Then came Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after 1978 and the opening of China to the free market economy. By twenty years later, China astonished the world with the way it was rising again. By one account, this was the fourth time that it had risen after a great fall.
The first rise was more than 2200 years ago when the Qin and Han empires united the country after 500 years of fighting among warring states.
The second was the reunification under the Sui and Tang dynasties after another 400 years of division.
After the 8th century there followed another 400 years of continual fighting between Chinese and northern tribal peoples, this time led by the Khitan, Tangut, Jurchen and Mongol that ended with Kublai Khan’s conquest of China. China fell to its lowest point in history when the whole country came under foreign rule. Thus, when the founder of the Ming dynasty was able to lead the Chinese to drive the Mongols out: that was China’s third rise. The Manchu who took over in 1644 built on the Ming system and made the empire even stronger. The Qing had consolidated the third rise so this did not represent a new rise.
The key point is that, in each case, the rise came after long periods of division and chaos and confirmed that China could recover from its falls and become stronger when it rose again.
Its newest challenge in the 19th century came from the industrial revolution in Europe backed by long-distance naval power. By 1900, China’s imperial system had collapsed and given way to frantic attempts to learn from Western models, beginning with a nationalist republic with capitalist characteristics. At stake was an undivided China with a resilient culture that was the pride of most Chinese.
During the 20th century, the China dream was to restore the country by acquiring the wealth and power that had made the West so dominant. The United States and Japan had demonstrated how quickly such power could be achieved. Germany and Soviet Russia also showed that there were other ways to challenge Anglo-French pre-eminence.
In the end, the major Chinese political parties chose between West One (liberal capitalist) and West Two (revolutionary communist) and, to the surprise of many, in 1949, West Two won out.
Now that the reforms have enabled China to learn everything it wanted from both West One and West Two, it is clear that the fourth rise is in progress and probably unstoppable.
Is this just another rise like the first three? This rise is different.
The first was a rise after centuries of efforts to establish central power from within. That rise was unchallenged for three centuries, but the original Han China was eventually destroyed by a series of tribal invasions from the north, northeast and northwest. In the end, the shock of external aggressions was absorbed and what was internalised laid the foundations for China’s second rise. By that time, the culture of the Han peoples was greatly enriched by the Buddhist ideas accepted from the Western Heaven (xitian) of India and Central Asia.
New continental enemies then became even more powerful and the Mongol conquest that reunified China gave the Chinese a new global outlook. Under the Ming, China’s synthesised Neo-Confucianism had become a defensive orthodoxy that inhibited learning from the ascendant West that emerged after the 16th century. For that, both Ming and Qing China paid a hefty price. When defeated in the 20th century, the country’s loss of orthodox legitimacy forced new generations of Chinese to confront the fact that their distinct civilisation was about to be destroyed — something they had not thought possible.
The determination to survive remained strong. That led them to learn everything they could from the modern world. But this readiness to learn was hampered by decades of political strife within and threats of invasion without.
After 40 years of consolidated central authority since 1949, there is renewed confidence. This stems from the people’s belief in progress and their ability to combine the new with what was best in their past traditions. By being willing to learn so much from the modern West, China today is undergoing a totally different experience of rising again after a great fall.
Wang Gungwu is University Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Chairman of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. He is also Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University.
China had help from American companies in its rise to economic power because the American companies gave them the jobs, technology transfers, and a whole bunch of other things in order to get a docile, cheap labor force. In addition, the Chinese government refuses to let the foreign companies come in and buy up state industries like steel and gave tough trade demands that the foreign companies had to accept; otherwise, they would not be allowed access to the Chinese markets. The American companies certainly play their part in making China what it is today.
On Professor Wang’s overview of the four cycles of China’s identity progressive consolidation, I would like to suggest a factor that can make this last and present cycle “totally different”: it is happening at a time when global conditions – protracted lower GDP in the OECD countries, climatic disturbances, uncontrolled migrations, the global uberisation allowing GAFAMs/FAANGs and global unicorns resorting to fiscal engineering – resulting in growing unemployment in developed countries, and widening of the gap between the 0.01 per cent and the rest – could put China in the driver’s seat to manage a global soft landing of the economy on which our planet and species survival might depend in the middle and long term. The level of her currency reserves, her still very high GDP growth rate, her expertise in centrally managed market economy, as well as migration control, and stated claim to found a “ecological civilisation” could make her confident enough to inspire policies at the UN level or otherwise (G7 + 3 for instance).
I feel the jury is still out on whether the CCP will outlast previous imperial dynasties. The advantages the CCP has are (i) its leaders are selected by merit (in theory), not by accident of birth; (ii) power is held by a party vs a single individual; and (iii) whereas imperial China often faced hostile invasion, today’s China faces a relatively benign external environment.
On the other hand, (i) we have no idea how the CCP actually selects its leaders – the fact that even members of the Politburo had been prosecuted for corruption shows that the selection process is flawed; (ii) the CCP could end up becoming a dysfunctional organisation, captured by the wealthy, the corrupt; and (iii) the external environment could become hostile.
I would like to see: (i) greater transparency in how China’s leaders are selected (vs elected); (ii) evidence that China can in fact deliver inclusive growth (reversing the currently high levels of inequality); and (iii) greater openness between China and the rest of the world (especially the developing world).
I also suggest experimenting with more liberal forms of democratic participation. Not necessarily Western style elections. But it is right that people should have more say over how they are governed. China could remain committed to a single party system that is democratic by giving people a say on the selection of party leaders. It is often claimed (rightly I think) that China’s current leadership enjoys a high degree of support among the Chinese people. How is this support actually demonstrated and assessed? I suggest China experiments with systematic way of demonstrating public support of (say) provincial leadership, and mechanisms for changing the leadership when public support falls off.
I don’t know how can you have democratic participation when you only have one party ruling the country? Of course, it is no better in the USA where that country has a two party system.