Is China coming full circle by repeating the Qing court’s self-defeating mistakes?
- Xi’s China is implementing an ambitious vision through projects like the Belt and Road Initiative. Yet, when it comes to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Beijing’s decision-making processes seem as obstinate as those in Qing China
Are we finally seeing Pax Sinica 2.0, or is China engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead to its doom (again)?
China’s remarkable rise in an extraordinarily short period of time is something all Chinese people (including Hongkongers) should celebrate. Nevertheless, Beijing should be cautious and reflect on whether it might be making the same errors the Qing court did before it collapsed in 1912.
China rejects international dispute settlement mechanisms as inappropriate and inapplicable to its territorial and maritime claims. Amid the currents of these troubled waters, and with complications arising from Hong Kong’s ongoing crisis, the Taiwan question is more intractable than ever.
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Despite enhanced economic ties with Beijing, countries ranging from Japan and South Korea to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, with at least a few of the Pacific islands to boot, regard it as a threat to their national security.
China’s rise has proved the adage that money can’t buy love.
In his 1984 book The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society, Gerrit Gong observed that during the Qing dynasty, “[t]he Middle Kingdom’s size, inertia, and adherence to its own standard of ‘civilization’ made China slow to implement the European standard”. The Qing court’s reluctance to modernise subjected China to more than a century of external assaults, internal strife and abject poverty.
Benjamin Schwartz has suggested that one of the reasons Marxism-Leninism had an appeal to young Chinese in pre-1949 China lay in its theory of nationalism, which “provided a plausible explanation for China’s failure to achieve its rightful place in the world of nations”.
To win over Hong Kong, Xi’s China must break a 2,000-year tradition
Its decision-making processes are arguably as obstinate and obfuscating, self-isolated and self-defeating, as those in the dying years of imperial China.
The excessive significance the Chinese attach to “face” merely exacerbates the problem. Labouring under a siege mentality, and calling each and every less-than-friendly comment or action by any foreign official or country “foreign interference” in China’s internal affairs, is something the Qing court did, with catastrophic and lasting outcomes.
As we have learned from the rise and fall of great powers throughout world history, the US will hardly relinquish its dominant position in the international order without a fight.
Phil C.W. Chan is senior visiting scholar designate at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies