MCLC: Sinocentrism for the information age

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Scott Savitt <scottsavitt at gmail.com>
Subject: Sinocentrism for the information age
***********************************************************

Source: New Paradigms Forum (n.d.):
http://www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=1498

SINOCENTRISM FOR THE INFORMATION AGE: COMMENTS ON THE 4th XIANGSHAN FORUM
By Christopher Ford

[Note:  On November 15-18, 2012, Dr. Ford attended the 4th Xiangshan Forum
in Beijing, an event sponsored by the International Military Branch of the
China Association for Military Science of the Academy of Military Science
of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).  The paper he presented to this
conference appears on NPF at
<http://www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=1495>, and on the Hudson
Institute website at
<http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/Ford--ArmsControlSino-AmericanTru
stDec2012.pdf> 
<http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/Ford--ArmsControlSino-AmericanTru
stDec2012.pdf>.  Below, however, appears a follow-up essay based upon Dr.
Ford’s experiences at the conference, where he served on a Roundtable
discussion group focused upon strategic mutual trust.]

The fourth biennial Xiangshan Forum in Beijing was my first conference in
the PRC, and a fascinatingly useful opportunity to get to know not only
the other non-Chinese attendees but also a good many uniformed PLA
officers, our gracious hosts and fellow participants.

The Forum included three breakout discussion groups, of which the one I
was assigned to attend was Roundtable Three.  Our subject there was
Asia-Pacific mutual trust, and indeed the discussion provided an
interesting opportunity to learn about that subject.   Unfortunately,
however, this was principally because our discussion – especially on the
first day – did more to demonstrate or model distrust than to illuminate
how to lessen or overcome it.

In general, the participants in Roundtable Three broke down into two
camps.  One focused on the challenges of each side understanding and
trusting the other side’s strategic intentions, on the role of perceptions
in conditioning such conclusions, and of how to communicate and to
modulate future behavior in ways conducive to trust.  By contrast, the
other camp focused upon trying to obtain agreement on specific
characterizations of past behavior before any matters relating to the
present (or the future) could be addressed.  The first camp, in other
words, emphasized trying to achieve forward-looking insight, while the
other stressed backward-looking blame-allocation and fault-finding.  The
second group consisted predominantly of PLA participants.

Indeed, our discussions quickly veered off course during the first day,
from the presentation of prepared papers on the subject of trust into
lengthy comment-and-response cycles in which the participants sometimes
seemed to inhabit parallel universes of competing facts and historical
claims.  In particular, the Chinese and non-Chinese participants seemed to
start from radically different starting points on surprisingly basic
matters of fact (e.g., about what did or did not happen in the South China
Sea in 2012, who started the Korean War, or whether or not Japanese
history textbooks acknowledge that country’s invasion of China in the
1930s).  In principle, these questions were objectively “knowable,” yet
our hosts were not interested in empirical evaluation.  Instead, our
Roundtable discussions bogged down, for it was apparently central to the
agenda of most PLA participants that their version of these facts – and
their accompanying characterizations about fault and blame – be accepted
by all others as a starting point for future-oriented discussions of
“mutual trust.”

Significantly, no non-Chinese participant in our Roundtable presumed to
tell the Chinese participants what China’s strategic intentions are.
Instead, non-Chinese participants explicitly referred to foreign concerns
rooted in perceptions of Beijing’s intentions, and asked about how it
might be possible to lessen foreign misperceptions that might exist in
this regard if indeed the PRC’s rise is as benign as its leaders claim.
The PLA participants, however, were quite comfortable telling non-Chinese
what their various governments’ intentions are.  We were told, for
instance, that Japan wishes to return to imperialist adventurism of the
sort that it displayed during the Second World War.  The United States, we
were further told, wishes to “contain” China and obstruct its rise.  These
Chinese assumptions were not depicted as mere perceptions, but instead as
matters of inarguable fact that we non-Chinese must accept – and
thereafter atone for – in order to make future trust possible.

For those PLA participants, therefore, achieving strategic trust required
that the non-Chinese world undertake something somewhat akin to a Maoist
self-criticism session.  The various presumptive malefactors who were
declared to wish to harm China needed, in effect, to confess their sins
and denounce themselves with sufficient intensity, consistency, and
sincerity that Chinese would be willing to conclude that we had forever
put aside all such deviations from proper behavior.  For this group,
apparently, having trust required eliciting the other side’s acceptance of
one’s own characterizations of history and endorsement of key elements of
one’s own world view.

These differences were striking.  Rather than being about adjudication
between or management of competing claims in a pluralist world, the PLA
participants seemed to view preventing international conflict and ensuring
future “trust” as aiming principally at keeping competing claims from
being conceived or asserted in the first place – specifically, by
obtaining others’ validation of and agreement with China’s own claims, and
its narrative of itself in the world.  In this essentially monist
conception of order, identifying and managing differences within a
framework of competing interests took a back seat to the construction of a
moral hierarchy among strategic players, as a result of which interests
wouldn’t ultimately really have to compete at all.  (Participants did not
have to be homogenized, but they had to be “harmonized” by being fit into
a status-gradient within a single system of hierarchic moral order,
acceptance of which was a prerequisite for “trust,” and which would in
fact produce peaceable and orderly behavior.)

We acquired further insight into this way of thinking near the end of the
conference in its concluding plenary session, when I raised a question
about something that had perplexed me in our earlier discussions.  There
is a stereotype in the PRC’s official discourse of America in which it is
said to be the United States which spends a lot of time telling other
countries what their values should be and how they should run their
domestic political affairs.  China, by contrast, is depicted as
scrupulously avoiding “interference” in such “internal” matters.

Intriguingly, however, in our Roundtable discussions, values-based and
“internal” issues had not been brought up by any of the non-Chinese
participants.  By contrast, a number of PLA participants did advance such
arguments.  As requirements for eliminating regional distrust, for
instance, it was declared that Japan must revise its historical education
curriculum for primary and secondary education in order properly to depict
the wrongs the country did to China in the past, that Japan must pass laws
prohibiting honoring war criminals, and that Japan must push right-wing
parties out of national politics.  They insisted that these things had to
change in Japan as a prerequisite for future strategic trust.

I raised this point in the open plenary session, asking why our Chinese
hosts did not consider such insistence to be “inference” in Japan’s
“internal” affairs.  In response, a well-known PLA general explained that
it was not “interference” in another state’s “internal affairs” for
Beijing to make demands about how other states view and depict China and
their own history in the Asia-Pacific region, because these things affect
China.  (I was told, for example, that the “right deviation” in Japanese
politics needs to be suppressed – and it is proper for the PRC to demand
this – because right-wing politics in Japan bear upon Sino-Japanese
relations.)  Such things have external effects, and therefore are not
“internal” affairs; China may make demands with regard to matters that
“affect China.”

If this view is indeed broadly held in contemporary China – and I have no
reason to believe that senior serving PLA officers, in uniform, attending
a conference that they have themselves sponsored and speaking at a plenary
session to which they invited Chinese media representatives with
television cameras, would depart in any meaningful way from the official
PRC line – it may provide an important insight into Chinese conceptions of
how Beijing’s imagined “harmonious world” would work.  It suggests that
there is nothing at all anomalous about a range of otherwise seemingly
idiosyncratic PRC demands in recent years, including calls for Western
governments to prohibit “biased” coverage of the PRC in domestic Western
media, the insistence that a small town in Oregon destroy a
privately-painted wall mural sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan and
Taiwanese independence, Beijing’s angry complaints every time anyone has
any dealings with the Dalai Lama or gives a prize to a Chinese whose
political views are not approved by PRC authorities, its indignant
reaction to  the “lack of balance” in a recent publication from the
Australian National University, its harassment of Western media
organizations that tell their readers about corruption in the Chinese
elite, and the above-listed agenda related to Japanese domestic politics
and administration.

I once assumed that most such things were simply an uncoordinated,
unsystematic prickliness bespeaking merely Beijing’s ongoing insecurity in
the modern world and the crudely propagandistic reflexes of the Chinese
Party-State.  And I had assumed that the “non-interference” theme in PRC
diplomatic discourse was simply a propaganda trope intended to be
alternatively invoked or ignored with opportunistic and often hypocritical
cynicism.

My dealings with PLA officials at the Xiangshan Forum, however, suggest a
possible (and more interesting) alternative explanation.  Beijing’s
various idiosyncrasies in these regards may be, in meaningful part, the
relatively coherent and consistent outgrowths of a conceptual framework –
an Information Age twist, if you will, on much older themes of Sinocentric
moralism  – in which the emerging Chinese superpower hungers to control
other peoples’ narrative of China.  Even things like overseas media
coverage, university publications, and small town murals thousands of
miles away are all deemed appropriate subjects for PRC demands because
they relate in some fashion to China, which is assumed to have a
proprietary interest not only in how the rest of the world acts toward
China, but also in how it depicts and understands China.

And thus we circle back to my earlier observations about the two groups’
different approaches to “trust” in our Roundtable discussion at the
Xiangshan Forum.  Specifically, many of the Chinese participants around
our table appeared to be acting on the basis of just such an assumed
proprietary interest in the rest of the world’s view of China when they
insisted that we accept the PRC’s historical and moral characterizations
of itself and its role in the world as a prerequisite for mutual “trust”
and cooperation in the future.  One thus glimpses here a sort of
conceptual imperialism, at least in aspiration, suggesting that it is a
Chinese strategic objective to control the world’s discourse about China.

It does seem to be the case that China’s modern ruling elite views
politico-moral discourse control as a crucial determinant of
“comprehensive national power.”  But this isn’t just some newfound
enthusiasm for constructivist international relations theory.  We may in
fact see here a modern incarnation of the ancient Confucian “rectification
of names,” in which properly characterizing key actors in a system of
order determines the relationships and responsibilities between them.
Through such a prism, control over “naming” is essentially the same thing
as controlling the system of order itself.  Nor can there be anything
purely “internal” about such characterizations, for they are in part
constitutive of systemic order, and thus everybody’s business.

China’s fixation upon shaping others’ accounts of China, then, is arguably
not necessarily “just” the result of insecurity or narcissism.  Some of it
may in fact grow out of a deeply-rooted conception of social order in
which narrative control is inherently a strategic objective because it is
assumed that status or role ascriptions and moral characterizations play a
critical role in shaping the world they describe.  (It seems to be felt,
for instance, that if the world understands China “properly,” it will tend
to behave toward China as China’s rulers desire; controlling others’
conceptual frameworks may be felt at least as important as more
traditionally tangible aspects of international dominion.  How others view
China and its role in the international system, moreover, may feed back
into its regime’s own legitimacy narrative at home, and thus its continued
monopolization of power.)  Through this lens, my PLA counterparts’
emphasis upon demanding concurrence with Beijing’s characterization of the
region’s politico-moral backstory, as it were, was not a self-indulgent
distraction from the task at hand, but in fact the game itself.

To be sure, perhaps I am reading too much into a few days’ discussions.
On the other hand, perhaps these encounters at the 4th Xiangshan Forum
really do offer insight into an idiosyncratic Chinese approach to global
order, highlighting a sort of politico-moral imperialism that has few
obvious precedents outside the historical Sinosphere.  Chinese leaders
appear to be strongly invested in other countries’ narratives of China –
seeing this as critical terrain for international competition (i.e.,
advantage or vulnerability) – and they seem to claim the right to control
everyone else’s interpretations.  If this is so, there may be important
policy implications for the United States, and for China’s increasingly
nervous neighbors, both about what to expect from Beijing in the years
ahead, and about additional ways in which we might perhaps be able to
develop effective competitive strategies vis-à-vis the PRC.

It’s food for thought, anyway.

— Christopher Ford