50 China The EconomistApril 4th 2020
M
arco polois a surprisingly dodgy role model for writers on
China. Seven centuries have passed since the Venetian mer-
chant published his account of travels in Asia, including 17 years in
the service of Kublai Khan, China’s Mongol overlord. Polo’s China
is a ruthless but efficient dictatorship, a market of staggering pro-
mise, a land of great cities and tireless workers. At the same time,
he describes a China so isolated that three ingenious Europeans—
Polo, his father and uncle—can help the Khan win a military cam-
paign by building him a set of giant catapults. It is an early example
of technology transfer via joint venture. Polo’s portrait of China,
combining wonders, horrors and a dose of Western condescen-
sion, set a pattern followed by other authors for 700 years.
In recent years, however, some fine historians have begun to
debate whether Polo made his Chinese adventures up, or borrowed
his tales from Arab and Persian traders. It is odd that neither Mon-
gol nor Chinese records contain any trace of Polo, though he
claims to have governed the city of Yangzhou. It is puzzling that
Polo’s memoirs never mention tea, chopsticks, calligraphy, foot-
binding or the Great Wall. For all that, the truly striking thing, per-
haps, is how little it matters whether Polo went to China.
Long before foreigners commonly travelled or worked in Chi-
na—an actual country linked to the world by trade and by two-way
flows of emigration and return—outsiders have held strong opin-
ions about “China”, an Otherland that is as much an idea as a place
on the map. “The Chan’s Great Continent”, a classic history of
Western thought about China by Jonathan Spence, catalogues the
many influential writers on China who never set foot there.
Enlightenment philosophers, notably, used China as a symbol
for all that is good, or bad, about human society. Leibniz praised
China as a land of order, Confucian morality and religious tolera-
tion—but mostly as a way to rebuke Christian monarchs stirring
up sectarian hatreds in Europe. In contrast, to promote the merits
of dividing state power between separate branches of government,
Montesquieu damned China as a despotic state ruled by fear,
whose peoples “can be made to do nothing without beatings”.
On the face of it, imaginary notions of China should not matter
much during the covid-19 pandemic, which has left governments
wrestling with hard questions about life and death. There is, for in-stance, nothing very abstract about a propaganda campaign under
way inside China to stress that most new infections involve cases
imported from abroad. Though almost all of these involve Chinese
nationals, curbs on foreigners are tightening. The border has been
shut to most of them. On March 27th the government shocked em-
bassies in Beijing by declaring a halt to the issuing of new identity
cards for most grades of diplomat. This was apparently in response
to the flouting of virus controls by a Western envoy. Embassies, in
effect, face a ban on staff rotations until at least mid-May.
Yet listen carefully to Western leaders discussing China in this
crisis, and time and again their discussion of Chinese policies is a
form of introspection. They are really agonising, aloud, about how
they found themselves so dependent on a country like China. On
March 29th the Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, quoted gov-
ernment ministers blaming Chinese secrecy over covid-19 for
ruining the world economy. How could Britain not now review
Sino-British ties, including deals to let Huawei help build 5gnet-
works, a minister asked. That sounds like an argument about Chi-
na, but is really a cry of alarm about Britain’s sway in a harsh world.
Pushing back against headlines about China delivering medi-
cal supplies to Italy and other European countries, President Em-
manuel Macron of France warned against becoming “intoxicated”
with the boasts of rival powers (meaning, clearly, China). He noted
that France and Germany had also sent substantial aid to Italy.
Then Mr Macron let slip what really troubles him about this pr
contest with China: that it reveals the limits of European solidar-
ity. “I do not want this selfish and divided Europe,” he lamented.
Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is said to be wrestling
with how to position her country in an age of sharp competition
between two self-interested giants, America and China. Her
choices have been narrowed by a loss of faith among Germany’s
elite in the claim, once touted as “change through trade”, that com-
merce with China will nudge that country towards openness and
democracy. China’s defiantly hardline turn leaves Germany in
need of a foreign policy shorn of wishful thinking. That in turn
condemns Germany to debate what sort of country it wants to be.
As for President Donald Trump, he won office, in part, with fiery
speeches about China growing rich at Americans’ expense. Yet
during this pandemic he seems strikingly unmoved by ethical
questions about China’s conduct. Asked about Chinese propagan-
da accusing America of infecting China with covid-19, which his
own aides have angrily denounced, Mr Trump shrugged. “Hey, ev-
ery country does it,” he told Fox News, adding that his earlier insis-
tence that covid-19 was caused by a “Chinese” virus was “very
strong against China”.China as cause and beneficiary of a crisis of confidence
America’s allies, along with many Trump administration officials
and members of Congress, worry about China posing an unprece-
dented challenge to the post-1945 global order and the norms that
underpin it. All evidence suggests that Mr Trump’s concerns are
narrower and more domestic. His “China” is a proxy for globalisa-
tion, and for the failure of elites to shield American workers from
competition. As for the actual autocracy called China, Mr Trump
takes its ruthless self-interest for granted, and even praises it.
Western leaders disagree about how to handle China partly be-
cause the country has become a larger, more daunting and more
assertive competitor. It is also because of a crisis of Western unity.
As Marco Polo was the first to demonstrate, foreigners with visions
of China are often talking about themselves. 7Chaguan A Chinese mirror
China is not just a real-world power. It is an idea, revealing much about Western hopes and fears