Windwing: March 2012

2012-03-22

Cultural Reasons China Won't Go To War With US

http://www.straitstimes.com/Review/Others/STIStory_779066.html

Cultural Reasons China Won't Go To War With US :

Will the United States live in peace with a rising China? This was the topic of a Tembusu Forum chaired by Professor Tommy Koh on March 7, the 40th anniversary of Dr Henry Kissinger's groundbreaking visit to China. The following are edited versions of remarks from three speakers

By ZhengYongNian , FOR THE STRAITS TIMES

AFTER the United States' declaration of a "return" to Asia, Sino-american relations entered an unusually tense period. Many have asked if the two big powers will go into conflict, and even a war. If one looks at the essence of Chinese culture, the answer is no.

Culture matters in international affairs and influences foreign policy as a way of thinking. The mode of thinking is not a cause of conflicts, but the interactions between two different ways of thinking is likely to lead to conflict. Culture can also be mobilised and utilised to influence foreign policy. Once mobilised, the impact of culture is infinite.

So why is war an impossibility between the two? One should distinguish between small-scale conflicts and major wars. All kinds of conflicts such as trade disputes and ideology-oriented debates on human rights are inevitable and normal. But for the China-us conflict to result in a major war is unlikely.

Here is the cultural argument. A long undisrupted history of several thousand years has bestowed China with a rare sense of "big history". China perceives long-term issues with a long-term vision. China is slow in dealing with international issues, while the Americans sometimes become impatient. China's normal approach to problems is to find the best solutions before acting on them. China sees many problems as inherent in the process of development and believes solutions will eventually emerge with time.

An analogy can be made here with Chinese medicine, which is slow in curing an illness but is considered better in completely curing one. The American way is similar to Western medicine's delivering of quick fixes.

The differences between cultures are also demonstrated in the different understanding of strategy. The West views China's "Tao Guang Yang Hui" (translated literally as "hiding brightness and cherishing obscurity") strategy as something temporary and believes China is waiting for better opportunities to emerge. This strategy is apparent in China's reactive and defensive foreign policy of the last few centuries. Its defensive foreign policy is best reflected in China's Great Wall, which was built for defending aggressive invasions. Although such defensive strategies are not very successful in Chinese history, they are deeply rooted in Chinese culture.

This defensive culture also prevails in China's military development. The military philosophy of "zhi ge wei wu" simply means that the purpose of developing weapons is to use them to stop their usage. For the West, it is for deterrence while for the Chinese it is defence. China develops a certain kind of weapon or military plan only to counteract weapons and military plans directed at it. China is rarely pre-emptive like the US. China has repeatedly stressed its nuclear policy of maintaining a minimum deterrence with a no-first-use pledge. Chinese defence policy is very different from the ones adopted by the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan before World War II, which all had a state will and plan to achieve hegemony.

The reactive element is also in the daily practices of China's foreign policy, which runs on a reactive mode like firefighters. This scant regard for foreign policy can be seen in China's chess game, "weiqi" (Japanese go). In Dr Henry Kissinger's new book, On China, he uses an analogy of weiqi to depict the difference between Western and Chinese strategic cultures. Western strategic culture is like a game of chess which tends to be a zero-sum game, while the Chinese weiqi is a non-zero-sum game where relative gains are possible.

In the West, be it the presidential system or the Cabinet system, the minister of foreign affairs is a prominent and influential position. By comparison, the weiqi philosophy emphasises relative gains. Chinese-style foreign policy could be likened to doing business: you may make more profits today, but I may make more tomorrow. With such a mentality, foreign policy is never an urgent matter. Unlike his counterpart in the West, the Chinese minister of foreign policy occupies an extremely low position in the administrative hierarchy and has limited influence.

Chinese culture is also unique because of its secular nature. It does not have a mission to change others. In international affairs, it is reflected in the Chinese understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty in the West means homogeneity and convergence, while Chinese sovereignty emphasises "harmony in diversity". Western countries have the tendency to change the polities of other countries to conform to their own, whereas China is strongly against such practices and values coexistence of different countries.

In some phases of its history, China did become aggressive, such as during the Yuan and Qing dynasties. But during these periods, China itself was ruled by what the Chinese called "barbarians". The aggressiveness of Maoist foreign policy was largely due to an imported ideology, namely, communism. Today, China is again at a crossroads. Two ideational forces are working in its foreign policy: a return to its own grand tradition or Americanisation. To be sure, Americanisation will create an aggressive China, while its grand tradition is a peaceful China, be it authoritarian or democratic.

The writer is director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore

Cultural Reasons China Won't Go To War With US -- ST ILLUSTRATION: MIEL

March 18, 2012

2012-03-06

Chinese Britons Have Put Up With Racism For Too Long

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/11/british-chinese-racism?INTCMP=SRCH

Chinese Britons Have Put Up With Racism For Too Long

Many people are shocked to hear the extent of prejudice against the Chinese – is it so surprising when stereotypes still flourish?

Elizabeth Chan

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 January 2012 11.07 GMT

Elizabeth Chan as Cinderella at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 2008: 'Going to drama school in London was a revelation'. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Chinese Britons are often referred to as a "silent" or "hidden" minority. For although we are the fourth-largest minority ethnic group in the UK, we are virtually invisible in public life, principally the arts, media and politics.

On the surface, the Chinese seem relatively content and well-to-do, with British Chinese pupils regularly outperforming their classmates and Chinese men more likely than any other ethnic group to be in a professional job. Consequently, we are often overlooked in talks on racism and social exclusion.

But academic and economic successes do not negate feelings of marginalisation. A 2009 study by The Monitoring Group and Hull University suggested that British Chinese are particularly prone to racial violence and harassment, but that the true extent to their victimisation was often overlooked because victims were unwilling to report it.

Growing up in the north of England in the 80s, I had few role models. Popular culture was dominated by white faces and occasionally black and south Asian, but never east Asian. I'm not sure that much has changed since.

Shouts of "Jackie Chan!" and kung-fu noises from random strangers continue to greet me in the street, perhaps followed by a "konichiwa!" Just a few days ago, a friend was having a post-hangover drink in a trendy east London pub, only to be accused by the manager of being a DVD pedlar hassling his clients.

Going to drama school in London was a revelation; I was told I couldn't perform in a scene from a play because it had been written for white people. The scene was two girls sitting on a park bench talking about boys, and the year was 2006. Worse was when it came from my contemporaries; one (white, liberal, highly educated) helpfully suggested I did a monologue from The Good Soul of Szechuan instead, and another rushed up after one performance to tell me how delighted her parents had been that I'd spoken perfect English (I'm from Bradford).

In hindsight it was good preparation for a profession where, on my first job, the Bafta-winning director chuckled to everyone on set that I'd trained in kung fu, and where any character who speaks in some kind of dodgy east Asian accent is considered hilarious.

I have friends who are shocked that such things actually happen. They are usually most surprised at the fact that it's happened to me. Why? I suspect mainly because, like them, I am part of the educated middle class, and things like that don't happen to people like us.

Well, they do, and quite often. And frankly, it isn't surprising that prejudices are rife in a country whose media perpetuates the very images that evoke stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings: Chinese characters rarely appear on our television screens, but when they do, you can bet they'll be DVD sellers, illegal immigrants, spies or, in the case of last year's Sherlock, weird acrobatic ninja types. Many Chinese viewers were outraged at the portrayal of east Asians in this show, but typically, few complained.

Sadly, the British Chinese are reticent about speaking up for themselves, and simply do not have the numbers to make the same noise the black and south Asian communities do, whose vociferous and galvanising voices have been making waves against racism for decades. Racism is one of those horrendous, soul- and confidence-crushing things that, when faced with, you'd much rather forget or pretend didn't exist. So we tend to brush it off, pretend it never happened, or laugh along with the rest rather than come across as bad sports. We Chinese have become dab hands at this, living up to the stereotype of the smiling but silent Chinaman.

If we are to make progress in understanding the true extent of racism in this country, we all need to be a lot braver in confronting truths about how we live. It's about swallowing our pride and being less afraid of telling the world how racism affects us and really thinking about the people across Britain who have come to accept racism as a part of life. It's about standing up in classrooms, television studios, offices, pubs and public transport, not just for ourselves, but for friends and strangers, too.

Denial gets us nowhere. But awareness, thoughtfulness and courage could make millions of lives so much better.

2012-03-03

Why China Resists Western Intervention In Syria

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120229tp.html

LOS ANGELES — Intellectual precision is especially vital in times of geopolitical passion. The full totality of evil of the Syrian government is now on display for the entire world to see. The brutality of President Bashar Assad is beyond immense. And so the blame game has begun.

The obvious target of global wrath is the hateful Assad. But not far behind on the international hate and blame list is Russia and China. They committed the sin of blocking United Nations Security Council action against Damascus by refusing to vote for resolutions that called for major changes (i.e., Assad must go). But about the use by Moscow and Beijing of the so-called veto, two things must be said.

The first is that Russia and China come at the issue from different perspectives. Moscow works from strictly defined national interest. Damascus has been a friend that has given it broad and significant access to the strategic Middle East without which Russian influence would be much reduced.

By contrast, Beijing approaches the issue from a broader perspective of (in effect) geopolitical philosophy. Living in a glass house itself, it is not about to advocate as accepted international practice the throwing stones at anyone else for the manner of their conduct of domestic security. This is to say that its overall foreign policy is grounded in the long-held principle of "non-interference in the internal affairs of other states." The contrasting principle would be the "policeman of the world" approach, the practice of which the United States has sometimes been accused.

The Russian view, it seems to me, reeks of pure craven power politics — so that little more need be said. But the Chinese view is rooted in more complex thought, emotion and experience. They include a tortured history of centuries of intrusion and invasion by foreign powers eager to run China their own (colonial or neo-colonial or Western) way.

That view also derives from the Treaty of Westphalia, which way back when in 1648 ushered in the era of sovereign nations. The essence of sovereignty includes the right of countries to rule exactly as they wish as long as they stay within their borders. From the logic of the Chinese perspective, therefore, nothing that has been happening inside Syria should be said to be axiomatically a candidate for international intervention. In fact, it could be argued (though of course I won't) that Damascus is struggling mightily to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria so as to avoid national fragmentation.

This leads to our second point. In the age of all-seeing and easily transmitted digital technology, the shortcomings of the Westphalian nation-state political philosophy are more evident than ever. The amazing media technology of the 21st century knocks down borders and collapses formerly remote regions of the world into virtual neighboring communities.

This current world reality has been recognized for years by the United Nations, the lead agency of the international community. For all its many glaring faults, the U.N. has consistently offered itself as one way out of the no-exit nation-state box. Kofi Annan, the previous U.N. secretary general, deserves credit for having insisted on the new global doctrine — "the responsibility to protect" (cleverly: "R2P") — in the wake of the humanitarian disasters of Rwanda, Somalia, Srebrenica and Kosovo. The theory here is that the international community must exercise "the right to humanitarian intervention" when nation-states are visibly pulverizing their own people.

And so, notwithstanding the Security Council's hostage to the structural impediment of the veto, the U.N. has been carving out an appropriately internationalist R2P role for itself.

In an interview back in August, I sat across from Annan's able successor, Ban Ki Moon, the eighth U.N. secretary general (and only the second from Asia) as he explained his own unavailing efforts to deflect Assad from the horror he was planning. Remember now — this is in August.

I asked: "How did your conversations with Assad go? I mean, you pick up the phone and you call him, or he calls you, when he is probably shooting people?"

Ban answered: "Oh, yes. Of course, I urged him to stop killing your own people. Killing your own people is a dead-end, and a violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and you should listen attentively, and seriously, to the challenges and aspirations of your people — what your people are asking you to do. Please engage in inclusive dialogue, and take bold and decisive reform before it is too late."

Ban continued with both emotion and logic in this fashion, explaining that "R2P" is now the normative standard in the approach of the U.N. secretary general to such issues of the so-called Arab Spring. Where a nation-state might coldly calibrate its policy toward humanitarian crises in terms of sheer national interest, the world's leading international organization reverts to an international, humanitarian standard.

The U.N. secretary general believes that "a natural evolution of history" will make the 'see-no-evil, hear-no-evil' Westphalian approach outdated.

If so, then Beijing might be viewed as being on the wrong side of history. But at least the Chinese tendency is rooted in something other than narrow national interest. This contrasts with the Russian view, which is Westphalian at its worst.

Tom Plate, the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Affairs at Loyola Marymount University, is author of the "Giants of Asia" series. The veteran U.S. journalist has been interviewing the U.N. secretary general for "Conversations With Ban Ki Moon" — Book Four in the series, to be published in September by Marshall Cavendish Asia.