China as the Middle Kingdom: Lessons for US and India
Every civilization is effectively hardwired for decline and self-destruction. What gave it energy once becomes the instrument of its downfall.
Consider the Indian story of Bhasmāsura who was granted the power to burn up and turn into ashes anyone whose head he touched with his hand. Bhasmāsura became arrogant with the boon, and became a terror to the whole world. To help humankind, Vishnu assumed the form of the ravishing Mohini, who captivated Bhasmāsura with her charm, and they began to dance. While dancing and copying what Mohini was doing, Bhasmāsura unwittingly placed his hand on his own head and was burnt to ashes.
Europe’s strength overseas during the colonial age was in the use of overwhelming force but it has turned into a fatal weakness because the use such force cannot be done within its own borders. Europe is paralyzed not knowing what to do with migrants within its own borders who refuse to assimilate and are now a substantial minority in cities. These migrants are continuing to stream in and they will eventually become the majority in places and several European nations will disappear in the coming decades. After centuries of exploitation and depredations in the colonies, Europe has embraced a mantle of suicidal empathy for the former colonized.
American capitalism and popular culture that had the magical power to conquer the world has turned it hollow. It is driving people towards narcissism and fifty-odd genders, in which the only way people interact with the world is through consumption without any sense of the limits to the process. The capitalist machine churns on ceaselessly and yet it is devoid of real purpose. The cycle of increasing consumption can only end in a crash.
India is yet to fully cast-off its colonial shackles. It has embraced a perverted form of secularism in which all religions but its own can have their schools and run their churches and mosques. India’s judicial and administrative systems, devised by the British to extract the country’s wealth and keep Indians at the mercy of the police and the judiciary, have not been reformed and Indian economy and knowledge systems remain an appendage to the West.
With this as background, let us decode China. How to make sense of its international dealings and why it is constantly quarreling with its neighbors?
China’s quarrels
Although China proclaims its desire to have good relations with its neighbors, it is aggressively pursuing unilateral action in its border disputes with India in the Himalayas, and control of the Paracel and the Spratly islands in the South China Sea. After constructing a string of artificial islands, it is building deep-water ports, military-grade airstrips and strategic infrastructure to the alarm of its neighbors and the United States.
China presents a façade of being reasonable and responsible in its actions and its greatest trading partner is the US, yet it actively supports American adversaries in various theaters. China speaks of dismantling the colonial age, but revanchism is at the basis of its policy towards Taiwan and other neighboring states.
The difference in the international dealings of US and China are a consequence of their different belief systems, and geopolitical and strategic considerations. Deep beliefs are at the basis of how people and states conduct business, diplomacy and war.
The Chinese style is based on its imperial memory with its emphasis on ceremony, loyalty and the sense that it represents the center. This style is best represented by the Chinese board game weiqi, better known in the West by its Japanese name go.
Confucius
To understand the Chinese mind, it is best to begin with Confucius (552–479 BCE) whose ideas have remained influential throughout its history. Although the modern Chinese society is rapidly changing and getting Westernized, its cultural values have remained remarkably ingrained. Confucius spoke of a system of social cohesiveness dependent upon personal virtue and self-control and it is his ideas and not Communism, which lies at the core of China’s deepest sense of self.
Confucius emphasized practical ethics for he believed that society’s harmony required appropriate behavior of each individual within the social hierarchy. Some view his ideas as no more than secular philosophy while others see them as having a profoundly spiritual basis.
Confucius devised a system of interdependent relationships — a structure in which the lower level gives obedience to the higher (extending from the family level to the national). He believed that moral behavior stemmed from the fulfillment of traditional roles, as defined by the Five Relationships: ruler and minister, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, and friend and friend (with trust between friends as the only horizontal relationship).
Confucius envisioned a society in which everyone followed their responsibility in these five relationships. Each individual may have different responsibilities on both sides of the relationships. For example, a child is expected to respect and obey the parents. After marriage, men fulfill the role of the husband by protecting and providing, and women fulfill the role of the wife by respecting and obeying. In turn, a husband is expected to respect and obey older siblings. And all the inhabitants of the country are expected to respect and obey the ruler. Confucius believed that if everyone fulfilled their responsibilities within the Five Relationships, it would create a stable, harmonious, and peaceful society.
Confucianism considers the ordinary activities of human life, especially human relationships, as a manifestation of the sacred, because they are the expression of humanity’s moral nature, which has a transcendent anchorage in tian (“heaven”). The concept of tian is somewhat similar to the concept of a deity, even though it is primarily an impersonal absolute principle. Confucianism asserts that moral order arises from this-worldly awareness of tian.
The worldly concern of Confucianism rests upon the belief that human beings are teachable, and improvable especially by self-cultivation and self-creation. Confucian thought focuses on the cultivation of virtue in a morally organized world. Some of the basic Confucian ethical concepts and practices include ren, yi, li, and zhi. Ren is the essence of the human being which manifests as compassion; it is the virtue-form of Heaven. Yi is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do good. Li is a system of ritual norms and propriety that determines how a person should properly act in everyday life in harmony with the law of Heaven. Zhi is the ability to see what is right and fair, or the converse, in the behaviors exhibited by others. Confucianism holds one in contempt, either passively or actively, for failure to uphold the cardinal moral values of ren and yi.
Collectivism is inherent in a Confucian society. In order for the society to operate smoothly, it is necessary to subordinate one’s own desires to the greater good of the group. The focus on collectivism makes communism ideal for China, and it may explain why it has persisted there even after its demise in Russia.
Another side effect of this “family first” approach is that the Chinese tend to view society in terms of insiders and outsiders. This is related to the Chinese concept of guanxi (“connections”) — where Chinese people view the world in terms of their web of family, personal and professional network. Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings.
Therespect for authority and hierarchy taught by Confucius helps explain why Westerners have long complained that the Chinese are inscrutable. In the interest of social harmony, one is supposed to act according to one rank, and not necessarily by how one feels. it is important to behave with reverence and obedience according to one’s rank.
For example, ambassadors were expected to kowtow — to kneel and bow so low as to have one’s head touching the ground– to the emperor. It was widely used to show reverence for one’s elders, superiors, and especially the Emperor of China, as well as for religious and cultural objects of worship.
Punishment for not kowtowing
For many centuries China had little intercourse with other countries but after trade began European nations found their commercial relationships with China to be unsatisfactory. Trade was the key to British power and prosperity, and it wished to consolidate its power in India by getting better terms than imposed by the Qianlong government on European merchants in 1760. George Macartney, colonial administrator of Madras and diplomat, was chosen as British envoy to the Qing Empire.
Once in China Macartney refused to kowtow and finally it was negotiated with the Chinese legatee that he could go down on one knee. The meeting itself went fine but Macartney was unable to negotiate business with the emperor or his representatives. The reason became apparent from the emperor’s letter for King George III: “I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of Our Celestial Empire.”
He followed this by expressly denying the requests to open various ports to British ships, permission to establish a warehouse in Beijing, small island near Chusan for a warehouse, a site in the vicinity of Canton for the Navy, and permission to proselytize. It appears that not having kowtowed had played a role in the emperor’s displeasure.
The failure of the Macartney mission was determined by conflicting cosmologies of China and Europe.
Brief eclipse and rehabilitation
Confucius was ahead of his time and was only mourned by a small group of his followers at his funeral. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE — 220 CE), Confucian ideas edged out the “proto-Taoist” Huang–Lao as the official ideology, while the emperors mixed both with the realist techniques of Legalism. A Confucian revival began during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). It developed in response to Buddhism and Taoism and was reformulated as Neo-Confucianism. This reinvigorated form was adopted as the basis of the imperial exams and the core philosophy of the scholar-official class in the Song dynasty (960–1297). The abolition of the examination system in 1905 marked the end of official Confucianism.
As Western powers defeated China before the first World War, the leading intellectuals blamed an attachment to Confucian values for China’s inability to defend against foreign powers. They argued that China’s “backwardness” in the modern world was due to Confucianism’s focus on authority and tradition. It was reviled by Chinese intellectuals of the 1950s-1990s, who spoke of it as “yellow silt clotting the arteries of the country”.
The 1973–6 movement — known as the “Criticize Lin (Biao), Criticize Confucius Campaign” — started by Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, the leader of the Gang of Four, lasted from 1973 until the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976. It claimed that Confucius kept China trapped in a feudal state for millennia.
Today, Confucius is back in favor. His emphasis on harmonious societal relations is a good fit with the modern CCP leadership desire for stability and social harmony. In 2006, then-President Hu Jintao called on government officials to return to Confucian moral ethics as a way to counter corruption and growing inequality. It was decided that over 100 “Confucius Institutes” will be established around the world to spread Chinese language and culture.
The rehabilitation of Confucianism marks an attempt to see a continuity with earlier Chinese empires.
Tianxia
Another idea to understanding the dealings of the Chinese state is that of tianxia (“all under heaven”); it is the ideology that everything under the Sun belongs to the Chinese Emperor who is the Son of the Heaven. Tianxia means that all lands are divinely appointed to the Chinese sovereign by universal and well-defined principles of order. The center of this domain was directly apportioned to the Chinese court, and it went concentrically outward to major and minor officials and then the common subjects, tributary states, and finally ending with barbarians at the fringes.
In other words, the Chinese nation is on the inside and the various feudal kingdoms are on the outside; the feudal kingdoms are on the inside while the barbarians are on the outside. If the Chinese nation is cooked, the vassal states are half-cooked, while the barbarians (those that do not give tribute) are uncooked.
Philosophically, tianxia represents civilization and order in classical Chinese thought. It was seen as the basis of the authority exercised by the Chinese emperor on the vassal states. Since the emphasis is on the emperor retaking lands that by divine authority belong to him, even Sun Tzu in The Art of War speaks of conquest without destroying that which one seeks to conquer.
In the early 19th century, Britain’s victory over Qing China in the First Opium War forced China to sign an unequal treaty. This marked the beginning of the end for the tianxia concept. Following defeat in the Second Opium War, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Tianjin, in which China was made to refer to Great Britain as a “sovereign nation”, equal to itself.
Thus Tianxia is another name for hegemonic power, but as Middle Kingdom it also becomes a status-quo power. It own self-conception has within it the seeds of its fall.
Xi Jinping and return of the tianxia perspective
Chinese official media frequently portrays general secretary Xi Jinping as having the tianxia perspective to seek “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and peaceful development of humanity.” Its proponents argue that tianxia’s moral appeal distinguishes it from realpolitik, which is the basis United Nations system, where political operations are limited and constrained by parochial national interests.
Many believe that the concept of Community of Common Destiny articulated in Chinese policy papers presumes a vision of tianxia over and above the liberal international order. By 2023, it was rebranded as the Community of Shared Future for Mankind that has been used as a mechanism to expand China’s network of foreign relationships. It is seen as an opportunity to reshape the liberal international order into a hub-and-spoke pattern around China.
To counter American power, the Chinese are advocating the use of the phrase “humane authority” as a synonym for a multipolar world order. There are obvious inconsistencies between the “harmonious world” conception and the tough realities of the domestic harmonious society, and between China’s global media outreach and its increasing domestic control, digital surveillance, blacklisting, and media isolation of the Chinese public.
There are many ironies. Whereas the CCP speaks of dismantling colonialism, it wishes to claim any land that in the remote past may have had anything to do with the country.
China’s current boundaries are bigger than ever in its history. Yet China today wants to keep pushing its boundaries and for apparently no reason. It treats countries outside of its orbit as barbarians who are seen as inferior, arrogant, tools of powerful inimical countries, duplicitous, and divided.
Since Western democracies are open, their internal differences are all out there for the entire world to see. The Chinese differences are not visible, not even to the Chinese themselves. So they can comment about racism in USA without bothering to give a second thought to their prison camps. They see India divided between rich and poor, castes and all sorts of political parties.
The game of weiqi
Weiqi is played by two players who alternately place black and white stones on the vacant intersections of a grid of 19×19 lines. Once placed on the board, stones cannot be moved unless surrounded and captured by the opponent’s stones. This is a game of controlling territory and the object is to surround a larger portion of the board than the opponent. Groups of stones must have at least two open points to avoid capture and, therefore, placing them close together helps them support each other. Stones far apart create influence across more of the board and help occupy more territory. The strategic challenge of the game is to find a balance between conflicting interests of staying close for safety and going far to capture territory. It is the perfect game to learn imperial strategy.
In contrast, chess is the game that captures the way the West sees its sports and war. In it, the players perform tactical maneuvers to attain winning material advantage or to mount a successful attack on the king. This can involve real sacrifice for the sake of victory. Although, primarily tactical, the game does have strategic elements that involve piece mobility, center control and pawn structure. The chess player maneuvers to force and consolidate a winning material advantage. The history of the West is about exploration and conquest. It has celebrated clear resolve and victory as in Caesar’s famous proclamation: “Alea iacta est,” or “the die is cast” when he crossed the Rubicon.
If we see the encounter between China and Macartney through the lens of weiqi, England was a small country in a faraway place that did not deserve any investment of the court’s energy. Modern China may be viewed as a restoration of the Qing Empire, with the difference that the court has been replaced by the Communist Party.
Weiqi is profoundly strategic, but with incisive and complex tactics. The game proceeds with the players trying to balance conflicting and yet complementary objectives of territorial acquisition, projecting “influence”, maintaining access to the center, and attack and defense. The tactics used in the game involve diversions and pincer and broader attacks and sacrifices. In weiqi, the consolidation of territorial borders takes place between safe opposing armies.
If chess is about decisive victory by vanquishing the enemy by taking the fight to the place where the king is located, weiqi is about consolidation of territory. This is the reason that the Qing emperors were busy fighting to keep the empire together, rather than advancing it elsewhere.
If Europe emphasizes conquest, for China, the Middle Kingdom, the focus is on consolidation of its power. This difference between the styles of chess and weiqi explains Chinese history and why the Chinese did not go out to explore and conquer other nations. Another aspect of weiqi is a relentless pursuit of strategic gain, which may be called lingchi, or the strategy of a thousand cuts. The term lingchi derives from the notion of ascending a mountain slowly, where one requires a thousand small steps to reach the top.
Beijing’s warnings on economic consequences for those who challenge its political orthodoxies are consistent with the weiqi style. The punishment to those who don’t heed the warning comes in a thousand forms. China’s relentless pressure on Taiwan for reunification in fulfillment of its imperial vision is not only in terms of missiles fired across it on multiple occasions but constant shrinkage of its diplomatic space.
Without knowing the weiqi style, most people will not understand that the Chinese don’t want to settle border or trade disputes. They want to keep them active to use as leverage against adversaries, and to this is added a litany of historical grievances and how their honor has been violated. A similar bullying is used be the Chinese government to deny democratic rights to its own people.
By making the weiqi style the foundation of their relationship with neighbors and potential trade partners, China has ended up alienating nearly everyone.
References
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Kak, S. (2023). The Idea of India. Garuda.
Littlejohn, Ronnie (2010). Confucianism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris
Yao Xinzhong (2000). An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge University Press.
Zhao, Suisheng (2023). The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy. Stanford University Press.
