Will the Chinese Civilisation Clash with the West?

China Grows, and Imports



The world economy needs at least 3% growth rate to raise the standard of living, otherwise the population growth and inflation will dominate the economic growth. The Triad (US-EU-JP) is in deep depression and have not seen such a figure for quite a while. It is China that keeps the world’s 3% threshold afloat. Chinese trade volume has rapidly increased, especially imports from other Asian countries. Imports from Korea grew by 94% in 2008, from Taiwan 91%, and from Malaysia 51%. While Malaysia increased its export to China, its exports to US and Japan decreased by 13%. The growing trend of China’s import has been apparent since 2005.
China's stimulus package (Economist)
Yuan: one step at a time (Economist)

These figures suggest that the US and Japan no longer function as the locomotive of the world economy, in shadow of China. In the economic sphere, the world relies more and more on China.
Chinese demand drives regional recovery (FT)

China is expected to have grown by 13% in 2009. Such a monstrous growth rate is a bubble and it will burst sometime in the future. Yet, until the burst occurs, China is the saviour to the world economy. Unlike West Germany and Japan, that achieved economic growth but wished to accept US hegemony, China longs to convert its economic might to political muscle. Chinese economic growth coincides with its increasing political influence.


China May Overheat With 16% Growth, Government Researchers Say (Bloomberg)


More Chinese people have become conscious of their nation becoming a global player. Bookshops in major Chinese cities are flush with titles related to Chinese civilisation, hegemony theories, Western dominance, and China’s awakening. Partly due to Beijing’s censorship and partly due to China’s traditional sino-centric views, many wear nationalistic hard-liner tones.
Books in Chinese

But would the world’s future be dominated by everything that’s Chinese? Would it necessarily come into conflict with the West? Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996) accurately predicted the 9-11 and the world thereafter drunk with the war on terror. Contemporary conflicts indeed mostly take place near the fault lines of world’s civilisations. But this book also speaks of other scenarios such as the demise of the Western civilisation, the rise of the Chinese counterpart, and even Sino-American War. The book did not argue with precision, and some may have read the book not as an analytical piece but as a blueprint for US foreign policy.

The World According to the West

If we wish to think about the potential clash between Chinese and Western civilisations, we first need to ponder the meaning of a civilisation. In dictionary terms, it is “a set of technical and material assets created by people” (Webster). In this case, a civilisation means a culture, since culture is a set of spiritual assets created by people. Materialism is the civilisation, and spirituality is the culture. ‘Civilisation’ owes its Latin roots to ‘civitas’ (=of city). Civilisation originally meant urbanisation, to juxtapose against ‘rural’ or ‘barbaric’.

Huntington argues the above definition was created in Germany and was not widely accepted in the rest of the world. He says that civilisations are an extension of cultures. Then the book’s title should have been Clash of Cultures. It was only replaced with Civilizations, for the sake of impact.

Civilisations are, to a large extent, a notion of the past. Before the Great War, the world had several civilisations. The Spanish empire destroyed the Aztec and Inca civilisations. Islamic civilisation represented by the Ottoman Empire had its unique material assets. Until the first industrial revolution, China was richer and more advanced than Europe. Back then, China was under the ‘Chinese civilisation’. All foreign invaders to China eventually succumbed to the Chinese civilisation. China held its own distinction between ‘civilised’ (=China) and ‘barbaric’ (=the rest) to maintain the suzerainty system.

The industrial revolution gave Europe an advantage. After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain became a hegemonic power in Europe, and gave China a beat in the Opium War. Since then, China was put under quasi-colonial state. With the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the world civilisations were unified under the Western civilisation. Not to mention mass production and mass consumption, but transportation, telecommunication, scientific basic research, economics, law, enterprise management, accounting, electoral system, journalism, how to run a country… these are all the offspring of the Western civilisation. Sun Yat-Sen and his fellow revolutionaries strived to import Western systems and technologies in China. The Chinese Communist Party learned from the Soviet Union, which was a variant of the Western civilisation. Kemalist Turkey contemplated how to throw away Islamism and westernise. Both Sun and Atatürk looked to Japan, which achieved westernisation at a very rapid pace.

While China kept Chinese clothing and architectural characteristics for nationalist reasons, its ultimate goal was to exit Chinese and Islamic legacies as soon as possible, and replace them with Western governance system and technologies. Its role model Japan, after the Meiji Revolution, abandoned its feudal shogunate system for the purpose of adopting the Western civilisation.

Japan grew rapidly, became the P4 member in the League of Nations, and its militarist policies came to conflict with the US. But Japan was allied with Germany, thus the WWII was not the clash of Western and Japanese civilisations. The Japanese never embraced a concept of Japanese Civilisation (=that one country is the sole constituent member of a civilisation), even during the 1980s when she had her golden decade. Most Japanese think their ancestral roots are the mixture of Central Asia, Korea, and southeast Asia, its early governance system adopted from the Chinese civilisation, fully developed the ‘Japan-ness’ during the mediaeval age, and domesticated the Western civilisation in the modern era. They believe their success owes to the domestication process, but both Sun and Atatürk thought it was the unmodified importation of the Western civilisation that would lead a country to success.

Illusory ‘Chinese Civilisation’

Civilisations are geographical concepts. Before the industrial revolution, travelling to other parts of the world required much time and effort. Now the industrial revolution has fully spread to all corners of the world, they are connected with common transportation and telecommunication network. A new technology or system developed in one part of the world would quickly spread to the rest. This nullified the possibility for several different civilisations to exist independent of one another. The transportation and telecom network is based on the capitalist concepts, thus this phenomenon has allowed the Western civilisation to permanently sweep throughout the world. The evolution of civilisation is synonymous to material thus economic growth. Re-dividing the unified world is clearly not advantageous to the economic growth. The world will not go back to when there were many different civilisations. So the clash of civilisations is an oxymoron.

From this perspective, China’s recent growth does not mean the rise of the Chinese civilisation. It is the consequence of a series of attempt to adopt the Western civilisation since Sun. China can grow now, because it has abandoned the Chinese civilisation and finally succeeded in adopting the Western civilisation. The “Great Chinese Civilisation” is merely propaganda to incite the nationalism of the Hans. If it’s the rise of the Chinese civilisation, then the former affiliate states such as Korea or Vietnam must benefit too. It’s not happening. China as a culture still does exist, but the Chinese civilisation has been dead since the Opium War. China will inevitably have to lift the yuan’s dollar peg some time in the future, and when it indeed does so, it means it has learnt the Western methods on monetary management.

Multilateralism and Single Civilisation

The world has been conquered by the Western civilisation. But that the West having dominated the world politics is another. The recent 100 years coincided the civilisational dominance of the West and the political dominance of Britain and the US. The Western civilisation with its industrial advantage ruled the rest of the world. Adoptees such as Japan contributed to the evolution of the Western civilisation, especially in the manufacturing domain. In the 21st century, however, US’ economic and military fiascos have put the Anglo-American dominance in jeopardy. The world’s contemporary civilisation has its base in the West, but politically, the West as the sole hegemony is coming to an end. The FT and other business papers foresee Asian newcomers that will engine the world economy. Like Japan did, growing India and China will make some sort of contribution to advance the incumbent Western civilisation in the future.

The Western civilisation will maintain its unitary wholeness, but it will be led by non-European countries. Perhaps it should change its name to the ‘World Civilisation’. The last clash of civilisation in the world history was when Britain destroyed the Ottoman Empire. And it was not even the main theatre of the Great War. The two world wars primarily concerned the internal conflict within the Western civilisation, such that new and more efficient players such as Germany and Japan challenged the British hegemony. It was the competition between nation states, not between civilisations. The UN and the EC were created to curtail this inevitable competition.

The emerging World Civilisation may fail to contain its internal conflicts, like the Western civilisation failed. Yet the BRIC nations are quite cooperative to global integration efforts such as the G20 or the IMF or the UN. Major warfare beyond the scale of regional skirmishes is unlikely to happen.