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Alex Lo

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
– The Modern Traveller, Hilaire Belloc
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
– The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington
Some Westerners like to tell China to chill out. It has been more than a century. Whatever foreign imperialism did to humiliate you, look how powerful your country has become today. Everyone is scared of you now.
They might also have added: Don’t take it so personally – we dominated, subjugated and humiliated everyone, and still do in some cases.
Well, they do have a point, though I doubt such a line of reasoning will convince many nationalistic Chinese.
If modernity is about the rise to dominance of the West, then postmodernity is all about the return to power of the rest.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the rest will end up dominating the West, but it will certainly mean a more humble and constrained West that must learn to respect and coexist with others rather than riding roughshod over their concerns and priorities.
After all, to rephrase Belloc, everyone has the metaphorical “Maxim gun” now.
Many Chinese of my generation, including yours truly, have been taught the whole shebang about the nation’s two-century struggle from humiliation to ascendancy. And this story is not necessarily propaganda or wrong, though it can be, depending on how it is taught.
But it has usually been taught as Chinese history, outside the global historical context. That has created, dare I say, a historical myopia.
China’s response to Western incursions had been along the following stages: initial prideful denial that something very bad was happening; shock and incomprehension at the awesome Western technical and military powers; futile attempts to resist with traditional defences; and eventual acknowledgement of the need to learn the West’s secret sauce to better fight fire with fire. And along the way, the constant inevitable fight and jockeying for power between the traditionalists and modernisers.
Call them the five stages of national grief in the face of Western global aggression enabled by the European scientific and industrial revolutions, the revolution in military science and of course, the French Revolution.
This sequence of responses from old civilisations, with some variations and different durations, was repeated with the Japanese, Ottoman, Persians, and not just the Chinese.
You could be Turkish, Egyptian, Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian or African. All had been bullied, lorded over – or worse, enslaved in the case of Africans – by the Western powers, which they often considered culturally inferior upstarts if not outright “barbarians”.
The same need for reforms and “self-strengthening” was alternately recognised, exercised, rejected or hesitated over, for fear of wrecking already crumbling traditional governing foundations, against the need to survive. You saw the same arguments and fights among the mandarins in the Qing and the Ottoman courts. The doomed 100 Days of Reform led by Kang Youwei and the failed reforms of Abdulhamid, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, were motivated by the same need to strengthen before fighting back.
With the Ottoman collapse, the Young Turks, among them modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had better luck with parties advocating modernisation and constitutional reforms. The May Fourth Movement established all the subsequent major ideological movements and their political positions in the early Chinese Republican period, eventually ending with the communist triumph.
In reforming against the West, the Japanese had the most success, beginning with the Meiji period; the Chinese, not so much. Most others achieved something in between. Unfortunately, the Japanese out-devilled the Western “devils” with their brand of imperialism that was worse than that practised by the great Western powers.
This universal struggle of the non-West put the heirs to all the once mighty and prideful empires in the same category of “developing” countries, the Third World, and now the Global South. That was a humbling experience, but one that they needed to learn. China was no exception.
Some Westerners like to claim – or at least they used to, though many have lost that confidence lately – the universality of Western values upon which the Western spread of democracy and freedom (read domination and expansionism) has been morally justified.
But what non-Westerners should always claim or counterclaim is the universal justice of their struggle against foreign domination.
China’s recent rise has been meteoric. That has, on the one hand, made many Chinese prideful again and to think of their successes as unique or exemplary. On the other hand, it has caused China to be singled out for Western animosity.
But China’s long struggle to free itself from outside bullying and domination has been very much part of the same larger global struggle of the non-Western world.
The China story is not singular but very much part of the return to prominence of the non-West, which must also spell the relative decline in power and influence of the West, but especially of the American empire.
It took a long time for the non-Western powers to acknowledge their diminution in the face of the Western onslaught. It may also take a while, if ever, for the managers of the American empire to realise the same inevitable diminution of their own power and influence.
Many influential Americans are still at the stage of denial, making them most dangerous not only to others but also to themselves.
But the return of the rest is inevitable. With empathy and common interests, China now has the means and motive to help speed that along.


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Opinion

The rise of China is not specific to the nation but part of a larger historic trend in the fall and rise again of the non-West – and of the reverse for the West


The rise of China is not specific to the nation but part of a larger historic trend in the fall and rise again of the non-West – and of the reverse for the West.


My Take

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

My Take | How China and the West misconstrue the ‘century of humiliation’

The rise of China is not specific to the nation but part of a larger historic trend in the fall and rise again of the non-West – and of the reverse for the West