The world shakes China.

• Author: Cumings, Bruce
• Position: China's influence in world affairs

"One might trace die history of the limits of those obscure actions, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are performed, whereby a civilization casts aside something it regards as alien. Throughout its history, this moat which it digs around itself, this no man's land by which it preserves its isolation, is just as characteristic as its positive values."

In the recent Italian film Il Postino, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda teaches an uneducated mailman first the word and then the art of metafore. The mailman is a quick study, and soon he is asking Neruda an intriguing question: "Is the world perhaps a metaphor for something else?" Neruda pauses and then says that he will have to think about this question. But he never gives the postman his answer.

China has not been a nation for Americans, but a metaphor. To say "China" is instantly to call up a string of metaphors giving us the history of Sino-American relations, and fifty years of "China watching" by our politicians, pundits, and academics: unchanging China, cyclical China, the inscrutable Forbidden City, boxes within boxes, the open door, sick man of Asia, the good earth, agrarian reformers, China shakes the world, who lost China, containment or liberation, brainwashing, Quemoy and Matsu, the little red book, ping-pong diplomacy, the week that changed the world, the China card, the gang of four, the four modernization, China as insatiable market, Tiananmen, butchers of Beijing, China shakes the world (again), cycles of rise and decline (again), unchanging China (yet again).(1) Beyond all that, our pundits and experts remain captured by a master metaphor. that of China's unfathomable-in-a-lifetime vastness, its historical depth and profundity, and (therefore) its overriding importance to the world we five in.(2)

The accompaniment to this operatic "China" din is a cacophony of expert opinion offering scenarios, for where China is going, and what we must (by all means) do about it. Pick up almost any journal or magazine of expert opinion and you will read that China is disintegrating, or that it is united and stable; that Sino-American relations are frayed to the breaking point, or that they are just over yet another nettlesome hump; that fearsome China must be "contained", or that outward-opening China must be "engaged"; that its military is growing ominously, or that it is underfunded and fitted out with obsolescent weaponry; that its commerce is drastically overheated and facing crisis, or that it is in great shape; that China may attack Taiwan, or that Taiwan may soon be China's biggest foreign investor; that China may take over the Spratly Islands, or that it will not because it cannot; that China will subjugate Hong Kong after it is no longer a British colony in 1997, or that Hong Kong has been colonizing China for years; that a budding civil society was crushed at Tiananmen, or that the protesters themselves did not know what they were doing, or wanted; that post-Deng China will dissolve into chaos, or that a new leadership will pluralize China's politics.(3) Atavistic China seems to be lying in wait for the next trough in history's recurring cycle -- or not, as the case may be.

Contrast all this with George F. Kennan's sober remark back in the 1940s, around the time that Mao mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace (i.e., Tiananmen) to found the People's Republic: "China doesn't matter very much. It's not very important. It's never going to be powerful."(4) China had no integrated industrial base, which Kennan thought basic to any serious capacity for warfare, merely an industrial fringe stitched along its coasts by the imperial powers: thus China should not be included in the containment strategy. Japan did have such a base, and was therefore the key to postwar American policy in East Asia.

Such clear-eyed thinking, informed by a shrewd realpolitik, is a better place to start than with the chorus of alarms and diversions always surrounding the China issue. If we can think realistically about where China has been, maybe we can make better judgments about where it is going. That begins with recognition that China has yet to shake the world; its external influence has been comparatively inconsequential since the industrial revolution. Instead, it is the world that has shaken China.

Castle and Moat

Foucault's metaphor gives us culture as a feudal castle protected by a moat of ingrained practices, habitual choices, and unconscious rejections through which the heterodox and die alien are kept at bay or subdued. It might be taken as a restatement of the reigning metaphor for Chinese civilization: dignified, aloof, self-contained, content with itself, always ready to reject the barbarian -- or, if it must succumb temporarily, to dissolve the foreigner in die absorbent sea of Chinese custom and practice. For centuries this fate awaited the Mongols, the Manchus, and according to many accounts, the Westerners.

The Chinese "castle", however, was an empire encompassing for its occupants the known universe, and its "moat" delimited civilization itself Two hundred years ago King George III of England sent a mission to the Chinese court, asking for the opening of trade relations. The Qianlong Emperor replied:

Swaying die four seas, I have but one goal,

which is to establish perfect governance; strange

jewels and precious objects do not interest me ...

the virtue and prestige of the celestial dynasty

have spread far and wide, the kings of the myriad

nations come by land and sea with all sorts of

precious things. Consequently there is nothing

we lack....

Alas, there was all too much that China "lacked." Modern history began for China when the British banged on its door and when, in C.P. Fitzgerald's perfect metaphor, "to the amazement of all, within and without, "the great structure ... suddenly collapsed, leaving the surprised Europeans still holding the door handle."

A structure that could hold together the entirety of China was not put together again until the country had experienced a century and a half of debilitation, rebellion, central collapse, and disintegration, followed by false starts, blind alleys, civil and international wars, and an immense social revolution. When Mao announced atop Tiananmen in 1949 that "China has stood up", he stirred the hearts of Chinese everywhere, for at least China was again unitary, the humiliation had stopped, and the foreigner had been expelled. But, that done, China again pulled up the ramparts and closed itself off against the Western challenge, only to fall behind once more. It adopted the modern world's only significant alternative to industrial capitalism, namely communism, and imagined that in so doing it was leaping ahead of the decadent West -- only to fall behind. In the 1960s it closed itself off from both the Soviets and the West in the name of "self-reliance", and fell even further behind. The only untried strategy was to join up with the West, as japan had done after 1868; which meant falling in well behind Japan, a former tributary.

In the 1980s intellectuals were able for the first time in decades to travel to the West and to appreciate the wealth, power, and civic order of societies long caricatured as capitalist nightmares; meanwhile the very leaders who had penned the caricatures were now looking to the West for a way out of China's developmental impasse. Thus even the one remaining achievement of the Chinese revolution, the re-establishment of national dignity and pride, seemed a mere illusion. "No foreigner can understand the depth of our pain", a respected intellectual told a visiting American.(5)

In all these encounters, spanning two centuries, we can appreciate the alpha and the omega of China's relationship to the modern world. Standing at the center of the only world it knew, supremely self-confident of the inherent superiority of its own civilization, China has still not overcome the humiliation of encountering a West that prevailed against all Chinese stratagems. It was not for want of trying.

Three Strategies

The 1950s produced some classic metaphors for Sino-American relations but no contact, other than the bloody Korean War, which made mutual accommodation impossible for a generation. Before that war, Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, attempted to construct a different policy, one that Richard Nixon -- Acheson's antagonist in the 1950s -- was to fulfill only in the 1970s.

That policy was to recognize communist China, as a means of weaning it away from Moscow and bringing it into the world economy, thus rendering it dependent on the West. Acheson, like George Kennan, thought that Moscow could not really do much to rehabilitate and industrialize China; sooner or later it would have to turn to the West for help. An Anglophile and an internationalist, Acheson wanted to work with Britain to keep China open, in the hope that this would divide Beijing and Moscow, and ultimately scatter China's insurgent impulses in the solvent of free trade. The way to do that was to try to stay on the good side of Chinese anti-imperial nationalism, and hope to enmesh China in the world economy. The direct confrontation of the United States and China in the Korean War killed that hope for two decades. It also committed the United States to maintaining the separation of Taiwan from the mainland, a separation that continues to this day.

This early 1950s history shaped China's development strategy profoundly. In essence, three broad conceptions of political economy, each with a foreign policy corollary, have animated post-1949 China. All have had the goal on which all Chinese nationalists could agree: to foster China's wealth and power. All have had the stunning and unnerving aspect of requiring thorough change abruptly initiated from the top, first by Mao and then by Deng. And all have sought to contend with the same circumstance that the Qianlong Emperor faced: a vibrant world economy, led first...