56 China The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
W
hat doesChina want from the world? Some things are obvi-
ous: natural resources, foreign markets and nifty stuff, from
high-end computer chips to top-notch airliners, that China cannot
yet make. Then there is China’s ambition, at once reasonable and
terrifying, to become so strong that no other power will thwart its
core demands. China has less obvious wishes, too. A surprisingly
pressing one is a demand for foreign powers to recognise the “le-
gitimacy” of its Communist Party. Though it may baffle outsiders,
when Chinese grandees meet foreign visitors the question of le-
gitimacy comes up, time and again. The words vary, but their
meaning is something like: will America and the self-righteously
democratic West ever accept that the party provides the best and
most fitting government for China, with a mandate strengthened
by the country’s rising global stature, economic growth and do-
mestic stability? Chinese diplomats voice the same grievance
whenever they hear international criticism. China, they protest, is
being singled out for suspicion because it has a different political
system, led by a communist party.
If this seems an obscure fight to pick, history teaches the world
to beware. A well-connected Chinese scholar who lives and teach-
es in Europe, Xiang Lanxin, has written a book ascribing centuries
of East-West tensions, including several crises in relations, to
Westerners who condescendingly dismiss China’s rulers, whether
imperial or communist, as “oriental despots”. He says they have
failed to grasp how Chinese leaders must earn their right to rule
through deeds and accomplishments, at the risk of overthrow if
they are truly tyrannical. Mr Xiang is no apologist for today’s party
leaders. Though an avowed Chinese patriot, he is scathing about
the corruption enabled by one-party rule. He believes that mod-
ern-day income inequalities make a nonsense of claims by party
bosses to be reviving traditional, Confucian ethics. In a vivid pas-
sage, he compares Beijing’s political scene to the last days of the
Russian tsars, “with charlatans and sycophants running amuck”.
Still, his book, “The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, A
New Interpretation”, is an invaluable guide to the feelings of hurt
and injustice that consume those same ruling classes now.
A political scientist and historian at the Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies in Geneva, Mr Xiang de-votesmany pages to a crisis three centuries ago. Then the consen-
sus view of China changed among European elites, just as dramati-
cally as it is changing now in Washington and other Western
capitals. The cause was an arcane theological dispute known as the
“Chinese rites controversy”. To simplify, this was an argument
about whether Chinese converts could be good Christians if they
continued to pay solemn respects to their ancestors and to Confu-
cius, a sage particularly revered by scholars and officials. Mr Xiang
praises Jesuit missionaries who travelled to China in the 16th and
17th centuries, painstakingly learning Chinese and studying Con-
fucian classics in a spirit of cultural “accommodation”.
Those Jesuit scientist-adventurers reported to Rome that China
was a brilliant civilisation whose traditions of ancestor worship
and Confucian ethics were not pagan religious rites, but customs
compatible with Christian monotheism. With disastrous results
for those envoys, hawks back in Europe disagreed. Mr Xiang draws
explicit parallels between religious hardliners back in Europe who
attacked those Jesuits for being overly tolerant of Chinese tradi-
tions, and modern-day critics who chide China for falling short of
values that the West calls universal. In 1692 the Kangxi emperor
was so impressed by his Jesuit guests that he issued an edict of tol-
eration, blessing the presence of Christian Europeans in his em-
pire. But within half a century Christianity had been banned and
most missionaries expelled. The rupture was provoked by papal
rulings that ancestor worship and Confucian rites were pagan
idolatry. It was an unanswerable charge: the crime of Confucius-
revering Chinese converts was to be un-Christian, as defined by
the church in Rome. Mr Xiang argues that those taxing China with
being undemocratic are using a similar trick: defining legitimacy
in a way that makes it unattainable by rulers who are not Western-
style democrats.
That does not make Mr Xiang or grumbling Communist Party
officials correct, though. They urge the world to judge China’s rul-
ers by their achievements, not their political system. But that is ex-
actly what most foreign governments do, to a fault. Even in the im-
mediate aftermath of the murderous suppression of pro-
democracy protests in 1989, America’s then-president, George H.W.
Bush, secretly wrote to assure China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, that
his aim was to preserve close ties, adding: “I am respectful of the
differences in our two societies and in our two systems.” If West-
ern leaders were really unable to abide communists, America and
its allies would not be investing in and even helping to arm Viet-
nam, as a strategic partner in Asia.Engage with the sinner, hate the sin
Today, it is true, hawks in Washington charge previous American
governments with wishing away China’s authoritarianism and re-
sistance to change. To quote the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo:
“We accommodated and encouraged China’s rise for decades, even
when that rise was at the expense of American values, Western de-
mocracy, security and good common sense.” But his boss, Presi-
dent Donald Trump, does not deem China’s rulers illegitimate. He
says he does not blame them for taking advantage of America’s
past stupidity and calls President Xi Jinping an “incredible guy”.
Chinese demands for respect are in part a ploy, a passive-ag-
gressive bid to browbeat foreign critics into silence. But to meet of-
ficials in Beijing is to hear a regime talking itself into a funk about
how America and its allies cannot bear to let a system like theirs
succeed. That is mostly bogus. The problem is China’s actions, not
the fact that it has a politburo. But the risks of a rupture are real. 7Chaguan The communist block
Ideology is not what worries the world about China’s ruthless ruling party