INTRODUCTION
In venturing into a new environment, such as in learning to swim, all is enticing but also different and potentially threatening. For one has only the old ways of moving on land to call upon; yet holding to their usage can impede progress and even threaten one’s safety and that of others. In time, one begins to understand better the nature of the new environment, and to apply one’s personal strengths in a more adapted manner. Eventually, one may even be able to help others to develop their own ways of responding to the special challenges they too experience in this new environment.
There is some analogy here to the recent experience of China. After centuries of closure, Deng Xiaoping suddenly set an “open door” policy. From then on the issue has been engagement, rather than isolation. Here, Part I reflects the effort to understand the cultural dimensions of this new engagement.
As in 1919 many have held that either Asia must profoundly cease being Asiatic and begin to mirror the West, or it would simply fade under international engagement. Thus, when the great Dragon began to move in the 80s it did so warily and defensively, preoccupied with not losing its identity as it looked for appropriate modes of engagement. Deng gave explicit voice to these concerns, which are elaborated in Part II.
Some factors however began to suggest that the view of industrialization as a Western phenomenon might be flawed. The little Asian dragons began to flourish. What is more Japan, though it had the worst geographic location and effectively no natural resources, precisely by dint of its human resources and in terms of its own culture began to outstrip the Western world at its own industrial, automative and electronics game. Soon, tossing off its fears, the great Dragon broke into dance: the spectacular annual 28 percent increase in exports in the earlier part of the new century reflected 30 percent of its production and 10.70 percent of the commerce of the world.
Part III analyses the potential of culture for international relations, not only of China but of the world. If culture is a human creation, then the emergence of non-Western peoples in the new global arena should not only add new products, but transform world structures and open new potentials for peace and progress.
Of course, the contrary is also possible. Cultural changes can be threatening and remnants of outmoded cold war instincts can be expected to interfere. Part IV reviews the spectrum of new threats, to which it may be too soon to expect answers. But the positive possibilities suggested in Part III promise to evoke the new thinking required.
Let us look now in greater detail at the structure of this axial volume. It begins with the prologue by the Yu Xintian, past Vice Director of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and now Director of the Shanghai Institute of International Relations, traditionally the cosmopolitan center of China. Facing her new ship into the wind, she takes up the already classical work of Samuel Huntington on the clash of civilizations and neatly distinguishes between its theory and its policy import.
Huntington’s views are incorrect in theory. Differences in culture and religion may often be the fuse for conflict, but the scramble for interests in terms of territory, wealth, resources and power is the main reason. Furthermore, there are not only conflict and confrontation, but also exchange and fusion between different cultures. The Islamic culture he regards as a great scourge hung like a bright moon in the dark sky during the Middle Ages, before the rising of the sun of the Renaissance. Chinese culture spread to the West and became the engine of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have similar views on humankind, the environment, the importance of society and family, the significance of spiritual guidance and the objectives of life. Cultures can share values and different cultures can temper intersecting interests and aspirations.
All this has disappeared in Huntington’s vision. If in theory his views are incomplete and incorrect, politically they are indeed sensitive and insightful. Western countries took the lead in soft power while dominating the world with hard power. The rise of East Asian countries made the West feel severely the challenge of different cultures for the first time. Western superiority in soft power is declining as East Asian ideologies, cultures, religious beliefs and value systems pour onto the international arena. They pay no attention to Western centralism, but rather affirm their own presence with a particular political culture. This is the real reason for Huntington’s heavyheartedness.
Yu Xintian weaves together in an expert manner: history, theory and practice; hard and soft power; economics and culture; the more abstract and universalizable systems theories and the essentially unique domains of culture as the realm of creative freedom; and the lessons learned by the ex-colonial peoples. It is the drama of this work – and of our times – that as the West attempts to share its closed systems, convinced that if it is right for the West it must be right for all, other parts of the world call for a more open world. For Yu Xintian cultural identities need not be sacrificed for globalization, but instead can enrich and render it more humane and more peaceful.
To grasp the challenge which the issue of culture presents to China as it enters more actively into international relations one needs to return to 1919. Then, in the passion to enter into the modern world Confucius was dismissed in order to make way for “the Two Misters”: Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. The venerable cultural roots of the Chinese people were intentionally uprooted. However, the progression of E. Kant’s three Critiques suggests an opposite path, namely, that if science (the first critique) is to be complemented by freedom (the second critique), then aesthetics (the third critique) in needed to open the space in which the two can proceed together. In other words, rather than being expelled, Confucius and his aesthetic sense of harmony is needed as the gracious host to enable Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy to work together for China.
In Part I, “Culture: A New Dimension of International Relations,” Professors Zhu Majie and Guo Jiemin undertake the difficult task of breaking into the newly emerging cultural dimension. In Chapter I Zhu Majie begins with the positivist definitions of culture by anthropologists from early in the last century in terms of the objects a people produces. He moves correctly beyond that to show that culture must be rather about values and collects a number of notions, such as that of “navigator,” in order to suggest the role of cultures in international relations. It is possible, of course, to think of the new attention to culture as some kind of plot by the West in order to justify its hegemony, but in the end this cannot be successful.
Though cultural conflicts are inevitable judging from the contradictory interactions where different civilizations intersect, the extension of these conflicts is limited. Culture is an invisible force and its impacts on international relations must be exerted through the visible bodies of politics, economy, military and so on. But as the globalization of the world economy develops the interaction of national interests also increases, and so does the tendency toward interdependence among nations. One of the cases in point is the financial crisis in 1997 in Southeast Asia, rapidly affecting Asia and the world.
Culture is the sum of the material and spiritual wealth generated by the historical activities of human society. The most profound source of the cultural force lies in the accumulation of the evolutionary process of the mode of social production. The conflicts and integration of different cultures are constrained by this evolution. Thus, in economic globalization conflicts caused by the confluence of different cultures must be curbed and the advancement of common interests must promote an all-inclusiveness among different cultures.
In sum, the ethical and religious commitments of a people are too complex and penetrating to be understood in terms of objects from without, and in any case, China’s principal concern is peace.
For Chapter II Zhu Majie follows with a detailed analysis of the concept of soft power in international relations, tracing the term from Joseph Nye. This is the proper realm of culture in the relations between nations.
Guo Jiemin in Chapter III shows how international relations in the new world situation can no longer be understood or navigated only in terms of the narrow economic self-interested concerns for profit or political concerns for power. Rather there is need to take account of values and cultures. As these are essentially differentiated between peoples, this entails a trend toward pluralism. Hence the new search must be for complementarity and, more deeply for the basis of cooperation between cultures.
There remains, however, a strong allergic reaction to the insistent calls from the West to accept universal standards, which are read as a plot to manipulate and suppress the rest of the world. This feeling is so strong and deep – “unsufferable” it is called – that it should be examined in detail; that is the task of the Part II.
Part II, “Cautions and Concerns,” attempts to sound out the concerns regarding relations between cultures. It consists of two studies by Zhu Majie. The first studies the thought of Deng Xiaoping; the second is on Western civilization. Together they point up a number of inherent difficulties that confront China in its desire to implement its open door policy.
The first is the radically defining character of its colonial past. The utter sense of impotence at the commercial ingressions from the West, the military defeat at sea of the Great Northern Fleet and then on land by the Japanese army generated a decisive loss of face that is relived by every school child. Reactions alternate between instinctive protectiveness and overreaction at any slight, real or perceived. Others cannot hope to understand this experience, but need to avoid anything that could evoke these deep sensibilities. From this come the issues of sovereignty and its correlate, non-intervention. These take on a symbolic importance, rooted equally deeply in the national and personal psyche. No leader can appear to compromises on any related matter, yet all can somehow be related thereto under some heading. How then is an open door policy to be implemented?
The second is the view that Western culture, like all cultures according to Huntington, is religiously rooted. Unfortunately, in China this is known largely from fundamentalist sources which discount reason and reinforce the Marxist view of religion as irrational, and fail to allow for other cultural modes of life. On this basis, Western attitudes are seen as arbitrary and arrogant impositions of alien views upon the identity and sovereignty of China.
This impedes the ability to read Western efforts at human rights and humanitarian intervention as, at least in some ways, well intentioned, and thus a field of potential cooperation. Here the West, working with an abstractive and objectivist mindset, concerned only with the universal at one end and the individual at the other, has its own limitations. As a result, it takes any concern for distinctive cultural factors as excuses and evasions of individual human rights.
Chinese culture, in turn, has a somewhat contrasting emphasis inasmuch as it has greater concern for the community. This has been reinforced by decades of Marxist theory and focuses instinctively upon stability (unfelicitously referred to as “democratic dictatorship”). The quantity of persons protected can be converted only with difficulty into the concerns for the quality of life also predicted by Marx. At any rate, there appears to be less sympathy for de Toqueville’s or the Federalist’s notion that protecting and promoting individual initiative is the key to the progress of a nation, rather than to simply selfish and arrogant self-interest.
As a result, the recognition of the importance of culture or soft power, which emerged in Part I, could become hidden under the old dictum that politics is war by another name. All could be seen as an issue of domination, so that human rights issues would be perceived as a cover for cultural and economic imperialism. Deep psychological passions against foreign aggression lurk always in the shadows and could be evoked by the twist or any phrase.
Thus, the basic Chinese yearnings for peace and harmony are endangered. Yet the power of these cultural resources persists. If they can be summoned and applied effectively they promise to enable China to play a leading, indeed salvific, role in international affairs. This is precisely the burden of the next Part.
Part III, “Culture: How to Succeed in International Relations,” with chapters by Yu Xintian and Guo Jiemin, brings the argument of this volume to its climax. Yu Xintian takes up the mandate of Deng Xiaoping to develop an open door policy. She recognizes the many dangers and difficulties amply developed by Deng himself and fully elaborated in the preceding chapters. She realizes that the international system as designed at the end of WWII -- whether the economic structures elaborated at Bretton Woods or the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights -- are heavily Western in character.
Indeed, it could not have been otherwise. Immediately following World War II it was most urgent to begin rebuilding the world; yet at the time Africa and South and Southeast Asia were colonies, while East Asia was in the throes of civil war. That the foundational ideas of the new international structures were Western was not a plot against the rest of the world, but the best ideas available had to come from the only culture engaged. Indeed, before long they would inexorably dismantle the colonial empires and begin the construction of a new era.
Deng correctly assessed the dilemma of China: not to open to this new era would be to condemn his people to backwardness and penury that would generate social chaos, yet to open meant to face the challenges well delineated by Zhu Majie in Part II. There was no choice but to go forward, but to do so would be to confront great dangers and hence require both courage and creativity.
Surveying the situation Yu Xintian sees that the only way China can legitimately move ahead is to engage in transforming the world system in order to make room for the East and for developing countries. This is to develop a global culture at the point at which in information, economics and politics it could no longer remain bipolar and confrontational, much less unipolar and imperial. She does not propose to do this by ideas alone. As China enters the WTO the productive power of its more than 20 percent of the world population, working together as a cohesive body, can have immense leverage. Nevertheless, of itself this economic power could still support competition in terms of the old rules made by and for the West.
Instead, the approach of Yu Xintian echoes the classical experience of China in absorbing Buddhism. In his Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity and Chinese Culture, Professor Tang Yejie, son of the classical Buddhist scholar, asks how Buddhism as a religion/philosophy/culture of India could be absorbed into China. His answer points to the inherent complementarity of Buddhism to the particular needs of Chinese culture at that time. This suggests that one should look for the cultural elements in the Chinese experience which can help to improve international, and especially economic, exchange.
These are, first, on the basis of its own sad experience with colonial domination, to proceed not by force but rather by patient consensus building. Second, China can speak for the concerns of the developing countries of the world. Third, and most fundamentally, from its own Confucian tradition of harmony and proportion, it can be a notably creative force in shaping the structures of the global future. This is not to propose a return to the traditional culture of the past, but to draw creatively on the resources of the Chinese cultural tradition in response to the needs of the new world order.
Specifically, noting the individualism and universalism of the West, Yu Xintian sees not only the weak points identified in Part II, but especially the need for the addition of a more adaptive, aesthetic and community based perspective for a world culture in a newly global age. In this the task is less that of developing China or Africa as an offshort of the West, that would amount to a new colonization from top down. Instead, the more challenging task is to transform and develop the cultures of the many peoples, each with its own genius, in a cumulative and mutually enriching process from the roots upward. Guo Jiemin illustrates this by the case of Japan whose cultural particularity has enabled it to engage the world and claim its place by doing some things better than other peoples.
Part IV, “Culture and Contemporary Conflicts in International Relations,” begins to face the major challenges for a new pluralist world. Does the end of a bipolar world under constant nuclear threat mean the unleashing of innumerable suppressed forces of conflict and revenge? Almost as a test case this Part does not shrink from facing the concrete difficulties in the present Islamic world.
The chapter by Li Weijian on Islam demonstrates a masterful command of the materials. He recognizes the centrality of religion for culture, echoing Huntington’s recognition that all (except one) of the major civilizations are rooted in a religion. Moreover, he notes that over the ages the continued efforts at Islamic reform have been primarily inward, rather than outward attacks on others.
In a brilliant passage he notes his confidence in the rich wisdom of this civilizations.
Today’s Islamic society is in a period of change, seeking its own cultural features. This is a long process in which Islamic culture cannot avoid colliding with Western culture. Overall, however, it surely will achieve the best integration of its national culture with those of other nations, including Western culture. The West should be fully aware of this. It should be noted that any civilization that can have a long and sustained development in the world is sure to contain at its core a culture and quality which manifests the maturity of human reason.
When related to Li Weijian’s earlier statement that religion is unreasonable it begins to emerge that there must be different usages the term ‘reason’ and different levels. If so, exploring the religious component of the maturation of reason in Chinese, Islamic and other cultures will be essential for the future task.
This is the more true when Li Weijian points out that, though the peoples are closely related genetically, the Arab and Israeli conflict shows that culture is not received automatically, but is always shaped by human choices.
The
absorption, exploitation and transformation of existing cultures have been
conducted in the manner of the idiosyncratic culture of the receiving nation.
There is a mechanism of cultural choice: the formation of the new culture was a
result of cultural choice by the receiving nation as the subject of the choice.
It should not be deemed as a simple compound of the received cultures; rather,
they were localized and nationalized.
Though we are borne along by our culture, and culture itself is the cumulative heritage of the exercise of freedom by our forebears, it remains ours to shape and apply with our own creative freedom.
Just how complex these matters can be is indicated by Quan Zonggi in his description of the deep complexities of the nations of Central Asia. This illustrates the disruptions caused by decades of decision-making by Moscow which ignored or even attempted to suppress local cultures and relationships in favor of a dominant universalist ideology. This again points to the importance of Islam as an identity which surpasses nationality and calls above all for unity and justice.
In her Epilogue, Yu Xintian recaps some of the key themes in this work. Together they constitute an impressive response to the challenge entailed in China’s entry into the WTO. She provides a plan for the opening of China that is neither reaction against, nor conformity to, alien pressures, but a creative engagement that can contribute to shaping the character of life for all in the global era now dawning.