Sourse: cmp.hku.hk

We know that for various reasons, China’s rise is a matter of great debate in the West. Over the past 20 years, the Western media have often portrayed China as a country where state power stands in opposition to the people, where political power is repressive, . . . Under the leadership of dissidents, the people carry out resistance. Some Europeans, some people in Oslo, for example, even believe that China is a magnified East Germany, or an amplified Eastern Europe, ripe for a so-called “color revolution.”

This point of view has driven many China experts in the West to make pessimistic predictions about China. They said first that post-1989 China would collapse. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they said once again that China would come next, torn by dissension and disintegrating. Around the time of Deng Xiaoping’s death [in 1997], they again predicted major unrest in China. Before Hong Kong was handed back [in 1997], they again predicted that the prosperity of the territory was gone for ever. When China joined the World Trade Organization, they again predicted that China would slide into collapse. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, they again guessed that there would be major unrest in China. In the end, all of these predictions were proven false. China did not collapse. Instead, the theory of the China collapse itself collapsed.

This successive failure of prediction suggests that we must research China, this complex nation, with greater objectivity. Perhaps, like the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, or like his German contemporary, Liebniz, place the focus on what they called “natural religion.” What these men might care most about is how China has used methods material and worldly, and close to nature — rather than the theological methods of Europe in its glory — in order to govern society, the economy and politics. If we throw off the bonds of ideology, we discover that the things that have happened in China over the past 30 years are perhaps the greatest economic and social transformation that human history has even witnessed — around 400 million people throwing off poverty. This change has had a profound impact on both China and the world.

It can even be said that in the past 30 years, the achievements of China surpass those of all of the world’s developing nations put together, because 70 percent of those moving out of poverty [in the world] are Chinese. China achievements are greater than the achievements of all transitional economies put together, because China’s GDP has grown by a factor of 18 over the past 30 years, and by contrast the transitional economies of Eastern Europe have on average only doubled. Of course Eastern Europe has developed from a higher base. China achievements are also greater than that of many developed nations. That portion of Chinese who live at developed economy levels is around 300 million, equal to the population of America, and their level of prosperity is already no longer inferior to their peers in developed nations in southern Europe. First-tier Chinese cities like Shanghai have already in many respects surpassed New York. Whether in terms of such “hardware” as airports, subway systems, elevated rails, commercial facilities and civic architecture, or by such “soft” measures as life expectancy, infant mortality and urban safety, Shanghai is already perhaps better than New York.

Naturally, China has many problems of its own, and some of these are quite serious and require earnest action on our part. But China’s overall success is clear for all to see. How do we explain this success? Some people say it is a result of direct foreign investment, but in terms of per capita attraction of foreign investment, Eastern Europe has attracted more foreign investment than China. Some people say that [China's success] owes to its pool of cheap labor, but labor is cheaper than China in a number of developing nations such as India. Some people say that [China's success] owes to strong [centralized] government authority. But in Asia, Africa and Latin America there are many strong governments, but they have been unable to make the same achievements as China.

If these reasons are insufficient to explain China’s successes then we need to explore new trains of thought. My own explanation is the “China Model.” Before I explain the China Model, I would like to speak for a bit about my understanding of China’s national nature [or character]. This will help us to better understand the China Model.

China is not a magnified East Germany, nor is it an amplified Eastern Europe. Nor is it any ordinary country. China is a “civilization-type nation” (文明型国家), and moreover it is the only country of such a type in the world. Why? Because China is the oldest [nation] in the world with a history as a unified nation. China is the only country in the world to have 5,000 year of unbroken civilization. China is the only nation where a millennia-old civilization fully coincides with the morphology of a modern state. In order to illustrate this concept, I can give you a very accurate comparison. It is as though ancient Rome was never dissolved, and continued to the present day, making the transition to a modern nation-state, with a central government and a modern economy, incorporating traditional cultural elements, having a massive population in which everyone speaks Latin.

This sort of nation is necessarily different. The Chinese civilization-type nation has [what I call the] “four ultras”: ultra-populated, ultra-vast in terms of territory, ultra-ancient in terms of its historical traditions, and ultra-deep in terms of its cultural accumulation. Owing to this character of the “four ultras,” China’s rise must necessarily give rise to a widespread international impact. China’s population surpasses that of Europe, America, Russia and Japan combined. During the Spring Festival this year, 2.5 billion trips were made by Chinese. What kind of concept is that? Imagine that the entire populations of North America, Europe, Russia, Japan and Africa were on the move within the space of less than a month. This example can illustrate the enormous challenges and endless opportunities China now faces.

China is a vast territory, a continent with great regional differences. On any account you can imagine, whether state administration, economics, medicine, military affairs, ways of life, [these regions] all have their own traditions going back millennia. China also has an extremely rich culture, including excellent works of literature and architecture. The richness of China’s food culture can illustrate this. There are eight major food cultures in China, and each of these includes countless sub-types. Personally, I believe that any of these eight food cultures taken alone is in many ways greater in terms of variety than French cuisine, though I understand that in this forum some might take objection to this. All of this is essentially the product of China’s deep history. All of this determines the uniqueness of China’s development path. Now, turning back to the China Model. I personally believe that this model encompasses eight characteristics.

1. The first is “speaking the truth through facts” (实事求是). This is an ancient historical concept in China, one that Deng Xiaoping revived at the end of the “Cultural Revolution.” It was Deng Xiaoping’s view that the ultimate standard for determining truth was not ideological dogma, whether Eastern or Western — rather is should be facts. Through an investigation of the facts, China has come to the conclusion that neither the Soviet planned economy model nor the Western democratic model can make a developing nation achieve modernization. China therefore decided in 1978 to seek its own development path, and it took one kind of practical method to promote its own large-scale modernization.

2. The second is the prioritization of lives of the people. This too is a political concept derived from Chinese traditions. Deng Xiaoping defined the elimination of poverty as the first item of business, and he formulated and put into practice a series of practical measures to eliminate poverty. Reforms in China began in the countryside, because at that time the vast majority of Chinese lived in the countryside. The success of rural reforms drew along the overall development of the Chinese economy, resulting in the emergence of countless township and village enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. They also created the foundation for the subsequent soaring development of China’s manufacturing sector. In many ways, the China Model’s characteristic of “prioritization of the lives of the people” also corrected a number of prejudices in the Western concept of human rights, for example that the political rights of citizens are always superior to other rights. This characteristic of the China Model will possibly have a profound impact on the fate of the poor who make up half of the world population.

3. Third is the preeminence of stability. As a civilization-type nation, the complexity of ethnicities, beliefs, languages and regionalism in China are second to no other place in the world. This character [of China] has given rise to the collective fear among Chinese of “chaos.” The traditional concept in China is of “times of peace and prosperity” (太平盛世), in which “peace” and “prosperity” always come hand in hand. This is why Deng Xiaoping repeatedly emphasized the importance of stability, because he understand better than anyone China’s own contemporary history — the fact that in the roughly 150 years from the Opium Wars in 1840 to Opening and Reform in 1978 China had at most 8-9 years of peace, and our process of modernization was constantly interrupted . Between foreign aggression, peasant uprisings, infighting among warlords, and ideological upheaval there were few years of peace. The past 30 years mark the first extended period of stability and development China has experienced in modern times, and only such an environment has made China’s economic miracle possible.

4. Fourth is gradual reform. China has a huge population, a massive territory and a complex situation, and this is why Deng Xiaoping employed a strategy of “feeling the rocks as one crosses the river” (摸着石头过河). He encouraged various kinds of experimentation with reform, and our Special Economic Zones were places where reform experiments were carried out, and taken nation after success was proven. China avoided “shock therapy.” We allow our imperfect systems to work while we carry out reform, serving the project of modernization. This characteristic has allowed China to avoid the paralysis and disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

5. Fifth is sequential differentiation (顺序差异). The overall sequencing of China’s reform has been as follows: first the countryside then the city, first the coastal areas then inland areas, first principally the economy then politics, first carrying out the simplest reforms then tacking the more difficult reforms. The advantage of this is that the first stages of reform pave the way with experience for the later stages, establishing foundations. Behind this method lies the holistic thinking (整体思维) of the Chinese tradition. As early as the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping formulated a 70-year strategy of transforming China into a developed nation. Today we are still carrying out this strategy. The capacity of this sort of wide-span holistic approach now stands in sharp contrast to the internal populism and political myopia so prevalent in many nations in the world (including many in Europe).

6. Sixth is the blended economy [approach] (混合经济). China has endeavored to organically combine the “visible hand” and the “invisible hand,” organically combining the strengths of the market and the economy, and effectively preventing the breakdown of the market. China’s economic system has been called a “socialist market economy.” As large-scale economic reforms have released massive market potential, the government has worked hard to ensure the stability of the macro environment. This is the principal reason why China was not implicated in the Asian financial crisis, and why it successfully negotiated the [recent] world financial crisis.

7. Seventh is opening to the outside world. The Chinese people do not have a missionary tradition, but they do have a strong tradition of study. Within the context of Chinese secular culture, studying the strong points of others is something honored with praise. China has maintained a tradition of selectively adopting the strong points of others. We have even learned much from the much-contested “Washington Consensus,” for example the entrepreneurial spirit (企业家精神) and the export-oriented economy. But China has through and through upheld its own policy space, deciding for itself what to adopt, and never following slavishly. Fully opening up to the outside has made China one of the most competitive countries in the world.

8. Eight is having a relatively neutral, enlightened and strong government. China’s government has been able to promote and achieve a widespread consensus on reform and modernization, and it can accomplish quite arduous strategic objectives, for example promoting the reform of China’s banking system, the reform of state-owned enterprises and the stimulation of the economy to deal with the global financial crisis. This characteristic has its origins in China’s deep and abiding Confucian understanding of a strong government (儒家强势政府观), in which the government must be good, virtuous and talented persons form the foundation. It was in China, after all, that the official examination system was established thousands of years ago. While our present political system has its inadequacies, it seldom produces leaders of low ability.

Fundamentally, the quality of a political system, including the source of its legitimacy, cannot be measured in its procedural correctness (程序的正确). More important is the correctness of its content, and this content, which is about achieving favorable political governance, must be measured by the people’s level of satisfaction. Good versus poor governance is far more important than democratic versus autocratic governance. If by “democracy”, that is, we refer only to the Western-defined “multi-party election system.” When we emphasize correct content over correct procedure, this is itself part of the Chinese political tradition, its goal being to create and perfect procedures as suits the needs of the situation of the nation and the people through the direction of good governance.

China today is in the midst of the world’s largest scale economic, social and political experiment. China’s successes on the economic front have already outlined the path of political reform in China — a gradual, experimental and accumulative approach to political reform in China. Throughout this process, we are willing to draw from methods old and the new, Chinese and foreign.

China is in the midst of its own industrial and social revolution, and naturally various problems have emerged. We face various challenges, such as rooting out corruption, bridging regional development gaps and closing the gap between rich and poor. In its development, however, China will keep to its own path, and will not behave according to other models. China has experienced more than a century of upheaval, chaos and revolution, and it has then experienced 30 years of successful economic reform and opening. The vast majority of Chinese wish to continue along the effective path of the China Model. This model has its own shortcomings, but it will continue to be perfected, because already it has done a good job of integrating with China’s own traditions going back thousands of years. China has its own historical inheritance. China has passed through 20 dynasties, of which seven lasted longer than American history.

As China rises, the influence of the China Model on the outside world will likely be greater and greater. China’s experience is fundamentally the product of China’s own national circumstances, and it is difficult for other countries to emulate. But a number of concepts and experiences involved in the China Model might have an international impact — things like speaking the truth through facts, prioritizing the lives of the people, gradual reform, constant experimentation, and the idea that “good versus poor governance is far more important than democratic versus autocratic governance.”

The world order today is undergoing a change of its own, from a kind of longitudinal world order to a latitudinal world order. The longitudinal world order is characterized by the West domineering other nations with its concepts and experiences, while the latitudinal world order is characterized by mutual cooperation among the concepts and experiences of various countries, with benign competition.

Finally, I’d like to share a story a European philosopher friend shared with me. One day in the second half of the 17th century, the German philosopher Liebniz came especially here [to the Netherlands], and he went to the Hague to meet secretly with the Dutch philosopher Spinoza. Why was the meeting secret? Because at the time Spinoza had been branded a heretic by the church. The two men discussed a number of odd things, including the secular, non-theological governance system of China. Actually, it’s my view that behind China’s re-emergence today lies still this non-ideological governance concept. After Liebniz visited Spinoza, he wrote a letter to a friend in which he said: “I’m planning to place a placard over my door that reads: ‘China knowledge center.’”

I tell this story not to encourage the Senate of the Netherlands to establish a China Office, but because the Netherlands has a world-famous tradition of China studies and research. But I still believe that we must continue to carry forward the spirit of the greats of the European age of enlightenment, particularly the spirit of openness and tolerance and the courageous pursuit of new knowledge. In a large sense, this is the spirit of the Dutch people. It is with this spirit that we must bravely go out and understand other cultures, other civilizations and other ways of managing state affairs — no matter how different these might seem.

If we move ahead in this way, we can avoid misunderstanding China through ideological prejudice. We can also in this way enrich our collective intelligence, better facing together the myriad challenges we face as humankind, such as the elimination of poverty, opposing terrorism, dealing with climate change, and preventing the clash of civilizations.