A security officer walks past a display with the Chinese flag at a technology expo in Beijing on October 31, 2019. The US-China trade war has given expression to many global anxieties about China’s rise. Photo: AP
Opinion
Opinion
by Ian Inkster
Opinion
by Ian Inkster
A rising China will not become a global aggressor – it has too much to lose and enough space to transform
While some fear that resurgent communist ideology will undo China’s gains and spark aggression towards other nations, this is unlikely because of how enmeshed China’s economy is with the West
Seeing China as a system in transition allows for greater space for innovative responses, including to the question of Taiwan and Hong Kong
Most of the time, China is seen in capitalist economies as a danger because of specific issues of ideology, defence, fears stemming from the US-China conflict and so on. But underlying even this is a fear of the supposed substance of the Chinese political economy – growing unduly fast, communist, militant and threatening, dampening of initiative, rejecting of progressive culture, yielding growth without either welfare or virtue.
Yet, most people in the West would argue that the major goals of their own political economies are to create growth and reduce socioeconomic inequalities.
For more than a generation, China has maintained startling expansion and in the 1990s alone, according to the United Nations Human Development Report for 2003, lifted some 150 million of its people out of poverty, a number equivalent to half the size of the Chinese middle class or half the population of the entire United States. Both Europe and the US would love to boast the equivalent figures at their more exalted levels of income per head.
Those who argue that this performance could only occur because of the very low base from which the nation started in the 1970s should face the contrary point – historically, combined growth and progressive income redistribution has not occurred in any massive, low-income system. Brazil, for example, is not translating growth into welfare at anything like the Chinese rates.
Those who argue that Chinese higher incomes went to industrial cities at the expense of rural communities inland have a better point, but evidence from nearly all successful economies shows a similar effect at their earlier growth stages, mitigated when incomes flow back from workers in cities to farmsteads through family repatriations, and when equipment and infrastructure built in cities is used in the countryside.
Farmers air chillies at a processing factory in Jize county, in north China’s Hebei province, on September 19, 2019. While Chinese higher incomes went largely to industrial cities, rather than rural areas, this is a common historical trend as economies evolve. Photo: Xinhua
The more sturdy argument against the Chinese political economy lies in two different directions – that reduction of income inequality does not really measure gains in total welfare among the poor and the powerless, and that communist ideologies and institutions will eventually claw back the gains that China has so far attained because of the nation’s failure to reduce the power of the old, Maoist-style state apparatus.
That is, there may or may not have been real gains for the people, but these will soon disintegrate in the face of trenchant ideologies. Economy and polity will then split in a terrible contradiction. This, in turn, will have an impact on the global political economy.
These arguments must be properly addressed. For the population overall, is it much better to live in China today than in the later 1970s or in any other earlier period of Chinese history? Second, does the present political economy of China represent a far lesser threat to the present global system than was the case in any other period in post-1945 history?
We must begin by assuming that long-term growth means that China now has much more at risk or in need of protection than ever before, huge assets and projects that will stand in the way of actual aggression anywhere. Many of the old People’s Liberation Army members are now effectively business managers, as familiar with the Hong Kong stock exchange as with production details of Chinese communes.
Time itself, through the death of very old men, has removed much of Maoism, approximately coincident with a global recession that has pushed Chinese capital towards centre stage in the global economy. This is not the stuff of which hasty acts of aggression are made.
Nor – despite so much clamour to the contrary – has super growth been directly translated into military capability for China, for this remains far below that of the US.
At the same time, the economic gains China will derive from its commercial relations with the US, and the West more generally, make it unlikely to begin moves towards any stark confrontation. Soft power is now in the air over China, even if missiles continue to be pointed at its neighbours.
But I have not – and would not – claim that anything here defends the Chinese system or removes serious doubts about China in, for example, Japan or the US. Rather, the points raised are meant to aid in understanding China and the contemporary debate on the position and future status of Hong Kong, which together so dominate political discussion.
My argument would be that anyone who somehow expects an instant democratic and capitalistic China, smiling benignly upon Taiwanese national sovereignty or Hong Kong’s claims for greater autonomy, as either an automatic result of economic growth or as an immediate result of direct political or diplomatic activity, is flying in the face of history.
Rather, interpreting the Chinese political economy as a transitional developing system whose nature leaves time and space for a great variety of negotiations and ameliorations, is not pie in the sky and fits better into the longer-term history of the global system.
More importantly, it leaves room for the emergence of innovative responses, which in time might begin to replace the present local furore over the “China syndrome” in Taiwanese and Hong Kong politics in particular.
Ian Inkster, PhD, is professorial research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London, and a senior fellow at the Taiwan Studies Programme, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham
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