Authors: James Fallows
Crude and clumsy? In January, 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an official visit to China. The purpose of the trip, which included a meeting with President Hu Jintao, was to begin calming U.S.-Chinese relations after an unusually tense year. In the preceding twelve months, the two countries had differed over maritime rights in the South China Sea, American arms sales to Taiwan, the value of the Chinese currency, and of course the selection of an imprisoned Chinese civil liberties activist as the 2010 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Gates’s trip, which immediately preceded Hu Jintao’s own
state visit to Washington, was supposed to convey the message that the two countries would try to contain their differences rather than letting the disputes escalate.
The news of the trip, however, was the opposite of what Gates intended. The People’s Liberation Army chose that week for a debut flight of its supposedly super-advanced J-20 “stealth” fighter, which was publicized first by Chinese bloggers and then by the mainstream media around the world. By the time the world’s aviation analysts had a chance to pore over the photos and performance data of the J-20, they generally pooh-poohed its significance. It was based on decades-old designs, and its rumored stealth capacities to avoid radar were primitive. If anything it suggested the backwardness of the Chinese aerospace establishment rather than its advances. But those analyses took a while to complete, and in the meantime the military’s decision to stage the test flight badly undercut Hu Jintao’s position during Gates’s trip. Either Hu had known all along about the planned flight, in which case he was deliberately saber rattling during what was intended as a peacemaking visit; or he had not known, and the implications of that were worse, in reinforcing long-standing concerns that the PLA was making strategic decisions on its own, without Party control. (Most Western democracies operate on the principle of civilian control of the military; in China, the military is officially under Communist Party control.)
And Chinese measures that are self-defeatingly harsh? Among many possible illustrations is the government’s furious response to the selection of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. The foreign ministry all but ruptured relations with Norway, whose parliament oversees selection of the Peace Prize winner. In so doing, the Chinese government naturally frightened and antagonized a range of other nations, who had new reason to
wonder what a steady increase in Chinese power might mean. Chinese officials threatened small states with trade sanctions and other difficulties if they attended the award ceremony—and then preposterously claimed that most of the world’s governments joined in denouncing the choice.
With a more coldly cynical understanding of how to influence world opinion, or with a greater interest in this component of its “soft power,” the government could have registered its disagreement and then underplayed the Nobel Prize episode. It could have conveyed through unflappability the message that it was serenely confident enough to absorb such petty blows. Such calculated calm generally seemed outside the government’s capability. Beyond its fury about Liu Xiaobo, China’s “diplomatic” efforts as a whole through 2010 were marked by similar oversteps and outbursts, plus threats and insults both intended or unwitting to surrounding nations. All of this eroded its “soft power” even as its economic strength continued to grow. The clearest indication of this backfiring effect was the expansion of Chinese claims to control over the South China Sea, which drew the governments of South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and several other Southeast Asian nations into closer military cooperation with the United States.
China’s aviation and aerospace ambitions offer one of many arenas in which these tensions will express themselves. The factors that will shape China’s evolution as an aerospace power—trust and honesty in commercial dealings, efficient and honest regulation, transparent dealings with international bodies, stable relations between civil authorities and the military, a culture of
free research and innovation—are bellwethers for its development more broadly. The interaction among the forces changing China, and the forces China is exerting on the world, will determine what kind of power China will represent and the speed, nature, and possible limits of its rise.
In the Western media and in most outside discussions of China’s future, the contrasts and tensions I am describing are often presented in stark either-or fashion. Either they are sure to continue—or, alternatively, they are sure to be resolved. One way or another we won’t have the ambiguity of the controlled chaos, the precarious success, of the China we have seen through the first few decades of its modernization.
The idea that the contradictions will continue, so that China will in the long run be both economically successful and politically controlled, lies behind the widespread projections that the world must soon confront the ripple effects of a powerful new Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism, and a “Beijing consensus” about how the world’s economies should interact. In this view, economic vitality ultimately determines the success or failure of the associated political system. The Soviet system was contained for half a century after World War II by Western military power, but—by this logic—it finally failed because it could not keep up economically with market capitalism. By extension, each new high-speed rail line that is opened in China—each supermodern airport, each advanced semiconductor factory, each addition to national output or export surplus or head count of engineers—confirms the viability of the Chinese approach of state-fostered market development coinciding with tight political controls.
Unlike India, with the friction of its multiparty democracy, China has a system that makes sure the country’s big jobs get done. The people living in the path of a “necessary” new road
in Sichuan or Guangdong might not be happy about being forced to move, but the country as a whole benefits from an improved infrastructure. China is able to build so many new airports, and the United States and Western Europe so few, in part because Chinese officials can commandeer the land. They are not bogged down by lawsuits over noise or pollution concerns. Unlike the old Soviet Union, China has so far found a way to keep businesses vibrant while maintaining political control. Unlike modern Russia, it has so far kept corruption at a level at which it distorts rather than cripples the economy as a whole. Unlike the United States, where political and media attention bounce from one spectacle to the next, China has usually kept the focus of its governmental efforts directed on the main threats to the country’s development and well-being. Rulers who don’t have to face election campaigns or an unmuzzled press enjoy that luxury.
The upshot of these Chinese achievements, of course, is an implied but potent political message. China’s infrastructure is astounding in its sweep and modernity; India’s and America’s are, in their different ways, depressing for decaying faster than they are rebuilt. The more abundantly the Chinese system delivers, freed from the bothers of democracy, the more it calls into question the ability of liberal democratic systems to keep up.
Many Westerners fear that the more successful China’s economy is, the more threatening its model and ideal will inevitably become. And of course it’s not just Westerners who think that a shift in economic fundamentals will have a profound political effect. A frequent theme in Chinese discourse is that the growing power of the country’s system will finally allow its representatives to talk back to the West, including about the supposedly “universal” values Westerners preach.
This view of the political implications of China’s economic
growth coexists with its opposite—the idea that China’s material progress would be the best possible guarantor of its eventual political and social liberalization. This is the faith that politicians and, especially, business leaders have used to justify continued Western interactions with China even when oppression is increasing there. Its premise is that as China grows richer it will naturally become freer too. When people can choose what car to buy and what job to accept, sooner or later they’ll want choice in other matters too. When some of them grow rich enough to own aircraft, they will want the freedom to travel without waiting weeks for an official okay. How long will citizens who are increasingly prosperous, urbanized, and “empowered” in many walks of life put up with a media system that does not treat them as fully adult, insisting that they be sheltered from certain “unauthorized” facts and viewpoints, and a political system that denies them a direct say in public affairs?
Over the past generation, and the past decade especially, China-watchers have framed this choice for the country: Either the growing power of the Chinese economy will change the rest of the international system, effectively making it more Chinese, or the growing prosperity of the Chinese people will change their own country’s system, making it more international.
The contradictory signals from China—the magnificence of the country’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics; the crackdown on all dissidence during the Olympics—make us eager for the choice to emerge, clearly and definitively, to end the suspense that has been building for forty years, since Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit, so we can know whether to regard China as friend or foe. But because of China’s vast resources and because its authoritarian system allows it to marshal them so effectively,
the country is able to stave off the choice and, while it is doing so, to continue to transform in astonishingly fast yet contradictory ways. Sometimes they make it appear to be on a path to changing the international system, sometimes to being changed by it.
China’s aerospace future is a test case for its economic and technological development as a whole. The more tightly the government maintains internal controls, the likelier that its aerospace industries will evolve toward a more efficient version of the Soviet model. That is, they would have some brute-force technical strengths, but they would lag the Western competitors in innovation, and their products would appeal only to captive customers. But the more that the military is willing to relinquish control over airspace, and that civilian authorities trust their people to travel unsupervised and collaborate with partners anywhere around the world as they choose, the greater the chance of real innovation arising within China.
Other industries have a similar telltale function. Can China move to the frontier of info-tech development, rather than just making low-cost products to someone else’s specifications? In the life sciences? In exploration of space? In fostering universities that are such undeniable centers of excellence that scholars will leave Oxford, Berlin, Berkeley or Palo Alto, Cambridge or New York to spend their careers in Beijing or Xi’an? (Much as European, Latin American, Asian, or African scholars have often felt in the past half century that they had to come to North America to be part of the first team.)
The development of institutions and organizations like these will shape China, and the choices China’s political leaders are about to make will largely determine whether China can excel in new ways.
With aerospace as a proxy for Chinese development in the broadest sense, what are the forces that will determine in which direction China goes? A threshold indicator is whether the leaders of a maturing Chinese system will be confident enough in the country’s achievements to become thick-skinned. In practice this means not allowing themselves to be baited by small slights in international dealings—and, much more important for the country’s development, allowing their own people latitude in pursuing their interests and shaping their society. The deliberately provocative way of raising this point is to ask whether the Chinese system is ready to grow up.
Each national culture has a point about which it is most defensive, because on that point it has its own most serious doubts. You can’t provoke most Americans by pointing out that the country has had a very warlike record for a very long time. Many Americans view this heritage as an achievement rather than a failing, and even those who don’t aren’t likely to feel insulted or personally threatened by this critique.
Yet let a foreigner tell an American that the country is “declining,” and there will be a reaction. Denial, assent, an argument that there’s still hope—something. The intensity of the reaction obviously underscores the point that this is one of Americans’ longstanding sources of self-doubt. Other countries—Japan, Germany, England, Russia—have similar points that provoke defensiveness. What is most deeply concerning to a culture (as for most individuals or families) is often the most difficult or infuriating for outsiders to bring up.
In modern China, one of these always sensitive subjects is the
idea of China’s full “equality” or “maturity” in modern international society, especially relative to the white Western nations that for centuries have been in economic and political control. (Competition with Japan is a separate and equally tangled question.) This is the significance of the phrase “Hundred Years of Humiliation” to describe China’s period of subjugation to foreigners and the repeated insistence by Chinese spokesmen on full dignity, equality, and respect in international dealings. In the late spring of 2011, I had the opportunity to watch the leaders of the world’s two largest military forces, China’s and America’s, sit down for discussion over a meal. Admiral Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as such the senior military adviser to President Obama, as he had been previously for President George W. Bush, had invited General Chen Bingde, the commanding general of the People’s Liberation Army and the senior military official in China, to a dinner at Mullen’s official residence in Washington.
I was one of a small number of outsiders at the dinner, at which the two senior commanders did most of the talking. The entire discussion was off the record, but I can say that in the following days I listened with a sense of familiarity to coverage of the public events of General Chen’s visit to the United States—the first by a senior PLA official in seven years. In nearly every formal statement, response to a question, or impromptu comment in the presence of reporters, he returned to the same note, an insistence on
respect
. Improved relations must start on the basis of mutual respect, he would say. Or: Our nations must seek ways to work together, but on the platform of respect. Or: Only from a vantage point of mutual respect and equality can we make progress. The tone was affable, and the words might have sounded like pointless officialese. But that reflected something far closer to the heart of Chinese concerns than is often
appreciated by outsiders, especially by the historically confident Western world.