Zhongguo heping jueqi or Zhongguo heping fazhan?
Sometime in 2003, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao used the first term, pinyin for the ‘peaceful rise of China’ at a meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, emphasising that China was a responsible world leader and committed to improving the lives of its people.
But as the Chinese economy continued to grow at an unprecedented rate, provoking discomfort and even apprehension in Western world capitals, says scholar of Chinese history, Wang Gungwu, China’s ‘fourth generation’ leadership such as President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao decided the term ‘peaceful rise’ should be superseded by ‘heping fazhan’ or ‘peaceful development’ of China.
For a country which takes seriously its own historical process, which it believes is inextricably connected to its present and future, Wang added, it was imperative to allay the apprehensions in these world capitals. After all, China’s economic boom was considerably fuelled by the large-scale investment by western companies into China.
On a visit to India under the aegis of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) — he spoke about the ‘rise of China’ at a lecture in Delhi on Monday evening — Wang is a symbol of the interconnectedness that sometimes exists between academia, international politics and nationalism. An Australian citizen for several years, Wang was born in Indonesia, but grew up in Malaysia and now lives in Singapore, where he continues to consult for that country’s Diplomatic Academy.
And yes, the rise and rise of China continues to be a subject of considerable interest around the world, Wang admitted, whatever term the Chinese leadership employs these days.
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Wang prefers the long lens himself. “There was never really a ‘fall’ of China, so the fact of its ‘rise’ is somewhat a misnomer. Chinese dynasties rose and fell over the centuries, of course, but these were not ‘China’. This nation or civilisation absorbed ideas from its many encounters with outsiders, including Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan, it had its ups and downs, but this cannot be synonymous with ‘rise’ and ‘fall’. In fact, there is no word in Chinese for ‘rise’,” he said in an interview with Business Standard.
Perhaps because of this self-perception of a nation that sought to carve out its own path – “even Marxism, a primarily European concept, has been changed by the Chinese to such an extent that it is now a Chinese ideology, and the Communist Party of China only a manifestation or projection of this idea,” Wang says — the Chinese are enormously sensitive about so-called ‘splittist’ tendencies that have sometimes been adopted by the Tibetans.
Wang says the presence of the Dalai Lama in India perhaps instinctually feeds into the Chinese leadership’s belief that if not him, then at least the younger generation of Tibetans want Tibet to secede from China. This feeling was hugely aggravated in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in China, when Tibetan separatists sought to heighten international sentiment and the Chinese responded by cracking down inside Tibet.
“The Tibetans used every opportunity to humiliate the Chinese…it made the Chinese leadership extremely sensitive,” he said.
Asked about the mounting tension in the Sino-Indian relationship these days, Wang said he “couldn’t understand it”, as there was nothing in the centuries-old relationship to warrant distrust of the kind that existed. “I cannot understand why it cannot be worked out,” he added, pointing out that it was only the 1962 conflict between the two nations that had left this residual bitterness but there was “nothing so rigid” that it could not be resolved.
“What went wrong in 1962?” he asks again, pointing out that Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou En-lai had forged a great relationship, and that perhaps it was the Dalai Lama’s escape into India in 1959 that tipped the scales.
The Professor said the Chinese continued to believe that if India and China were to sort out their border problem, and not allow third parties to come in the way, they would be able to do a much better job.
For example, he said, the 1914 conference in Simla (now Shimla) when British India, China and Tibet each sent their representatives, could not be taken as a valid basis for thrashing out a solution to the border, as the maps of the time were made by a ‘foreign’ country. China could not understand why India continued to source its positions on the basis of those British-made maps, he added.
China’s problems with the US that seem to dominate world attention these days could be attributed to the same reasons, Wang said. “China mistakenly believes that the US has a missionary instinct that makes it want to destroy the Communist Party. This is what makes China confront the Americans.”
As for China building a network of alliances in India’s neighbourhood, the Professor said he “could not understand why” Delhi felt so insecure. He said the Sri Lankans had given the Hambantota port to the Chinese to build after Delhi turned down the offer, and Pakistan’s all-weather relationship with China only meant India should sort out its own relations with Pakistan.