How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics
192
How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics
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Overview
Han-centrism, a virulent form of Chinese nationalism, asserts that the Han Chinese are superior to other peoples and have a legitimate right to advance Chinese interests at the expense of other countries. Han nationalists have called for policies that will allow China to reclaim the prosperity stolen by foreign powers during the “Century of Humiliation.” The growth of Chinese capabilities and Han-centrism suggests that the United States, its allies, and other countries in Asia will face an increasingly assertive China—one that thinks it possesses a right to dominate international politics. John M. Friend and Bradley A. Thayer explore the roots of the growing Han nationalist group and the implications of Chinese hypernationalism for minorities within China and for international relations. The deeply rooted chauvinism and social Darwinism underlying Han-centrism, along with China’s rapid growth, threaten the current stability of international politics, making national and international competition and conflict over security more likely. Western thinkers have yet to consider the adverse implications of a hypernationalistic China, as opposed to the policies of a pragmatic China, were it to become the world’s dominant state.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612349831 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 636,817 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
John M. Friend is an assistant professor of political science at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. His articles have appeared in New Political Science, Social Science and Medicine, and Health Psychology. Bradley A. Thayer is a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including Deterring Cyber Warfare: Bolstering Strategic Stability in Cyberspace, coauthored with Brian M. Mazanec, and American Empire: A Debate, coauthored with Christopher Layne.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Problem of Han-Centrism
It has been China's dream for a century to become the world's leading nation.
— Liu Mingfu, The China Dream, 2015
Whether China and the United States are destined to compete for domination in international politics is a major question facing both states as well as the global community. Accordingly, understanding the reasons for Chinese actions in international politics is essential. Academics and U.S. policy makers debate whether China's rise will overturn the present international order or may be accommodated and evolve within it. Critical questions revolve around what China wants, under what circumstances China will use force to advance its aims, and whether its rise will provoke a war or intense security competition with the United States, India, Japan, the Philippines, or Vietnam, or an allied coalition of these states.
There are many reasons for Chinese activities, and Beijing's actions may be usefully studied from various angles. While seeking to comprehend the implications of China's rise for international relations, academics and policy makers have offered two broadly different perspectives on China's behavior.
One side perceives China as ambitious and confrontational. It argues that China will attempt to replace the liberal international order with a system that better reflects and supports its economic and political interests. Referred to as the "China threat" school of thought, it suggests that heavy-handed Chinese policies in the region, notably territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, will cause intense competition with the United States and other states in the region.
The second school adopts a more optimistic view of China's rise, pointing to China's growing involvement in multilateral institutions, dependence on international trade, and strong partnerships on pertinent global issues. For this camp, China's interests are believed to be compatible with the present international order. In essence, China's rise may bring with it some political hiccups, but China is ultimately a status quo power. Consequently, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is not willing to overturn the international order that has made it increasingly wealthy.
However, because conflict and cooperation in international politics are not mutually exclusive, and because of the complexity of China's development, its study requires a more nuanced approach that pays particular attention to the ways in which domestic factors, such as historical memory, can cause conflictual or cooperative behavior. In fact, this amalgamation of behavior is captured in China's relationships with Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, which may be defined as a combination of hot economics and cold politics. Our concern is that the politics are likely to become considerably colder.
Acknowledging the importance of domestic variables, recent research has explored the influence of nationalism on Chinese foreign policy making. A number of studies have identified the dimensions of Chinese nationalism, pointing out that some are more aggressive than others. For example, Chinese premier Xi Jinping's call for "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" or the "Chinese Dream" has been supported by a growing wave of popular nationalism among younger segments of the population, referred to by some as the "angry youth" (fen qing [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]]).
The xenophobia, chauvinism, and ethnocentrism associated with this nationalist movement was on full display in September 2012 during the country's annual National Humiliation Day when violent anti-Japanese protests in major Chinese cities caused many Japanese firms to shut down. Such an outburst of nationalism is hardly new, as antiforeign protests appear to be a fixture of Chinese domestic and international politics. But what is becoming especially worrisome is the relationship between Chinese nationalism and its aspirations. A component of the Chinese Dream is, in essence, to reestablish China's central position in Asia, not through conquest, as there is only modest evidence of this in the East and South China Seas so far, but to recover what has been lost in terms of position in global affairs and in a confidence of innate superiority. This recovery requires restoring China's status as the dominant state in international politics.
Despite the recognition of China's aggressive nationalism, the identities and narratives shaping this movement are less understood, and the study of their effects on foreign policy making is relatively underdeveloped. In particular, little attention has been paid to group identification, historical memory, and the racial discourses associated with such assertive nationalist sentiment, which can easily be found throughout the Chinese blogosphere and during protests against Japan and the United States or recalcitrant minority groups within the country like the Tibetans and Uighurs. Kevin Carrico and Peter H. Gries do well to note the absence of any serious discussion on race and racism in the study of Chinese nationalism and national identity. On this point, they write: "There are many taboos in China studies: the 'three Ts' of Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan are the best known. Yet no taboo is more diligently policed than the subject of racism in Chinese nationalism," and "despite revealing studies on racism in China ... scholarship on Chinese nationalism remains largely silent on the issue."
Chinese racialized nationalism, as Carrico and Gries put it, has many perceived enemies, both domestic and foreign, and at the center of this aggressive and chauvinist form of nationalism is what we refer to as Hancentrism, which asserts that the Han Chinese are culturally and racially superior to other groups in China and outside of it. These Han nationalists have called for a China for the Chinese, that is, Han — as the Han equate to the Chinese — and seek to advance ideas and policies that will allow the country to reclaim the prosperity stolen by foreign powers. This occurred during the "Century of Humiliation," usually delineated by the start of the First Opium War in 1839 until the Communist victory in 1949, when the country was too weak to protect itself from European, American, and Japanese colonial depredations.
As a result, this movement has been supportive of China's aggressive posture in the East and South China Seas. Equally worrisome is the fact that it supports a fundamentally new international system — a China that is committed to changing the rules, norms, and practices of the established international order to suit China. In short, this movement actively seeks to replace the United States as the dominant state in international politics.
The Central Argument
This book explores the roots of Han-centrism, implications of Chinese hypernationalism for international relations, and how the United States should respond, including working with countries in the region to mitigate its effects. Building on the work of Stephen Van Evera, we consider Han-centrism to be a form of hypernationalism with distinct social Darwinian and culturally chauvinistic dimensions. That is to say, within this shared identity, the Han Chinese are considered to be racially pure and the true descendants of the "ancestral nation" (zuguo [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]]). Furthermore, since the anti-Manchu revolutionaries of the late Qing dynasty, the Han way of life is portrayed as more advanced and disciplined than the "primitive" cultures of the non-Han, particularly the minority groups in the country. Others have referred to this racialized understanding of ethnic groups inside and outside China as "Han racism" or the "great Han mentality."
In our study, we will use Han-centrism as the equivalent of Han hypernationalism, or virulent Han nationalism. We prefer the term Han-centrism because it better captures the phenomenon we are studying — the self-referential and privileged aspect of Han identity. That is, the humiliation, shame, and foreign threat narratives are based on the experiences of the Han — emphatically not the fifty-five other ethnic groups in the country — and are considered by Han-centrists as synonymous with China.
Our argument has important implications for both Chinese domestic and international politics, especially as China's economic and military growth continues. Han-centric reactions are often triggered by perceived threats to China's growth and development to reach its rightful place in foreign relations. For example, following the 2009 anti-Asian riots in Papua New Guinea, in which the local population looted Chinese-owned trade shops and bars in protest of unfair labor practices, comments on the China News website revealed virulent racism and nationalistic sentiment among many Chinese netizens:
We should revive the slave system, and put all black people in chains. These black bastards eat Chinese, buy Chinese, and still want to kill Chinese. Typical slave behavior. When our nation is a bit stronger, whenever there's an incident like this, retribution will be swift, just like this year in the western regions. Chinese people work hard. So when they go abroad, they prosper, and locals are envious. What can you do? A person far from home is despised (ren li xiang jian), so knuckle down.
Such xenophobic and chauvinistic attitudes are also directed at ethnic minorities in China. Uighurs, in particular, are all too often targets of racism. As journalist Blaine Kaltman writes, "Han-Uighur relations are colored by racist attitudes. Many told me that the Uighur are a 'fierce' and 'unreasonable' people and that they have a 'primitive mentality' and are 'apathetic to development.' ... Their problem is that they just don't care. They don't care to be modern. They don't seem to care about anything."
Like the Uighur, Africans studying and working in China, a group also perceived as socially disruptive, frequently experience overt discrimination, as "rising racism, police harassment, and an increasingly stringent and corrupt visa system dominated by Chinese middlemen has made life difficult for even the most successful." For the Africans living in major cities like Guangzhou, life is not what they expected: "Many Africans express feelings of helplessness, humiliation, and anger, railing against the harassment, racism, and indifference they face. 'Africans are treated like cockroaches here.'"
Since the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted nationalistic rhetoric through patriotic education campaigns and propaganda, with the goal of bolstering political legitimacy and unifying the population as the country goes through profound economic and social changes. In this sense, the CCP has tried to promote nationalism domestically while downplaying the "China threat" image internationally. Xi Jinping's "China Dream," and its call for "national rejuvenation," has effectively tapped into the sense of vulnerability, humiliation, and revenge at the core of Han-centrism, which in turn has enabled the CCP to rally support in opposition to foreign pressure over a variety of issues ranging from human rights violations to territorial disputes. In fact, not only have Xi's "historical allusions" been well received among the Han nationalists, but many have demanded that the Chinese government take a more aggressive stance on key regional issues.
Bringing domestic factors into the study of China's foreign relations is empirically difficult given informal mechanisms and the dearth of information available on decision-making processes, such as the degree of influence the military and bureaucratic factions have on foreign policy. Just as many Kremlinologists struggled to understand the effects of nationalism and communism on an obsessively secretive Soviet foreign policy apparatus during the Cold War, the lack of transparency in elite Chinese decision making has presented difficulties.
However, recent research has suggested that an autonomous nationalist public does possess a degree of influence over the CCP's political decision making. In particular, our research on the revival of Han exceptionalism has found that Han-centrism appears to be promoted and reproduced at the top by the political elite and at the bottom by nationalist elements like the "angry youth" bloggers and those in the diaspora. In this sense, we consider Han-centrism to be a form of "latent nationalism" in which the Chinese elite create the means for its expression and influence on Chinese domestic and international political behavior. Thus in our account, Han-centrism is most frequently an instrument to be used by these groups. At the same time, we do not want to dismiss or minimize the fact that Han-centric beliefs are truly accepted by the Han, even non-Han minorities, in China, including Chinese decision makers, intellectuals, and journalists. Han-centrism is indeed an instrument, but it is also a firmly held belief, as patriotism may be in the United States, a love of "la France" for the French, or "Mother Russia" for the Russians.
The Significance of the Study
There is no greater question in contemporary international politics than "How does China see the world?" While there are competing discourses in China on the issue of how China sees itself and its place in the world today and in the years to come, what is worrisome for the future of global stability is the outpouring of Han-centrism accompanying China's rapid growth. Historically such ethnocentric sentiment is to be expected and has occurred with the upsurge of other great powers from Britain to Japan.
What is far more disturbing is the deeply rooted cultural chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia that appear to be influencing the Chinese elite, who are in control of an emerging superpower that is likely to be, in time, the world's dominant state. In sum, the concern is that Chinese foreign policy decision making is affected by Han-centrism, making intense security competition and conflict with its neighbors and the United States more likely, if not determinative. We recognize that there are many potential avenues to conflict between the United States and China: systemic causes of conflict, such as alliance pathologies, unit level causes, such as bureaucratic interests, and perhaps individual motivations as well. Historically, of course, a virulent nationalism in the rising superpower is a dangerous unit level cause of conflict.
Second, if China does become dominant, the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to the new values advanced by China. This means that all of the stakeholders in the present international liberal order, developed largely by Great Britain and the United States after World War II, are likely to find it more difficult to advance fundamental western concepts of free trade, individual liberty, and human rights. In many cases, the opposite of what the West values will be the new "rules of the road" in international politics. Western elites have yet to consider what will be lost if a hypernationalistic China were to become the world's dominant state, as opposed to a pragmatic China.
Third, this issue is understudied. Despite the importance of China's rise, there is only a modest literature on Chinese nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism and their impact on foreign policy. There is even less on the racial component. The combination of nationalism and racial identity in Han-centrism is best addressed in Frank Dikötter's pathbreaking and sterling scholarship. But beyond a small number of scholars, few address the racial elements of Han identity. Concerning the racial aspect of Han-centrism, Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel argue that "there is no justification for this oversight" on racism in East Asia by scholarly and policy communities.
Our study differs from these excellent works. First, our focus is on the foreign policy consequences of Han-centrism rather than its domestic aspect. We acknowledge the importance of its domestic impact, but our scholarship will center principally on the international implications. Second, our study provides greater contextualization and analytical penetration of Han-centrism and Chinese nationalism due to the long history and considerable complexities shrouding Chinese national identity and China's foreign policies.
Counterarguments
While the literature on Chinese nationalism is, indeed, vast and cannot be covered fully here, one key takeaway is that the study of nationalism in China does not fit neatly into previous research on national identity. According to Wenfang Tang and Benjamin Darr, China was never fully colonized. Nonetheless, as the authors suggest, "While the history of each country may have unique attributes, states always have an interest in promoting national identity," which in turn requires us to study the ways in which a country constructs and promotes its national identity.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
1. The Problem of Han-Centrism
2. The Origins of Han-Centrism
3. Han-Centrism in Chinese History and Today
4. Implications of Han-Centrism for Chinese Foreign Policy and International Politics
5. Han-Centrism Provides Strategic Asymmetries for the United States
6. The Coming Struggle
Notes
Bibliography
Index