Conrad Black: Between empires (perspective)

[liberal]

Not too much should be expected from Stephen Harper’s visit to China. The Middle Kingdom, the only country that has oscillated several times between greatness and degradation — and, with Russia and the United States, the only country that has historically been unconquerable — does what it wishes, ignores the opinions of other countries, and doesn’t give much away.

There is no point to raising civil rights, other than that their relative absence in China diminishes the moral respect China would otherwise receive. About 10 years ago, an associate of mine, in conversation with the Chinese ambassador in London, recited Voltaire’s famous formula that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent one to be condemned. The ambassador stared quizzically and said: “Better for whom?”

In China, as in other traditionally non-Western countries, such as Russia and Japan (largely westernized as they are), there is a tension between the nativists and the Western emulators. To the minimal extent we can, we should encourage those Chinese that would be more co-operative with the West than not. But the only way to do this is to impress China with the power of the West, a task that is not assisted by the Chinese ownership of over $1-trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, and by the bizarre spectacle of the president of the United States making the international rounds apologizing for the conduct of some of the West’s greatest leaders — including (as he put it in London last April) the remaking of the world by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy,” and Truman dropping atomic bombs on two small cities of a country that savagely attacked the United States and its allies without the stuffy heirlooms of a casus belli or declaration of war. Similarly, for President Obama to have declined to see the Dalai Lama, in deference to Chinese sensitivity, was as cowardly and misjudged an act of appeasement as President Ford’s refusal to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1975.

Educated Chinese never forget that China was the most powerful and advanced empire in the world in the seventh and eighth centuries (Tang Dynasty), the 13th century (under the Mongols), and the fifteenth century (Ming Dynasty), and feel their turn is coming again. At the time of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, China had hundreds of nine-masted “treasure ships,” (whose rudders were longer than Columbus’s flagship, the Nina), which carried huge iron cannons and up to 3,000 tons of cargo. They were 10 times the size of analogous western vessels, the Queen Mary or Normandie compared to the Noronic.

The Chinese navy contained over 4,000 ships, commanded by Muslim Arab eunuch-admirals, and was vastly greater than western navies. (Henry V invaded France with four fishing ships, which carried a hundred soldiers each per cross-Channel trip.) The Chinese governed almost all of Asia, and in the 13th century surged into Poland, Germany and Hungary, routed the Western knights and effectively destroyed European feudalism. Even in the seventh century, China exchanged embassies or trade representatives with 300 cities or states, including the Portuguese and Swedes. Kublai Khan was a relatively liberal ruler who tolerated all religious views in the times of pre-Inquisition Europe and reduced the imposition of the death penalty to a lower per capita frequency than in the United States today.

China discovered gunpowder, the printing press, and the magnetic compass long before the West did. And no matter how tattered, decrepit, or bloodied China has been at intervals, it has never in thousands of years considered itself inferior to, or even equalled by, other nationalities.

It may not come naturally to Stephen Harper to speak in such epochal terms, but to the extent he can express confidence in the West, notwithstanding current indispositions, as having see-sawed with China as the world’s most advanced culture for 2,500 years, he should promote the solidarity of great and ancient rivals over competitive irritations.

It is something of a fad to be awe-struck by the recent economic progress of China. Stephen Harper is not going to that country to affront his hosts, but there is a good deal of flim-flam in its figures. Nearly one billion Chinese peasants live largely as they did 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. Indicators such as electricity production do not confirm claimed economic growth rates, and the Chinese practices of adding to GDP at once any expense when it is approved but not made (the state controls almost 40% of the economy), and of manufacturing narrow lines of products and of considering them sold when shipped from the factories, replicate some of the notorious frailties of the command economy.

The prime minister should not be lecturing the Chinese about carbon emissions. That misguided task has been taken up by Obama and some European analogues. Their harangues on this subject have no doubt been met with almost as much astonishment as that experienced by long-serving Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who famously listened to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s lectures on the need for bomb shelters in the late fifties.

The Chinese, like the Indians, have quite correctly taken the position that the advanced Western industrial powers are responsible for most of the carbon emissions that have occurred, while promoting their own industrial growth, and are still the largest sources, per capita, of carbon emissions.

Apart from whatever forays into the history of civilizations and long-term geo-strategy that Stephen Harper may be comfortable making, he arrived in China with the strong hand of the head of a country that is, or could be, a major supplier to China of base and precious metals, energy, forest products, and agriculture, and of a country that has carefully managed its trade balances and cash flows with China and the world.

There are spectacular possibilities for building this relationship imaginatively. Raw-material importing countries can no longer create a buyers’ market, as Japan once did before the economic rise of China and India forced up demand. Now, it is a producers’ market, and there may be long-term possibilities for exchanging guaranties of quantities for guaranties of price. This could be streamed to assist Canada in expanding its ownership of its own resources, without mistreating or discouraging foreign investors in this country.

Although the Chinese political establishment is proverbially inscrutable, any informed intuition the prime minister has acquired of Chinese intentions would also be useful. It is a myth that China has had no historic vocation beyond its own borders. As mentioned, they were the most adventurous navigators in the world until the Europeans unlocked and plundered the riches of the Americas and the Indies, whereupon the Chinese became perversely isolationist and scrapped their navy and merchant fleet in the 17th century.

The Chinese leaders are unlikely to be overly informative about their long-term geopolitical ambitions. But if Stephen Harper doesn’t lecture or scold or plead, discusses what interests the Chinese, Canada’s resources (they aren’t remotely interested in anything else about this country), with authority and imagination, listens carefully, and doesn’t make it look like another photo opportunity for a vote-hunting, transitory Western office-holder, it will have been a successful visit.

National Post
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[brookie]

Wow! Conrad still has the verbosity of a …. Hard to give a sufficient analogy. If Canada could only harness his ego it could reduce our energy consumption considerably. I’m not sure if China has any concrete long range plans other than to do the best it can.

[Author]

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