from something much deeper,a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world’.The rise of China and the transformations associated with it in the pasttwenty-odd years are surely considered a manifestation of such ‘large anddisruptive forces’. In the discussion below, I argue that China’s pathway topower has served to challenge some dearly held philosophical assumptionsand political convictions in the West. In so doing, it has raised a set ofdeeply reflective and, for some, profoundly disturbing, questions. Are wewitnessing an autocratic revival and the return of ‘great power rivalries’and ‘the great game’ (Gat, 2007; Kagan, 2007)? Or are we moving forwardtowards ‘the Post-American world’, an unsettling end to Pax Americana(Zakaria, 2008b)? Can the liberal global order survive (Ikenberry, 2008)?In which direction is history marching (Gat et al., 2009)? Just a few yearsago, it would have been hard to imagine that such soul-searching questionswould be debated in both academia and government. A brief examination


of these discussions reveals clear evidence of the intellectual agony that therise of China has elicited.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Azar Gat (2007: 59–60) makes the bold claimthat ‘the return of authoritarian great powers’ poses a greater challengethan militant Islam does to the liberal global order the United States haschampioned since 1945. According to Gat, authoritarian great powers are‘poised for a comeback’ after a long absence. In his view, such authoritariancapitalist regimes, as exemplified by China and Russia, ‘may represent aviable alternative path to modernity’ (ibid.). This return, he further claims,spells the ‘end of the end of history’ (ibid.: 59). This implies not only that‘the near-total dominance of liberal democracy since the collapse of theSoviet Union will be short-lived’ (ibid.: 67), but also suggests that ‘there isnothing inevitable about liberal democracy’s ultimate victory — or futuredominance’ (ibid.: 60). This finds strong resonance in the claim of RobertKagan (2007: 4) that the dreams of the post-Cold War era are ‘dissolving’and that ‘the old competition between liberalism and autocracies has alsore-emerged, with the world’s great powers increasingly lining up accordingthe nature of their regimes’.

These claims about the autocratic revival and its implications sparked aseries of heated debates. Also writing in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Deudneyand G. John Ikenberry (2009) sought to refute Gat’s claims by classifyingthe autocratic revival as myth. In their view, the proposition of the autocraticrevivalists that ‘autocracies have achieved a new lease on life and are emerg-ing today as a viable alternative within the global capitalist system’ (ibid.:80–1), is simply wrong. ‘The success of regimes such as those in China andRussia’, they argue, ‘is not a refutation of the liberal vision; the recent successof autocratic states has depended on their access to the international liberalorder, and they remain dependent on its success’ (ibid.). Furthermore, evenif autocracies today ‘are more competent and more adept at accommodatingcapitalism than their predecessors were, they are nonetheless fundamentallyconstrained by deep-seated incapacities that promise to limit their viabil-ity over the long run. Ultimately, autocracies will move toward liberalism’(ibid.: 79–80). In other words, liberal democracy will prevail in the long run.

Andrew Nathan’s earlier research on authoritarian resilience in Chinaoffers a different perspective. Not only does he argue that China’s particularauthoritarian system has proven surprisingly resilient, but he also seeks toexplain its endurance. At the risk of over-simplifying Nathan’s sophisticatedarguments, suffice it to say here that authoritarian resilience in China can beattributed mainly to four undertakings towards the institutionalization of theCCP regime. According to Nathan (2003: 6–7), these are: ‘1) the increasinglynorm-bound nature of its succession politics; 2) the increase in meritocraticas opposed to factional considerations in the promotion of political elites;3) the differentiation and functional specialization of institutions within theregime, and 4) the establishment of institutions for political participationand appeal that strengthen the CCP’s legitimacy among the public at large’.

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He nevertheless concludes with the sobering observation that ‘the regime isnot supine, weak, or bereft of policy options’ (ibid.: 15).

Debates about an autocratic revival are ongoing. Is the victory of liberaldemocracy preordained? Which way is history marching and unfolding? Isliberal democracy the destiny of all states? Will the triumph of the liberalvision of the international order endure? What is perhaps the most salientindication of intellectual agony in the dominant Anglo-American discourseis Ikenberry’s (2008) questions, ‘can the liberal system survive?’ and ‘whatdoes the rise of China bode for the future of the west?’. These questionsconvey an explicit, and somewhat anguished, acknowledgement of the un-stoppable rise of China to a global power. For Ikenberry, ‘the United States’“unipolar moment” will inevitably end’ with the rise of China (ibid.: 25).However, it is not inevitable that an increasingly powerful China and adeclining US would be locked in an epic battle over the rules and leader-ship of the international system, as some realists would like us to believe.China’s increasingly powerful position, Ikenberry argues, would not neces-sarily lead China to fundamentally challenge the existing liberal institutionsalready embedded in the US-led global order. After all, China has benefitedgreatly from its increasing engagement with these institutions, mitigatingthe likelihood of conflict with the US. China has become powerful, not bychallenging these institutions, but by selectively endorsing and embracingsome elements thereof; and indeed because these institutions have embraced,and not rejected, China. In his words, ‘Chinese economic interests are quitecongruent with the current global economic system — a system that is openand loosely institutionalized and that China has enthusiastically embracedand thrived in’ (ibid.: 32). China, he further asserts, is increasingly work-ing within the Western order, because China understands that ‘the road toglobal power, in effect, runs through the Western order and its multilateralinstitutions’ (ibid.).

Elsewhere, Deudney and Ikenberry (in Gat et al., 2009: 155) go on toargue that:

China has been a major beneficiary of this [liberal global] order, and in many ways its foreignpolicy practices have already evolved in fairly radical ways from its Maoist-communist daysin order to gain access to it. Furthermore, China has important incentives to increase itsparticipation in this loosely rule-based order. After all, this order respects state sovereigntywhile providing a variety of services and protections for states operating within it.

Unlike Kagan (2007: 58), who contends that ‘the power and durability ofthese autocracies will shape the international system in profound ways’,Deudney and Ikenberry (in Gat et al., 2009) are convinced that the liberalglobal order can shape China: ‘For China to play a role commensurate withits stakes in the system, the institutions will have to — and should — giveChina a greater role in their governance’ (ibid.: 155).


RISING CHINA AS INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE

The discussion of ‘China anxiety’ above suggests that a rising China hasprofound implications for the search of a politically viable global or-der. It contends that the rise of China remains a puzzle that needs tobe carefully unpacked in the design of a policy response and that the‘China knowledge’ as represented in the dominant Anglo-American dis-course is deficient and inadequate. Unpacking and understanding the par-ticular puzzle that China represents implies three humbling intellectualchallenges.

The first is to recognize that the dominant Anglo-American discourse onthe rise of China is problematic. Comprised of different representationalpractices, it is informed by certain political commitments and cultural as-sumptions that are blind to some important aspects of the changes that Chinahas undergone, which have been integral to its rise. The discourse has beenpurposefully oblivious of the fact that the fundamental social and economicchanges that China has undergone have triggered anxieties among Chinesepeople and in Chinese society. It is also to acknowledge not only that ‘therise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century’ (Ikenberry, 2008: 23), but also, more importantly, that whatthe reforms in China are trying to accomplish is unprecedented in worldhistory. It is to appreciate the complexities and contradictions associatedwith this human attempt at history making. Delivering the second annualBarnett-Oksenberg lecture in Shanghai in 2006, Kenneth Lieberthal (2006)observed that: ‘What China is now attempting — simultaneous, rapid andvery large scale marketization, urbanization, privatization, and globalization— is simply historically unprecedented in scale or scope. No other countryhas ever undergone all four of these deeply unsettling transitions simulta-neously, and China is doing so at astonishing speed’. Taking urbanizationas an example, according to a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute(2012: 16), ‘China is urbanizing on 100 times the scale of Britain in the 18th

century and at more than ten times the speed’.However, even Lieberthal’s list understates the scale of transformation

China is undergoing. To marketization, urbanization, privatization and glob-alization, one might add industrialization, democratization, bureaucratiza-tion, individualization, commodification, monetization and capitalization.China, in other words, has been trying to accomplish the ‘great transfor-mation’ to modernity on an exceptionally large scale and in a compressedtimespan. Just imagine British industrialization, the French Revolution, theAmerican democratic experiment, and German nation building all happen-ing at the same time in a territorially-bound state! Is it really surprising thatthis human attempt at history making has been accompanied by social un-rest and upheavals, socio-economic dislocations, and political and economiccomplexities and contradictions?

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Second, critical reflections on the dominant Anglo-American discourseas contingent representational practices should lead to the understandingthat unpacking the China puzzle requires a different kind of knowledgeabout China. After all, China is always an amalgam of seeming contra-dictions. This necessitates serious consideration of the nature and limitsof the existing knowledge on China which such representations constructand produce. It should also be considered whether such representations,as a particular kind of discursive practice, do not impose certain regular-ities on our understanding of China. ‘There is no knowledge — politi-cal or otherwise — outside representation’, Bhabha (1994: 43) once fa-mously declared. Accepting this dictum has two implications for knowl-edge construction about the rise of China. The first refers to the respon-sibility to search for an alternative and more reflective form of socialknowledge about the rise of China. The second refers to the need to ac-knowledge that ‘China knowledge is always inextricably linked with thegeneral dynamism of Western knowledge, desire and power in global poli-tics’ (Pan, 2012: 152).

Third, the unfolding story of China rising may pose a fundamental chal-lenge to theoretical, philosophical, political and even epistemological as-sumptions that are deeply embedded in the social sciences. The challengingquestion now is no longer whether or not China can sustain its hybrid system,combining authoritarian governance and capitalist economics, or whether itwill eventually have to democratize to continue its impressive economicgrowth. It has become increasingly futile to speculate whether the Chinesecommunist regime is the next to fall (Fukuyama, 2011). In the debate on theChina model of The Economist (2010), the proposition was simply: ‘Thishouse believes China offers a better development model than the West’. Thefact that 43 per cent of Economist readers voted for the motion after a fullweek of debate offers considerable support for Stefan Halper’s observation(Halper, 2010) that ‘China is shrinking the idea of the West’, as the Chi-nese Communist Party has become ‘indispensable . . . to the functioningof global capitalism’ (Zheng, 2007: 20). Andrew Nathan (2003: 16) wascandid that authoritarian resilience in China may indeed suggest ‘a moredisturbing possibility: that authoritarianism is a viable regime form evenunder conditions of advanced modernization and integration with the worldeconomy’. As a seasoned practitioner of liberal politics, Chris Patten artic-ulates a similar sentiment when he looks toward the possible trajectoriesof Indian and Chinese development. ‘Which Asian tiger should we bet on’,he asks, ‘India, with its software engineers and democracy, or China, withits manufacturing prowess and its flaky totalitarianism?’ (Patten, 2006). Hethen continues, ‘The political romantic in me hopes that the answer is both.I keep my fingers crossed that China will change without turmoil. But if thatdoes not happen, then for any liberal pluralist the comparative performancesof India and China in the future will be a test of the correctness of ourpolitical philosophy’ (ibid.).


CONCLUSION

‘China anxiety’ in the dominant Anglo-American discourse is inextricablylinked to the phenomenal rise of the Chinese power in the past two decades.The sources of such anxiety are many. Realists worry about the tragic con-sequences of the global power shift triggered by the rise of China in thepossible clash of the titans. Liberals worry that the rise of China may spelltrouble for the future of the prevailing liberal global order championed by theUnited States. Theorists of various persuasions are concerned about under-standing the purpose of Chinese power. Policy analysts are anxious not justto explain but also to anticipate a rising China’s domestic and internationalbehaviour. I have argued in particular that the sources of scholarly anguishas reflected in the dominant Anglo-American discourse are also located inthe intellectual failure to explain and understand the seeming contradictionsthat mark the historical transformation of China, and the apparent anomalyof China’s pathway to power. The roots of ‘China anxiety’ are much deeper.The anxiety is about China’s rise as much as about ‘the correctness of our[Western] political philosophy’ (Patten, 2006). As such, it calls — with acertain degree of urgency — for a critical reflection on Western philosoph-ical wisdom and political imagination as it pertains to the phenomenon ofChina.

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Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics at the Uni-versity of Bristol, 11 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TY, UK (e-mail:[email protected]). His most recent publications include ‘TheTributary System as International Society in Theory and Practice’ in theChinese Journal of International Politics (2012), and International Ordersin the Early Modern Period: Before the Rise of the West (Routledge, forth-coming 2014).

‘china anxiety’: discourse and intellectual challenges

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