Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power

"Before discussing the book, let me say something about Professor Yan. He is a Beijing-based realist (in western terms, roughly Hobbesian) international relations theorist, who is very well-versed in Western political theory. He’s also a Chinese nationalist who in 2011 wrote a piece headlined (in the English translation) “How China Can Defeat America” but, it seems to me, is also someone who might have slight qualms about Beijing’s tactics of over recent years as he seems to prioritise political leadership ahead of military or economic might. Anyway, he knows about us, if I can put it crudely, including the history of our thought, and he has been an influential voice and actor there. The book is fascinating because it’s a description (inevitably, selectively) of the history of ancient Chinese thought on politics, governance, and the ethics of governance, with a read across to international relations. It contains several chapters written or co-written by Professor Yan, and also chapters in which other authors respond to his descriptions of Chinese intellectual history, plus finally an interview with him. As a device for Westerners to learn about ancient Chinese thought before unification under the Qin, which Yan believes is instructive for both theory and today’s global contest, it’s fascinating. In reading the exchanges, we don’t see just a single view of Chinese political thought; the back and forth is instructive. But there is also a message: that China can be a “humane authority” (elsewhere translated as “true kingship”) for the world, and hence an improvement over US (bad) hegemonic power. The second substantive chapter of the book is about an ancient Chinese figure called Xunzi. This is after Confucius . Xunzi is more hard-line than Mencius (or Mengzi, as the Chinese know him). Xunzi thinks that good governance depends pretty much entirely on the character of leaders, and that institutions just aren’t going to do the job. “Yan’s book on ancient Chinese thought is useful for westerners because China is a great power, and it’s going to carry on being a great power” This is almost the opposite of what Hume says. Around two millennia later, he says that when designing a constitution you must base it on the assumption that all the men and women involved are rogues, even though that is untrue. He makes a point of saying that they’re not all rogues, but you’d be most unwise to design your constitution on the basis that they are all going to be benevolent all the time. You can see there the seeds of James Madison, who of course had read Hume. Xunzi, also a profound thinker, is saying that institutions aren’t going to do the work because institutions comprise bunches of people, and if these people have bad character, the institutions aren’t going to deliver for you. Interestingly, both Xunzi and Hume end up talking about the importance of education, as does Williams when discussing legitimation. That raises its own set of issues about whether education can be used to program people to support the regime they’re in (which brings to mind the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory). What a good system of education looks like forms an important part of thinking about politics. Xunzi makes us pause about Hume, and Hume makes us pause about Xunzi. Hume would say, even though all these people of good character have been trained, and the emperor has appointed good people around him or her, are they going to manage to be good every day? Are they going to manage to be good when the short-term rewards are so much more tempting than the long-term rewards can be? Likewise, Xunzi can say to Hume, how are you going to avoid these supposedly robust institutions becoming an empty shell? Both sides of this argument speak to us today. Think of the United States, whose institutions have been jeopardised by failings of character (and still are, in some parts of the system). But also, the institutions have functioned up to a point against flawed characters, so far preventing utter disaster. A reasonable conclusion is that you need both, and so, what does that mean? This is just one example I found, while reading Yan’s book, of an ancient Chinese theorist prompting us to think more carefully about some of the things that are central to today’s predicament. In economics, the importance of institutions was emphasised by Nobel economist Douglas North more than a quarter of a century ago. From that starting point, political economists have gradually moved on to looking at culture. I predict that they aren’t very far from colliding with questions of the normative validity of values and even questions of character (virtue). When they reach that point— and if they do, it will be in formally very clever ways —they will have returned us to the middle of the 18th century, when Hume was both a political economist and a political philosopher. But whatever the read across, Professor Yan’s book on ancient Chinese thought is useful for westerners because China is a great power, and it’s going to carry on being a great power. In any case, the history of Confucian states is extraordinarily rich and interesting. Either way, we ought to be more curious and know more about the history of their thought, as well as the history of power in China. By ‘we’, I don’t just mean the people sitting in the State Department or the British Foreign Office, but people who are interested in the world. In that sense, the publication of Professor Yan’s book in English is welcome. The world order may or may not change profoundly, but it’s certainly being contested at the moment. The people whose books we’ve been discussing are all saying that norms and institutions are partly a product of the order that supplies stability but also shape that order. Today, we’ve happened to live in a stable order for quite a long time. Now it is under stress and the era of silos, in which you can be a monetary policy maker without knowing much about trade policy, or a trade policy maker without engaging much with the laws of war and peace, or, more prosaically, with security policy, is finished. That is for lots of reasons but one of them is that when questions of order are up for grabs, states will use all the instruments at their disposal, and some of them are economic. Blackwill and Harris’s book describes geoeconomics as the use of economic instruments to pursue political and geopolitical foreign policy ends. Examples include seizing somebody’s foreign exchange reserves, throwing them out of the SWIFT international payments messaging system, and applying trade and investment sanctions of some nature. It is not an economics book, nor quite a textbook. It’s a really excellent book for finding out about all the varieties of economic instruments that states can use, defensively or offensively, against each other. It was published in 2016. Less than a decade later, almost everything in the book is happening. Oddly, that was the year that I first set out my thinking and scenarios in the Tacitus Lecture in London. I am not terribly optimistic in the short run. As I describe in the book, this is a contest that I think will go on for decades, maybe a century. It’s everywhere and in everything, neither side can knock out the other, and it is ideological—as evidenced by Beijing’s 2013 Document 9 , which far too few people have heard of. The main powers face each other with two completely different views of how states should be governed and how the world should be ordered. On the other hand, and this is where my book ends up, I think it is vital that we, in the so-called free world (including the Confucian heritage constitutional democracies), don’t forget who we’ve managed to become, that this is an achievement, and that while our values aren’t necessarily values we should impose on other people they are very much values we should hold on to. Order may be the most precious thing, but a way of life that maintains domestic order in ways that most people accept, even if of course they don’t like policy all the time, is a tremendous achievement. You can’t name the people who achieved it because it happened gradually. I’m not terribly optimistic, but I do think we should be very conscious that our way of life is one that is important for us to hold on to. At one level, my book is severely practical. I predicted what has come to be called de-risking, and I wanted some of that to happen even while accepting that there is a risk of overshooting, which would make people poorer, and that obviously would be a bad thing. But we mustn’t leave ourselves overly dependent upon or exposed to what could be a hostile state. I don’t say it is, but it could be. These considerations are symmetric, so there is bound to be some degree of decoupling. In the practical parts of the book, I argue that I don’t think the business community has got its head around that at all, and nor, in a way, would I expect it to. In a similar vein, we see the large international organisations—for example, the WTO and the IMF—struggling. In a sense, they’re bound to struggle because they are creations of the order that is being contested. They’re a manifestation of a particular kind of world order, and they aren’t going to provide the solutions. But the current order has also produced informal fora, like the G20, which can be incredibly valuable because they provide low-cost opportunities for the leading protoganists to meet each other. That, by the way, is why it was quite significant that Xi didn’t go to the Delhi G20 summit, which has extra resonance because India will most likely become a great power. The West has been slow to grapple with this situation, hobbled as it was by the Hegelian myth of an end to history and a kind of myopia that you can be hegemon without being engaged with and having friends across the whole world. I don’t think the contest is going to go away any time soon. If China’s economy stumbles, as well it might, it will be a mistake to compare that with Japan in the 1990s. Even if the Chinese economy moves sideways for a decade, the PRC could probably continue to expand its hard power. A worthwhile strategy for coping—for maintaining peaceful coexistence without giving up on our way of life—needs to avoid both amoral “realism” and idealism. I think the books I have listed can help us with that great challenge, including at home."