Wealth or empire – China’s dilemma
- A very Chinese debate: can China make peace with itself and the outside world by combining its cultural tradition, socialist equality and capitalist market efficiency?
A prosperous China or a hegemonic China? There is a lively debate among mainland literati about which goal to pursue. The latter, by and large, believes the nation can have both, indeed the one builds on the other and both are mutually reinforcing. The former, however, generally thinks the pursuit of empire may actually undermine prosperity, with the nation ending up with neither.
Here, I will consider the ideas of Gan Yang, a prominent political philosopher who was a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong before returning to the mainland, as representative of the “prosperity” school. This is, by the way, not how he would put it, but I don’t think he would object if one were to characterise his vision of the country as one that is at peace with itself and the world.
Jiang worked for several years at the liaison office in Hong Kong, published a major work on the city, China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective, and is believed to have contributed to Beijing’s plan for universal suffrage for Hong Kong in 2014 that was vetoed by pan-democratic politicians in the legislature the following year.
First, let’s start by saying Jiang is no propagandist but a respected constitutional scholar and dean of the law school at Peking University. And he is posing a legitimate and fundamental question at the outset about historiography: what is the unit of inquiry for the historian?