‘THE WORLD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO AMERICA’

08.06.2015

‘THE WORLD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO AMERICA’

A Chinese bestseller charting a path for global dominance appears in English for the first time.

“It has been China’s dream for a century to become the world’s leading nation,” wrote Liu Mingfu, then a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, in his 2010 book The China Dream. After taking over as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Xi Jinping echoed the book’s language and one of its key themes—“the dream of a strong military”—repeatedly in speeches. This dream, he said, would be realized by 2049, a century after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The English translation of The China Dream was published in the United States in May, the same month that the Chinese government published a defense-policy white paper laying out an expanded role for the navy in the context of U.S.-China tensions over China’s construction of islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea. The U.S. government estimates that Beijing has created 2,000 acres of artificial land in the Spratly Islands, parts of which are also claimed by other nearby countries. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned over the weekend that China’s activity heightened the risk of conflict in the region; a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman responded that the construction was “legal, reasonable … and neither impacts nor targets any country.”

The United States has its China hawks, and Liu is essentially an America hawk within China. After the initial publication of Liu’s book, Phillip C. Saunders of the U.S. National Defense University called it a “sensationalist” tract “aimed at tapping into a profitable mass market ... rather than [promoting] political orthodoxy,” and the book appears to have put its publisher briefly at odds with the government. The Wall Street Journal reported that The China Dream “flew off the shelves but was pulled over concerns it could damage relations with the U.S.” In the Xi era, however, the Journal’s Jeremy Page spotted it in the “recommended books” section of a state-run bookstore. (Liu told Page he didn’t know whether Xi himself had read it, but said Xi’s “China Dream” speeches had sent “a strong message.”)

Liu is representative of a new class of pundits in China that former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Geoff Dyer has compared to America’s “TV generals,” retired officers who opine on military matters in the media. “In the last few years,” Dyer wrote in his book The Contest of the Century, “something similar has happened in China. A small number of media-friendly members of the armed forces have begun to talk openly about military matters, including their mistrust of and distaste for the U.S. military and its policies in Asia. ... In some ways, Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu is the latest addition to their numbers.”

The colonel has now retired from the military, and the path to global dominance he laid out five years ago was a bit more flexible than Xi’s; Liu reckoned it might take China another five decades to replace the United States as world leader. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has called the book an example of a “triumphalist” strain in Chinese thinking, which argues that “no matter how much China commits itself to a ‘peaceful rise,’ conflict is inherent in U.S.-China relations.” Kissinger noted that the hawks’ vision of inevitable U.S.-China conflict hasn’t been endorsed by either the Chinese or the American governments, but that “if the assumptions of these views were applied by either side—and it would only take one side to make it unavoidable—China and the U.S. could easily fall into an escalating tension.”

What follows is a condensed excerpt of one Chinese hawk’s view of what the “China Age” will look like, and his roadmap for how China will get there. It outlines a vision of Chinese superiority informed by the experience of America’s own rise to superpower status and conduct as the world’s preeminent power. His descriptions are general, and his prescriptions vague, but he asserts that the Chinese century will be a democratic one. If this strikes Americans as incongruous given China’s domestic system, Liu’s contention is that America itself is only “half democratic”—electing its leaders at home but “autocratic in the world.” He continues: “Americans overrate themselves and evaluate themselves untruthfully by saying that they are a democratic country.” And it is China that in Liu’s view can provide the “checks and balances” against America necessary to “form a democratic world.”

—Kathy Gilsinan

The appearance of every champion nation begins a new era. The China Age, at its most basic, will be an age of prosperity. In [early Chinese revolutionary] Sun Yat-sen’s evaluation of the West’s conception of Yellow Peril, he said that in the future, China’s era would not be one of Yellow Peril, but of Yellow Favor. The China Age will not be one in which China threatens the world, it will be one in which China enriches the world.

China Must Learn From America

America’s GDP surpassed Great Britain’s in 1895 to become the world’s largest. [Editor’s note: OECD estimates show U.S. per-capita GDP overtaking that of the United Kingdom sometime in the 1890s.] But it was only after 1945, half a century after America’s GDP outpaced Great Britain’s, that the United States replaced Great Britain as world leader. China’s GDP is still smaller than America’s; it may take China 50 years to overtake America’s GDP and replace it as world leader. There is still no need for America to be nervous. China should not be in a rush to be a leader; it should allow America to keep the position until a time that is best for all sides.

Before China can take over as world leader in the 21st century, it will need half a century to work through three stages. The first will be catching up to America and actively taking a leading role where it can in the world; the second will be racing neck-and-neck with America, and leading the world as an equal partner with America; and the third stage will be guiding the world through exercising leadership and management in the world, and thereby becoming the world’s leading nation. China is already actively participating in leadership where it can, and moving toward becoming America’s equal. This stage will last for another 20 to 30 years.

In 1987, American history professor Paul Kennedy of Yale University researched the favorable and adverse conditions surrounding China’s rise. He pointed out that China was the poorest of the countries wishing to be a great power and occupied the worst strategic position. These, he said, were two adverse conditions that would limit China’s rise, but he also pointed out two favorable conditions: one was that China’s leaders had “an ambitious, coherent, and visionary strategy, one that could beat Moscow, Washington, and Tokyo, not to mention Western Europe”; the other was that “China would continue to develop economically, and could be a vastly different country within several decades.”

His analysis of China’s strategy was very accurate. China’s rise was, before all else, the rise of its strategy.

This article has been adapted from Liu Mingfu’s book, The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era.