wall street journal article 文

作者：lilian4869 标签：文章

阅读次数：4

A Superpower Stirs
600 years after bringing home its armada, will China once again stride the world's stage?


Beijing
The wooden treasure ships commanded by Admiral Cheng-ho, a Chinese Ming dynasty eunuch, were among the largest vessels ever built, nautical monsters that by some accounts carried nine masts.
Bigger by far than the ships of Christopher Columbus that set out decades later for the New World, they were the flagships of an armada that ventured as far as the east coast of Africa on seven naval expeditions. The first embarked in 1405 bearing some 30,000 men; the seventh in 1430.
Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. Cheng-ho's adventures had helped to ruin Ming finances. The emperors put a halt to sea trade and closed the shipbuilding industry; China looked inward for the next four centuries. The expeditions to the "Western Seas" were a glorious aberration.
Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the world is looking to China to assume an unfamiliar role of global leadership. At a time when American prestige is fading, China's status is rising.
President Barack Obama arrives in China next week seeking help on everything from climate change to North Korea's nuclear threat. At meetings of the Group of 20 nations, China's opinions are urgently sought on issues such as banking reform and executive pay. Persuading China to take a lead will be a challenge.
History has done little to prepare this country for the kind of leadership that an anxious international community seems so ready to thrust on it.
Unlike the U.S., China doesn't aspire to remake the world: Its longstanding mantra is "nonintervention" in the internal affairs of other countries. Even under Chairman Mao's reign, China never sought world domination, like the former Soviet Union—although it stirred up revolution in other parts of Asia and beyond. Now that China has largely discarded socialism, it's hard to find a definition for what remains of its ideology, values and world view.
Recently, at a dinner in a Beijing restaurant of a group of young Chinese professionals—several of them Communist Party members—somebody raised a question that should have been simple to answer. Can anybody list the "Three Represents"? The reference was to the political theory of former President Jiang Zemin, which has been written into the state constitution and is taught in schools. Not a single hand went up. Could anybody name two? Nobody. One? With difficulty.
A hard-nosed pragmatism is generally considered to be China's guiding principle at home and abroad: whatever produces growth in gross domestic product.
China's aloofness from the world was interrupted when the West came knocking. In 1793, Lord Macartney was dispatched to China by Britain's King George III to open the country to trade. He arrived with presents meant to dazzle the court of the Qianlong emperor—mechanical clocks, chronometers, telescopes and mathematical instruments. The 600 packages required 200 horses and 3,000 porters to transport.
"There is nothing we lack," the emperor famously told the royal emissary. "We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects." The British forced open the doors to trade with gunboats; an enfeebled China was carved up by Western powers in what China calls its "century of humiliation."
It's easy to forget, driving by Beijing's Olympics-inspired landmarks—the Birds Nest Stadium, the Water Cube, the colossal CCTV Tower—that until quite recently China had closeted itself again.
For most of the first 30 years of Communist rule in China, which started in 1949, it was hard and often outright impossible to get a visa. Businessmen were granted access once a year for the Canton Trade Fair. In neighboring Hong Kong, tourist buses would deliver groups of camera-toting Americans and Japanese to the border to catch a glimpse of "Red China" on the other side. The rare Chinese official who ventured to the West was a curiosity, much like North Koreans today.
China was in turmoil. To divine what was going on inside the country, foreign intelligence decamped in Hong Kong to monitor local radio stations.
Deng Xiaoping put an end to Chairman Mao's era of murderous seclusion—its endless class struggles and man-made disasters, including the world's worst famine—with his "Open Door" reforms in 1978.
The decision to open the country to foreign trade and investment, initially through Special Economic Zones along the coast, set China on its path of supercharged economic growth. China is shortly expected to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy.
China's achievements have provided a beacon for much of the developing world: its success in lifting 300 million people out of poverty; its fight against disease and illiteracy; its embrace of technology that has put Chinese astronauts in space. All this, while allowing an unprecedented flowering of personal freedoms.
Now, as the global economy emerges shakily from the worst recession since World War II, China is attracting admiration from new corners.
While the Western world hurtled towards the financial abyss, China was moving ahead cautiously. It has emerged from the crisis with an economy growing powerfully. Its banks are unpolluted by toxic assets; hardly a ripple disturbs its vast pools of national savings. This year, property markets in Beijing and Shanghai are sizzling.
There are hopes, too, that China will use its new strategic heft—and its apparently deft touch—to help resolve the most pressing security issues of the times. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, proposed a drastically slimmer G20—a G2, the U.S. and China—to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; India-Pakistan tensions; climate change.
When he arrives in Beijing, Mr. Obama will be clutching a geopolitical "to-do" list that looks quite similar. America's broad goal has been to persuade China to assume the global responsibilities that go with its growing economic influence in a way that strengthens, rather than threatens, existing international arrangements. China, urged former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, should become a "responsible stakeholder."
Yet China's official commitment to a "harmonious world" is often at odds with an assertive America fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More often than not, it has meant that China has been a reluctant follower not a leader. Critics say that China's record in the world's trouble spots, from North Korea to Iraq and Darfur, suggests that it defines its responsibilities in ways that enhance its economic interests.
On North Korea, China has been heading diplomatic efforts to try to rein in Pyongyang's nuclear program. But it is hesitant to threaten the flow of Chinese oil and food that keeps the regime alive. Skeptics in the U.S. say that China holds back because it fears a collapse of North Korea that would not only unleash a flood of refugees across its border but also place U.S. forces face-to-face with its own.
Similar tensions between China's economic interests and international obligations play out in Africa, where Chinese companies are investing massively in energy and raw materials to fuel China's growth. The "no-strings" investments from Nigeria to Ethiopia fly in the face of Western efforts to link investment with improvements in human rights and the environment. In Sudan, China has sent peacekeepers to the war-torn region of Darfur, while bolstering the government by buying oil and selling arms.
Iran may provide the biggest test to date of China's willingness to lead. Washington and its European allies see China's role as critical in the effort to pressure Tehran over its nuclear program. So far, China has resisted tougher sanctions against a country that is its second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.
China's leaders wrap their great power aspirations in modesty. They point out that China is still a poor developing country, with one tenth of the per capita GDP of the U.S.
Yet China is rapidly modernizing its military forces. Every schoolchild in China knows the story of the Dowager Empress who used funds earmarked for the navy to build stone boats at the Summer Palace in Beijing. The story has become a metaphor for national weakness, and a call to arms.
A military parade last month to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sent a powerful message to China's 1.3 billion people. The intercontinental ballistic missiles that rumbled down Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, and the tanker planes that lumbered overhead, signaled that China not only was at last a strong country, but also could project power beyond its shores.
These days, China's appetite for "ingenious objects" from the West knows no bounds. It has 650 million mobile phones; it has passed America as the world's largest auto market.
No emerging nation on earth has seized the opportunities of global trade more enthusiastically than China. Its decision to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 launched its economy into a new orbit. Surpluses from foreign trade—particularly with the U.S.—have helped China rack up more than $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.
So what does China want to do with the enhanced status that it craves, and which the world seems equally anxious to concede to China?
Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi wrote: "Governing a large country is like frying a small fish." The advice was aimed at the scholar-officials that ran China—a Mandarin class that became a model of governance for the ancient world. The light touch has never been a hallmark of Communist rule, or of its statecraft. That matters greatly in a world in which influence and legitimacy derive more than ever from the attractiveness of a country's governing ideals.
Last month, the Frankfurt Book Fair offered the world a glimpse into the internal workings of the Chinese state, and a case study on the limitations of China's "soft power" and its ability to lead.
China was invited to the fair as the guest of honor. The Chinese government had invested millions of dollars in the event, lining up some 2,000 Chinese writers, publishers and artists to attend. All went well until organizers invited two Chinese dissidents to a prefair symposium titled "China and the World—Perception and Reality." Furious Chinese officials threatened to boycott the event and backed down only when organizers withdrew the invitations.
"We did not come to be instructed about democracy," Mei Zhaorong, China's former ambassador to Germany, icily declared.
"Two principles also apply to the Frankfurt Book Fair," said a German foreign ministry spokeswoman. "Guests are treated like guests, and art without freedom is inconceivable