The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series
under the Cornell East Asia Program.
The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belongs solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
Thank you for the introduction, Robyn and for the invitation by the way.
This is the person through whom the invitation came so double thanks.
You can tell that I was being introduced by a China person because he got the title of my book
a little bit wrong at the last instant. He fixed it but he wanted to say the traditional term
for the phrase that my book's name draws upon which is, in Chinese, it's usually translated as
"all under heaven" and so my I played with that a little bit in naming my book "everything under the heavens"
which sounds a little bit more modern in English and perhaps a little more intriguing also I hoped
and I'll explain what this all means in a few minutes.
So most of you I assume have not read my book and I'm gonna try to cover a lot of ground
in a short period of time to try to give you a flavor for some of the themes and
initial findings, if you will, of this effort of writing a book
which is essentially about Chinese history and Chinese geopolitics and
at the margins, both in the early parts of the book - the beginning and
the end of the book - an attempt to kind of anticipate where
things are going in the world today with regard to China and with regard to the international system.
When I'm forced to say in a phrase what the book is about
I say it's an attempt to kind of discern a civilizational logic to Chinese geopolitics.
Excuse me, I have a little bit of a cold so if you hear me
clearing my throat like that I hope it's not too much of an annoyance but
I think I should start at the very beginning which is how did I end up
writing a book like this and I started this project in a very different place
from where I ended up. I started this project with a question, having served in
lots of the places that that you heard about in the introduction, various parts
of the world and most notably for this purpose in Africa
in two different periods of my life. As a journalist I arrived in Japan to cover Japan and
the two Koreas in 1998 for the New York Times, having spent a lot of time in
Africa and was immediately struck by what to me at that moment was a
perplexing feature of life in Northeast Asia
politically speaking, geopolitically speaking, diplomatically speaking,
economically speaking and that is that. When we usually think of Africa I think
most of us think of a part of the world that is disorderly
that is certainly a relatively poor compared to many other parts of the world,
that is chaotic, that is underdeveloped etc etc
and when we think of Northeast Asia, with the exception of North Korea, which is a very particular case
we think -- we have very different images come to mind
especially most recently of advanced economies, high-speed growth, lots of technology,
explosion of wealth etc etc.
So I arrived in Japan in 1998 and within a year or two I found myself asking
lots of people: Why is it that in West Africa - West and Central Africa - you find much
much more regional integration than you find in Northeast Asia. What do I mean?
In West and Central Africa back then as well as now despite the fact that
West and Central Africa or Africa as a whole is considered less well developed than
Northeast Asia, you have all sorts of regional frameworks and institutions
that tie the various countries of these two regions together
whereas in Northeast Asia every country is sort of each man for himself
or each country for itself, to stretch this formula--agenda.
In western and central Africa you have regional currencies
where multiple countries use the same currency in close cooperation with each other.
You have regional airline. You have regional customs and immigrations agencies.
You have political institutions or organizations
that arrange very frequent meetings of heads of state,
sometimes two three four times a year on a scheduled basis
just as a matter of calendar, where they come together to discuss the important business of the region
with nobody, without any fuss about it and in Northeast Asia when I was just arriving I noticed that
of course each country has its own currency, each country has its own airlines,
each country manages each of these various things all on its own and
at the level of heads of state,
arranging meetings between the heads of state of Japan and the head of state of China
and of the two Koreas is a very tricky business.
These meetings don't happen very often.
Meetings of any two of them don't happen very often
and meetings of more than two of them as a group are very rare
and so this was the initial kind of question that I began with.
It set me on a long winding path to produce this book
and after I got over my sort of African hangover I began to look for other
kind of analogies or points of comparison for North East Asia and one
that seemed even more apt than West and Central Africa came to mind very quickly
and that was northwestern Europe.
So I was now based in northeastern Asia.
I was covering there. I was the bureau chief of the New York Times for Japan and the two Koreas,
flying back and forth between those three countries, not so often to North Korea
but also visiting sometimes North Korea,
and from time to time even though it was not my assignment
already back then beginning to go to China
and the European model came to me this way.
In Northeast Asia as I struggled to learn Japanese and years later struggled to learn Chinese
I became quickly aware that you have all of these points of common culture.
You have a common basis in writing systems, namely in Chinese writing systems that
all of those cultures have drawn upon.
You have common basis in religion, philosophy, legal codes, moral and ethical codes etc etc and yet
just as I had said when comparing or comparing North East Asia to
West and Central Africa the North East Asian countries carry on
as if they have at best nothing to do with each other or little to do with each other and
at worst like they're just barely short of being outright enemies with each other.
In northwestern Europe if you accept this construct I sort of selected
in thinking about this three main nation-states as the leading powers of
Northwestern Europe and the three that I focus on in this analogy are
Germany, France and Britain. Germany and France and Britain have many of the say -- you can say many
of the same things I just said about commonalities of culture, history,
and the like as I did with Northeast Asia - writing systems, legal codes,
philosophy, religion, ethics, morals etc etc.
When I first began in Northeast Asia to ask the question among Northeast Asians or two Northeast Asian
people in these four countries that I was traveling in and writing about:
Why is it that you don't, that you get along so poorly with each other?
Usually the question will be laughed off as if this was the work of a,
the inquiry of a naif or an idiot,
you know, what do you mean?
We, you know, it was just a day before yesterday we were killing each other
there were wars here. There's lots of bad blood. There's lots of animosity and hatred
and there's a hangover of all of these things
but when you think about the Northwestern European analogy you realize that's all true there too right?
The Northwestern Europeans - Germany France and Britain -
they killed each other a lot too and for centuries and centuries.
I'm a bit of a Francophile. I speak French. My wife is a native French speaker.
French is the language of my household.
I spent a lot of time in France and one of my early jokes about this
that I picked up many years ago among French people was
kind of a crude little ditty that said something like:
What does a German do the moment you hand him a rifle? He runs toward France.
So you have this long record of animosity in Western Europe, in Northwestern Europe,
immense amounts of bloodshed, centuries and centuries of atrocity
so this is one of the things, one of the objections that the people in Northeastern Asia would raise
when I would ask this naive seeming question they would say:
"But you don't understand that Japanese did really horrible things to us,
atrocities, they kill people you know, the Rape of Nanking or this or that and
I said but you know Northwestern Europe is no small potato in the realm of atrocity
I mean they killed people on mass scale and in the most gruesome and morally objectionable ways also right?
So I spent a long time thinking about this and I got put off of pursuing this question
with a kind of peremptory conclusion
which is that the reason why well actually I'm getting ahead of my story
so obviously as you all know Northwestern Europe put all that stuff to the side
and created functioning regional institutions.
First of all they created a lasting peace
then they created functionally regional institutions
they created a common currency.
All the things that the Africans did they did even bigger and deeper
and now nobody in Western Europe or Northwestern Europe thinks,
these people don't think about each other that way.
Brexit may be taking place but even with that being the case
we're in a totally different era. They have overcome the past it would appear,
it would seem to be, right?
And so when I thought back then in those Japan days
prior to arriving in China, what was going on,
I came to a kind of peremptory kind of initial answer which was,
well so this is really about the fact that the Cold War never ended in Northeast Asia,
that there is no peace in Northeast Asia in fact.
Today the United States and North Korea
are at loggerheads quite visibly and quite disturbingly,
often in the news trading insults, the North Korea's testing missiles and the like.
This is a testament few people stop to think of, especially I think people of your age,
stop to think of this but this is a legacy of the fact
that there has never been a conclusion - never mind the Cold War - there's never been a conclusion to
WWII in Northeast Asia, that there's a state of war that still persists
between the United States and North Korea. We are literally at war.
There was never a peace treaty signed. North and South Korea are literally
still at war even though there is a ceasefire there was never a peace sign.
And so my peremptory answer was oh so this is the reason that there's a war
that still is under way even though it doesn't appear to be the case
on the Korean Peninsula and a cold war that persists in Northeast Asia
or in East Asia overall which doesn't appear to be the case because the United States
trades so much with China and there's so much exchange between the United States
and China but in fact if you scratch a little bit beneath the surface you can
see all of the sort of hangover of the Cold War and the and the and of I'm
sorry of World War two and the Cold War that still persists just beneath the
surface in that part of the world so this was my initial answer for what's going on.
When I got to China in 2003 and began to think
this idea sort of became reactivated in my mind and I began to think about it more deeply again.
I began to put that peremptory initial conclusion to the side, to reject it.
All of those things that I've just said about the Cold War, the persistence of WWII and of the Cold War,
those are all true but they're not really sufficient explanations.
I don't think for why Northeast Asia has never coalesced and become a functional unit
the way Northwestern Europe has
and so for much of the rest of my talk with you I'm going to try to explain why that is.
In the wake of WWII even though China fought the United States to a standstill on the Korean Peninsula
the United States emerged in the 1950s and 60s as by far the world's most preeminent military power,
by far the preeminent military and economic power in that part of the world
and created an alliance infrastructure throughout Asia
that is has its sort of most robust foundations in Northeast Asia with Japan and with South Korea,
nations which were transformed politically and economically by way of their relations with the
United States after World War Two and into the 50s and 60s.
But also throughout most of the rest of Asia the United States went about in the 50s and 60s
establishing alliances with lots and lots of countries in East Asia, in Asia generally speaking in fact.
And although China had had the sufficient power to fight the United States to a standstill
on the Korean Peninsula which after all is on China's doorstep,
China did not have the wherewithal either economically
politically or especially militarily to contest for primacy with the United States elsewhere in Asia
certainly not with any consistency and not with any vigor.
China was for the most part preoccupied with a kind of autarkic management of its own economy,
with creating a new political order in its own geopolitical space,
reinventing itself under Maoism.
When China emerges from the Maoist period in -- so Mao died in 1976.
By the early 1980s we can say that China had emerged from the Maoist period
when Deng Xiaoping takes over and soon thereafter economic reforms and what is it called? 改革开放.
Reform and opening begin to take place.
The view in the United States was that China is -- that we have won.
I don't think politicians were on their rooftops crowing about this
but the feeling was, I think, shared very widely that given time with under the sort of
under the magic influence of capitalism China will become socialized
to become not socialist which it already was but socialized to become more and
more like us, meaning more and more like the United States, that capitalism would
americanize or would westernize China
and gradually if this process were pursued to conclusion through the creation of a middle class and
widespread prosperity in China, Chinese perhaps even a western-style democracy,
this was kind of the extreme version of this fantasy,
but perhaps even a western-style democracy would take hold in China.
There was a very, an axiom
fond among political scientists back in that day which one, even still now, here's
a little bit which says that democracies never go to war with each other and so
if only capitalism could take firm route in China and a middle class could sprout
China and the United States would become notional allies and close buddies
and pursue common causes and joint purpose around the world.
This sentiment had its sort of high-water mark in the George Bush administration
when there was a man - I can't remember exact title - in the Bush administration
but he went on to be the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick,
who I think he was the head of policy planning at the State Department,
who very famously had a series of engagements with the Chinese leadership in which he urged them
to become responsible stakeholders. This is an extraordinary phrase
because it implies a commonality of purpose.
How can you become -- How can you ask somebody to become a responsible stakeholder
without assuming that you have a common sense of what responsibility means,
what are you going to take responsibility for? So Zoellick, having bought into this idea, would seem that
the United States and China, by way of Chinese opening and reform,
by way of Chinese economic modernization, by way of the explosion of a Chinese middle class,
that China and the United States were going to be on convergent paths.
Zoellick is trying to say to China back in the 1990s,
"Come on guys let's put your shoulder to the wheel. Let's all push in the same direction and
be responsible together. Let's assume a shared custody of the world and manage the world's problems together.
This represents a profound misreading of Chinese geopolitics
and I want to go back to the decade or to prior to Zoellick to explain why.
So I said that China had managed to fight the United States to a standstill on Korean Peninsula
but that it had not really contested very much broadly in Asia with the United States beyond Korea.
Of course there were incidents here and there where the two were on opposite sides of different problems.
Indonesia would be a good example there.
There are a number of other examples.
China, actually, the Chinese Communist Party, funded Communist Parties in lots of different places
including Japan but China was not vigorously fighting for influence
in a head-to-head kind of confrontational way with the United States back then
because it lacked the means to do so
and the United States had, having imposed its security and alliance infrastructure throughout the region,
pretty much had managed to - I like to think of this as having managed to freeze time.
In freezing time - freezing time means freezing into place
a certain number of arrangements that creates the illusion that the flow of history has stopped
and that taking attention away from what I think is the critical issue here
which is the long term thrust of Chinese civilization in geopolitical terms and
thinking in a short-term perspective about rather shallow gains
created by the United States especially and by the West in general.
So with reform and opening, while Zoellick is thinking we're going to enter this era
of common custody of the world and China is going to be a good junior partner,
he never said junior partner but implicitly in patronizing language like "be a responsible stakeholder"
is that the person you're talking to is going to be your junior partner.
You don't talk to a senior or a co-equal that way right?
You say to your junior partner "be responsible".
What was really happening in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s
as China began to take off economically
and as all of the wealth that I've spoken about began to explode - shouldn't use a violent metaphor like that
but explosive growth is actually a good description for what happened in China if you look at
the extraordinary per capita wealth data over the over the decades of the 90s and the 2000s
and in this most recent decade. What was really happening behind the scenes is that
China was returning to its long-term historical direction in terms of dealing with its neighbors.
China in the 1990s said about settling territorial disputes with lots of neighbors.
It actually ceded small amounts of territory and settling lots of these disputes.
It gained insider status as an observer and participant in lots of regional institutions, most importantly ASEAN.
In the early days ASEAN had been formed kind of as a Cold War institution
skeptical and hostile of China in its early days.
China managed to work its way into their good graces by taking conciliatory approach to territorial disputes.
Then by forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China has its first initiative of,
kind of creating large scale although vague in purpose super-regional kind of geopolitical architecture,
inviting in Russia, inviting in all of the former Soviet states of Central Europe --
I'm sorry, Central Asia -- and in various other places, tentatively with India,
with Burma, with Vietnam, country after country, China began to achieve a detente
and then a high functioning relationship
and through a combination of entering existing political organizations or creating new political organizations
China begins to become an engine of diplomatic activity and of integration
which is really the important word in the greater world beyond China's borders.
So to return to the heart of my book, the true subject of my book is,
you know, what are the wellsprings for China's economic, I'm sorry, geopolitical
geopolitical initiatives and geopolitical logic.
And to find the wellsprings of this I go back to early Chinese history or early dynastic history.
The story, as I tell it, begins in -- actually it begins in a classroom
and I'll tell you what I mean by that in a moment -- but historically speaking the story begins
in the Han Dynasty which begins I think in 220 BC and runs until about 200 AD. Is that correct?
The classroom joke though is a clumsy anecdote about experiences I've had
for my last 10 years at Columbia.
Every spring I teach a seminar about modern China
and about a third of the students tend to be from China itself
and we have these very intensive conversations about Chinese politics and Chinese history and
almost every year there will be a comment or two if not more from a Chinese student
who says, "Professor French, there's this really important thing that you seem to be overlooking
in the way you describe Chinese behavior. It's kind of a big contradiction. I can't get over this
because your account of things are so at odds with
the way I or we have understood or been taught Chinese history
and that is that China is not like a Western country.
China has never invaded other countries. China is not a hegemonic power.
China does not use force to impose itself on other people. China does not invade other countries.
China does not and has never occupied other countries. China is not a bully.
China - on and on and on and on.
And so to answer his question one must go back to the Han Dynasty, I guess,
is the best, the most elegant way, I can tell this.
The China that we see on the map today,
modern China, is nothing but the result of an almost impossible to quantify
number of wars, of a huge number of invasions,
an immense number of occupations, a - not constant because there was expansion and
retraction over time - but a constant effort at extending the realm of the Chinese emperor,
China of the Chinese Empire, from dynasty to dynasty.
China begins in a place called Zhongyuan which we were talking about at lunch today,
which is basically parts of four more or less central provinces in modern China today
and from the Han Dynasty onward China gradually expanded.
Now, the Chinese story that is taught to Chinese students in China,
to give a rough and crude version of this, goes something like this:
that China's civilization in its origins was so brilliant and so rich that other peoples came flocking in our direction
basically saying they want to be with us, they want to be part of us, they want to join, they want to sign up
and that we didn't have to do anything to convince them. It was just the sheer brilliance of our culture
that led to all of these things happening,
that led to the creation of the grand China that we see on the map today,
from the humble origins of Zhongyuan.
Of course this is not the case.
China, like - I hesitate to say every empire but like a great many empires -
I say China, that's kind of a telegraphed version of something much more complicated
which is to say, one dynasty after another,
but one dynasty after another in China has had a classic pair of imperatives
that have been shared by a great many empires throughout history
and these two imperatives are
establishing a uniform culture and political realm within an integrally governed space
that's number one and the other is
defending the perimeter from attack of outsiders or rival political entities.
When you put these two imperatives together the the sum effect is a gradual expansion of the realm
because if you succeed in achieving cultural unity in a political space
and you then seek to defend the perimeter beyond that space
what usually happens in an imperial environment is that you begin to --
you want to create security in the perimeter and that involves
a combination of conquest and assimilation of the perimeter
in order to to pacify the perimeter
and so in a series of stages you go from a small place like this
where there are barbarians on the periphery to gradually conquering and
assimilating those barbarians in a concentric and expansive way until you
end up with a geopolitical space if you have been successful like China has been successful.
So this is a kind of a very crude schematic picture of how China grew.
China begins in Zhongyuan which is kind of in the north central part of the country that we see on the map today.
In the Han Dynasty China begins a very long term effort to conquer and assimilate
and these are the two tools in the toolkit - conquest and assimilation - to conquer and assimilate
the areas in southern China what are today southern China, modern southern China.
So if you look at the map of China I'm sorry we don't have a map
on the wall -- it didn't occur to me to ask for one -- but roughly speaking, south of the Yangtze River.
China has been, from the Han Dynasty all the way until the end of the Ming Dynasty,
basically conquering and assimilating all of southern China, south of the Yangtze River.
The conquest part is very simple.
You send in an army and China was able to amass -- you know China has always been,
I'm saying China, China's a modern word. China didn't exist 2,000 years ago.
There were dynasties, one after another.
I've mentioned the Han Dynasty. You'll hear the names of other dynasties in a moment.
China, as I'm speaking, it is a shorthand for those dynasties
so as not to give you a complete dynastic history or a list of dynasties.
But dynastic China has always been the biggest geopolitical entity in Asia,
certainly Asia east of the Himalayas. It's always been the biggest, right and
so for conquest, dynastic China has always been, going back so far as the Han Dynasty 200 years before Christ,
able to amass and to field enormous armies.
If you look at, I don't know how many of you watched
Chinese films or Chinese television but Chinese film and television,
this is the grist of so much of Chinese entertainment
where you have these mass TV or film spectacles
where you see these fields filled with tens of thousands of soldiers.
Chinese history has so many stories like this
that it's a kind of a natural ingredient for a Chinese style Hollywood right?
This is what epochs in China are made of.
Anyway to conquer southern China, to give you an example of how this proceeded,
armies beginning in the Han Dynasty of 200 to 500 thousand soldiers were fielded
in various parts of southern China at campaigns at various times during the Han Dynasty.
So you sent from this north central space called Zhongyuan an army of that size that far away
to southern China. They conquered the barbarians.
Some of the barbarians flee. In fact always some of the barbarians flee.
The barbarians elites sometimes are captured and surrendered
but very often the barbarian elites would flee and seek to retain power simply by shifting a locale.
So you've knocked me off the block in what is today,
I don't know, Fujian province or Guangxi province, and I'll go to Guangdong province or to Yunnan province right?
These are modern provinces right
but these processes happened all the times where the elites would flee if they were not captured
and try to restore some sense of authority in a different place right?
After a given campaign had succeeded the army would retreat.
Garrisons would be left behind in a fairly substantial number
but you don't keep a two hundred to five hundred thousand army fielded that far away
from the political center of your empire.
And so what China found or what Imperial China found,
the Han and later various other dynasties found
is that although they had a fairly easy time
conquering the barbarians who existed in these outlying areas of the south
that these garrisons ended up getting counter-assimilated. What does that mean?
That means that after a while they would start marrying local women
and they would start taking on local customs and they would not be, after a generation or two,
they would no longer be reliably Chinese - I'm using the modern term
but they would no longer be reliably -- their allegiance would no longer be reliable to
whatever the dynasty of the day was right?
And so China had to struggle to assimilate.
The conquer part was usually reasonably easy.
It was the assimilation part that was the struggle.
And [China] had to struggle to assimilate the outlying areas.
The borders - I'm going to accelerate. I don't want to give you a history of southern China -
but there was a portmanteau term for all of the people's or many of the people's south of the Yangtze River
which one sees of the kind of vestigial use of in contemporary China today
but the portmanteau term was yue (越). Yue means barbarian.
Most Chinese see the word yue, they don't think this means barbarian
but if you do an etymological analysis of the character yue, that's what it means, barbarian.
And so China thought -- the Empire, these north-central empires, thought of
the southern - south of the Yangtze River - as barbarians
and the task of empire was to assimilate them and to turn them into Chinese people.
Well the limits of this policy of conquest and assimilation are in fact
the modern borders of China roughly speaking. So I don't have a map here
and I don't dare draw China but let's say this is the southern coast of China.
Here you have Hainan and here you have Hongkong and here you have Vietnam, right?
The border with Vietnam is where - apologies to the camera - the borders of Vietnam
are the limits. The reason there is a Vietnam is because that's where
this approach reached its practical ends. In other words the Chinese - the Empire -
tried to invade the space that we call modern Vietnam many many times,
occupied it many many times, occupied it according to the sort of standard trope of Vietnamese history
for a thousand years and yet never managed to make the Vietnamese consider themselves to be Chinese
and so this is what has bequeathed to the world a modern Vietnam
and the same could be said about the Korean Peninsula.
The Chinese fought wars of occupation and assimilation in the Korean Peninsula.
The Koreans never really fully assimilated although the Koreans adopted wholesale
lots and lots of Chinese culture. They never really completely bit the bullet
and said they're willing to become Chinese
and so a kind of system of management of relations
emerged from these conditions and this is really the focus of what I wish to sort of end the talk with.
This system of relations is called by Westerners and yet never by - in Chinese scholarship by Chinese -
the tribute system.
So in the parts of the world where China had sort of reached the limits
of its conquest and assimilation policy. If the Chinese state - I should actually take a half step back
and talk about how barbarians were classified.
So in the imperial, in this dynastic long dynastic era or sequence of dynastic eras,
a vocabulary about barbarians emerges.
By the way every empire has a barbarian vocabulary -
this is not simply a peculiarity of Chinese people or of Chinese civilization - every empire.
To be a barbarian means roughly not to accept the rule of the emperor, right?
not to get with the plan of the empire right?
And so I don't want you to make too much of me using this word "barbarian"
but a kind of particular vocabulary arose around barbarians in China.
I'm giving you the example of the yue, the people south of the Yangtze.
By the way that's the character that's used in the license plate for Shanghai even today.
So every province in China has a one character beginning of its license plate.
The character for Shanghai is yue,
and I don't think any Shanghai person thinks of themselves as a barbarian
probably quite the opposite. They think they're more fancy and sophisticated
than most other people. Anyway the country of Vietnam's character is yue.
So what does Vietnam mean? Vietnam is a name given to Vietnam by China.
It means southern barbarian.
The particular vocabulary I wanted to share with you though
is that barbarians could be divided into three categories.
You had the irredeemable, unreachable,
completely, from the perspective of empire, kind of intractable, inconvertible barbarian,
like beyond the pale and those, to be very general about this, were the Central Asians.
The Imperial China never had the view that no matter how much they could invade or try to, that assimilation
would never work and it's interesting to pause to think why that is.
Why that is because they I think the main economic basis of life in Central Asia
was so different from the main economic base of life in most of Imperial China.
Typically we think of
Imperial China or China indeed as having a rice kind of economy.
Of course there was sorghum and various other things but in Central Asia
you had nomadism and pastoralism and things like that.
You didn't have people -- these were not economies based on fixed crop farming
where the state could tax people and people had fixed locations and fixed abodes
and so we think of barbarian as kind of a cultural thing.
You're making a statement of the level of civilization and cultural terms of another people.
The Chinese the Imperial state is actually maybe doing that but it's also actually thinking
about the economies of these place. These places are not worth it.
Why did China try so hard with Vietnam? Because Vietnam is a rice growing place.
Because the economic basis of life in a place like Vietnam seemed very similar
to the economic basis of life in most of China and therefore it made sense
from an imperial strategy point of view to try to conquer and assimilate these people.
As I've told you a succession of dynasties from the Han all the way to the Ming failed to assimilate Vietnam
but they never stopped trying.
So the three categories of barbarian are the irredeemable and then you have
the cooked and the raw.
So the cooked barbarians are the barbarians whose lives, whose economic life is very
similar to Chinese economic life and who have adopted some attributes of Chinese culture.
Maybe they have adopted the character based writing system
or maybe they have adopted the Chinese calendar
or maybe they have adopted certain other aspects of Chinese culture
and the raw barbarians are something between the irredeemable Central Asians
and the cooked barbarians like the Vietnamese.
To be cooked means that the center - the empire - thinks that you could
still be won over and assimilated. Anyway the conclusion of the talk,
which is meant to help us think about where things are going in that part of the world and perhaps more broadly later.
I'm going to step away for a second from my podium again but if you think about the southern coast of China
and the border of Vietnam as I've drawn it for you is how does Chinese civilization deal with
the peripheral peoples who are not irredeemable?
And the answer was to establish tributary relations with them, this thing that we've called the tribute system,
a system in my view is the most contentious aspect of that phrase here.
There is no dispute about the fact that tribute relations were held between
various dynasties and lots of peoples around China's periphery.
However system is problematic because the nature of the relations were different
in almost every particular instance and so you couldn't really think of it as being a uniform system of relations
that were established on a tributary basis from country to country.
So the first rule of tributary relations is that the tributary state must recognize China or back in the day,
the dynasty of the day as being absolutely superior,
that you must defer to the superiority of the center of China
and there's a story about Vietnam from the Han Dynasty that I like quite a lot.
When the emperor of Han named Wen Di in about the year 200 BC actually in the second century BC,
I'm not sure the exact year, a king and Vietnam arose in this place called Yue,
in which he decided he was going to call himself emperor,
that he wanted to be emperor in his own land and so king was not enough and
so he erogated to himself the title Emperor. He had a throne ceremony to be formally seated as Emperor
and word gets back to the Han capital
that there's this character somewhere on the periphery who thinks he's an emperor
and Wen Di sends a delegation to see this king and to tell him
that there can only be one sage in any given generation
and that to violate that rule is to prove yourself uncivilized
and there were a variety of threats that - this correspondence still exists by the way -
so there are a variety of threats that were included with this kind of flowery language and
the Vietnam Emperor - the king - got the point and said okay I surrender.
I'm not going to be an emperor if you'll allow me to be king, king is good enough for me
and so this is the first rule of being a tributary state, that you accept your subsidiary status,
that China is number one and that you are not implicitly but explicitly inferior to China
and that you get along within the rules of the Chinese order.
Eight hundred years later in Japan.
Japan had I think one of its perhaps its only female emperor - a woman named Suiko
in - it happened to be - the Sui Dynasty in China - in the years actually the year 600.
She was enthroned and she sent a delegation - these are called embassies - to the Sui capital in China
to announce her taking seat as Emperor and she called herself the Emperor in the Land of the Rising Sun
and she addressed her correspondence to the Emperor in the Land of the Setting Sun
and the correspondence was never delivered to the Chinese emperor because it broke protocol so crudely
that this was just simply unacceptable. You cannot have an emperor.
Within the tribute system you can't have two emperors.
As I said you can't have two sages in one era and threats were sent back and forth to the Sui
and unlike Vietnam, Japan, given the fact that there's an intermediary sea, the Sea of Japan,
between China and Japan, the Japanese persisted and they kept their emperor's system
and because of the limits of transportation and technology back then
China was never able to prevail in eliminating this notion in neighboring polity
that there could be a co-equal of the Chinese emperor or another Emperor.
And so these are the two
extremes of experience in the Chinese world that you have smaller countries
which must get with the program and accept their subsidiary status and live within
the Chinese order according to the rules of the Chinese system and you
have had, historically speaking, just one country namely Japan
which has been big enough and far enough away and separated fortuitously
from the point of view of Japan by water to afford it the kind of political space to maintain its own system
outside of the tribute system. So where does this lead us?
How does this lead us still to today and what does this mean for the future?
I argue in the book and I believe that this notion of dealing with peripheral countries
and especially the countries of East Asia and Southeast Asia
on the basis of superiority is a deeply embedded Chinese preference
that this is almost a default perspective from the point of view of the Chinese state,
that we China are the center and that all of these other countries around us
are obviously much smaller, much weaker, much poorer in terms of culture,
history and in fact economics, certainly in population,
and that the natural logic of things just as the natural logic of the communication between Wen Di
and the Vietnamese guy who wished to name himself as Emperor is that
if you smaller peoples will simply accept our centrality and our preeminence,
we can shower all sorts of public goods on you and everybody will get along well on that basis.
We will -- In early times what were the public goods?
The public goods were Chinese science, Chinese religion, Chinese medicine, the Chinese calendar.
A calendar by the way was not just for keeping dates. It was about
agricultural science and all sorts of other things, Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion
and a certain sense of order in policing the high seas and in
the dynastic era in adjudicating succession disputes and and wars between
secondary nations so that if you were part of the tributary system
one of these smaller countries - their kings were invested by a Chinese Embassy -
an embassy would come from the dynastic capital of China and
the local ruler would receive a boost in his legitimacy by virtue of the fact
that China was making an official show of recognizing his investiture and
so these were all attributes of Chinese soft power in the past
that China was bestowing to these countries as part of an exchange
for their willingness to play according to China's rules within
this thing that Westerners have called the tributary system or the tribute system.
It's my view that this is a deeply embedded default kind of prerogative
not prerogative I'm sorry, preference in terms of the way China
organizes its outlook and perspective on the surrounding region
and that the era of 1949 to 1982 was an aberration.
That from 1949 to 1976 when Mao was in
power China was deeply preoccupied with transforming its own politics and
getting - from its perspective - getting its own house in order and
although there's exceptions to this, not working very hard to project its force
outside of its own borders or to be an economic player internationally and
that in the early reform and opening period beginning in 1982 there was a
period of -- there was enough of a window so that a pretty smart man like Robert Zoellick could think
well we're on this convergent path and if we can simply
find the right vocabulary we can socialize the Chinese to be responsible
players in an American-led global order. I think that age is over
and I don't think that the 1980s was ever really about that in the first place,
that this was a case of American kind of naivete and self delusion
and what was really happening in the 1980s was China was laying the basis in
material prosperity and economic progress to return to its original impetus
which is to say being able to organize its periphery around it
on its terms and so what do we see when we look throughout the region? We see China
creating what most famously there's this thing called one belt one road which
concerns much more than the original tribute system
that includes all of Central Asia it goes all the way to Europe it goes all
the way to Africa around South Asia etc etc but where did this really begin
this One Belt One Road thing? It really begins in a very intensive infrastructure and
network building process in Southeast Asia itself which is about bringing
these smaller peripheral tributary style States into the Chinese fold
the moment China have the wherewithal to begin doing that it began doing that
starting in the 1990s and accelerating in this century to the point where there is no country in Southeast Asia
that is not heavily dependent on trade with China
and is not deeply in sync with China in terms of politics and in terms of diplomacy
including Vietnam which understands that as much as it would be tempted to try to play kingpin in Southeast Asia
or strike out on an independent path of its own it will get the same kind of rebuke that
its ruler in the second century BC received under Wen Di, that there's no
space politically speaking, geopolitically speaking for great distance from China
in any peripheral country. The big exception remains Japan
so in the 6th century in the year 600 Suiko sends an Embassy to China to
declare that she's the Emperor of Japan and China sends a rebuke and refuses to
acknowledge her communication etc. This is where things remain today.
Japan is the one country in the region that is big enough and that is afforded the
geography by way of the intermediary ocean to try to defy China
and this sense of order and I say big enough but also wealthy enough and so
this is kind of a frontline in terms of the limit of China's
tribute policy was invasion or conquest and assimilation in the past.
Today Japan is the last holdout in terms of in my view China's ability to restore
its own sense of order in the region and and in the next decade or two I write in
the book there is a great deal this is a moment of high anxiety.
There's a high possibility I'm not saying a probability - a high possibility that frictions
between these two countries, the two great powers of East Asia, will
erupt to the point of perhaps including violence between the two of them but
that this impetus, this drive to create its own sense of structure,
its own sense of order by China has resumed and that it won't be stopped unless
something catastrophic happens in terms of China's economic rise which is
something that I don't think anybody is predicting these days
so I think I'll stop there and hopefully you guys will have a little bit of time for questions.
Thank you.