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RETHINKING CHINA: AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD
Paul Monk
Austhink Consulting Pty Ltd
Asialink
Sidney Myer Asia Centre
University of Melbourne
7 September
2005
There is renewed
debate these days about literacy in schools. Do we teach young people such
basic things as grammar, spelling and - punctuation. Well, I think the
significance of punctuation is revealed in the simple fact that I
have been asked to address you briefly this evening on the topic ‘Rethinking
China COLON Australia and the World’, rather than ‘Rethinking China COMMA
Australia and the World’. We catch the distinction in the inflection. Even
so, the task is a formidable one and my remarks will be intended more to
stimulate thought than to offer systematic prescriptions for business or
public policy.
Well, I have
twenty minutes in which to address you on the subject of Rethinking China
and how such rethinking is likely to impact on Australia and the world at
large, or at the very least Australia’s place in the world. I am reminded
for some reason of a quip by the old comedian of the 1960s, Shelley Berman,
at the end of a comedy hour, “Well, I’m almost out of time, I’ve taken up
way too much time, I’ve only got ten seconds left; so I’m going to take that
ten seconds and discuss the fate of the world. That is, of course, on the
assumption that it lasts that long.”
But of course, I’ve been given a flying start, because both Jenny McGregor
and Henry Rosenbloom have spoken about me and about my book, Thunder From
the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. So, I want to take the twenty minutes
and dwell on three things. The nature of ‘rethinking’; the nature of ‘China’
and the challenges for Australia, as regards its place in a world in which
China is becoming a more and more substantial presence. The first of these,
‘rethinking’ is my most fundamental concern. It is the business I’m in,
China and the book quite apart. The second, ‘China’ has been a particular
preoccupation of mine since I completed my doctorate a decade and a half ago
and went to work for the Australian government as an intelligence analyst on
East Asia. The third, Australia’s place in the world is our common concern
here this evening and in that respect I address you as a fellow citizen, or,
in the case of those of you who are guests in Australia, as a fellow citizen
of the world.
The simplest way
into the topic of ‘rethinking’, I think, is to draw a distinction I like to
emphasise between predicting the future and engaging in scenario
planning. There’s an old joke to the effect that prediction is a
hazardous business, especially when it involves the future. Yet, time and
again, prediction, and overconfident prediction at that, is what policy
makers, intelligence analysts, business people and fortune tellers engage
in. Such prediction tends to be based, in considerable measure, on
extrapolation from what seem to be robust trends and on deeply held
assumptions which are not subjected to very much critical examination.
Therein lie the hazards.
By contrast,
scenario planning involves thinking about various possible futures and the
different ways things could turn out depending on whether certain trends
continue or are disrupted, on whether certain assumptions prove warranted or
otherwise, and on what actions are taken by various parties to effect
their preferences as regards future outcomes. Such thinking is much more
intellectually interesting than prediction, but also much more demanding and
much less superficially conclusive. The cognitive burden it imposes is the
chief reason why it is not commonly undertaken or taken seriously.
Let me underscore
this point, because it has considerable relevance to China’s possible
futures and their quite different implications for Australia and the world.
Just over a decade ago, social scientist Philip Tetlock completed a
longitudinal study of the confidence levels of experts in international
affairs. He asked a representative sample of experts in various specific
fields to make predictions in their own field looking anything from a few
months to five years ahead – not long term predictions. Moreover, he asked
them very basic questions, absolutely central to their field. For example,
experts on the Soviet Union were asked, in 1988, whether, by 1993, the
Communist Party’s grip on power would be stronger, weaker or about the same.
Note that they were not even asked whether the Communist Party might
have lost power altogether and the Soviet Union have ceased to exist.
Experts on
South Africa were asked whether the apartheid regime would have
strengthened, weakened, become more extreme or more reformist. Experts on US
politics were asked, in July 1992, whether George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton or
Ross Perot would win the Presidential election in November that year and so
on. The experts were also asked to rate the confidence with which they made
their predictions. There were seven sets of experts, seven different
predictions to make. Tetlock waited for the future to happen and then
checked it against the predictions of the experts. He found two surely
rather interesting things: first, across all seven cases, the experts
performed no better than random in the accuracy of their predictions.
Second, they were badly calibrated, which is to say that their confidence
in their predictions was much greater than was justified by their accuracy.
Why do I
mention the Tetlock study here this evening? Because ever since China’s
economy started to go gang busters, predictions about where things
were heading have been increasingly common and commonly rather facile, but
the actions taken on the basis of such predictions are or could be of very
great significance. For a decade or more now, I have been struck by how
unreflectively people have come to talk of China’s rise and its implications
and how very much has come to hang off those predictions in terms of
investment, foreign policy and strategic thinking. To give but a few of the
more prominent examples, Malcolm Fraser has long since expressed the view
that China is set to displace the United States as the number one economy in
the world within a decade or two; Bob Hawke has long since said that China
is about to resume its traditional role as the greatest power in the world;
while Hugh White, just a few months ago, expressed the view that China could
soon displace the United States as Australia’s new ‘great and powerful
friend’.
Quite a few
years ago, now, bemused by this kind of prediction, I wrote a few papers
taking issue with it and outlining how a more sensible and thoughtful
scenario-based approach to China’s futures might be attempted. Those papers
were the first seedlings of what has just become Thunder From the Silent
Zone: Rethinking China. The bedrock idea I advanced then and have
elaborated on in the book is that the complexities in the equation, the
challenges China faces, the constraints on the growth of its power in the 21st
world and the changes it may well undergo in the years ahead should compel
us to think, at a minimum, in terms of four different kinds of scenarios for
China’s future. Partly for mnemonic purposes, I call these four scenarios
mutation, maturation, militarisation and metastasis. Each is
distinct in both its nature and its implications from the tacit standard,
uncritical scenario, which I call the Linear Ascent Model or LAM. Far too
many commentators, I think, including many so-called experts are, as it
were, on the LAM, which is to say, fleeing from the hard thinking tasks that
the possible futures of China present us with.
The basis
for and implications of the four scenarios are spelled out in the first part
of the book and I shan’t digress here to enlarge on them, except to note
that mutation entails fundamental reshaping of the polity and economy
in China, such that, for practical purposes, the China we are dealing with a
little further down the track is not the People’s Republic, with Mao Zedong
as its founding hero. Maturation entails a leveling out of the rapid
growth we have been seeing, leaving China better off in some respects, but
with enormous social, demographic, environmental and economic challenges.
Militarisation entails a lurch into national chauvinism, whether out of
hubris or frustration. Metastasis entails things coming seriously
unglued, in part because the Communist Party fails, finally, to address the
institutional problems it created during the first half century of its rule.
The
uncertainties in how things will play out and the very different
consequences of one scenario compared with another are what should be
driving analysis of and rethinking about China here in Australia. I do not
see enough evidence of such searching, sophisticated analysis and I hope
that Thunder From the Silent Zone will help to stimulate some of it.
But I want to emphasise two things at this point. The first is that the book
does not predict which scenario will occur, but it does argue consistently
that it would be in the best interests of China, Australia and the world at
large for the first scenario, mutation, to occur. Our strategic
thinking should be shaped by sustained analysis of what we can do to help
bring that future into being and how we need to hedge against the
possibility that the future will be otherwise.
I use the
word ‘hedge’ here quite deliberately. We have all, over the past generation,
become familiar with the concept of a hedge fund. One of the most famous, if
ephemeral of hedge funds was a company set up in 1994 by a man called John
W. Meriwether: Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Last year, in a paper
called ‘Meriwether and Strange Weather: Intelligence, Risk Management and
Critical Thinking’, I pointed out how at LTCM a group of brilliant quants
came spectacularly unstuck when overconfidence in their math models, their
assumptions about market efficiency and their own intuitive genius led them
to create a trillion dollars worth of exposure over four years, making
remarkable profits, then lose almost everything in five weeks, in August and
September 1998. How did this happen? In the simplest terms, because,
ironically, LTCM failed to hedge.
Hedging
means placing bets on a risk weighted basis, given that we are uncertain
about how the future will play out. How are we hedging our bets in regard to
the possible futures of China? Who is even thinking rigorously about what
this might mean? How are they quantifying the risks? Have they even
specified what the range and relative gravity of the risks is? What
confidence do they have that their quantifications are sounder than those of
the brilliant quants at LTCM who blew a trillion dollars in five weeks? If
they are confident, how well calibrated are they? Last year, around the time
I wrote the LTCM paper, I attended a conference in Canberra on China’s
economy and asked a senior DFAT officer, who had just returned from three
years in Geneva working on WTO issues, whether he believed China’s accession
to the WTO would be more likely to precipitate reform in its dangerously
insolvent financial institutions or a banking crisis. He replied that he had
never heard that there was a problem with China’s financial institutions.
Hold onto your socks!
I need not,
I trust, dilate further here and now on the nature of rethinking, much as it
would be a professional pleasure to do so. Let me turn, instead, to the
question of the nature of ‘China’. Certainly, a major purpose I had in
writing Thunder From the Silent Zone was to offer to a broad,
intelligent, practical readership a book on China that would address this
question in a manner at once accessible and rigorous. That did not mean
simply offering a narrative history or a cultural survey or an economic
update. It meant, rather, looking at China from a number of different angles
and asking some tough questions about how it has become what it is and how
it is changing or might do so. I have just touched, ever so lightly, on the
economic aspect of China. Let me just as lightly make a few observations
regarding three other aspects of it: Chinese culture in the modern world,
the prospect for democracy and human rights in the Chinese world, and
China’s claims to Taiwan.
As it
happens, these topics correspond to parts three, four and two, respectively,
of Thunder From the Silent Zone. I leave Part Two until last, because
it flows most naturally into the third part of my remarks to you this
evening – Australia’s place in the world and its relations with China. As
regards Chinese culture, nothing seems more common than the way in which
tourists, diplomats and military officers who visit China, or even just read
about it, get overcome by the mystique of the Middle Kingdom. This stands in
striking contrast to the paradox, evident around the world, that American
popular culture has universal appeal, but the United States is held in
widespread disdain both by the Left for ideological reasons and by many
cultural elites out of snobbery.
One of my
favorite tales of the mystique is that of Henry Kissinger, when he first
visited Mao’s China, remarking to Zhou Enlai how wonderful it was finally to
be able to visit “your mysterious country”. The Chinese premier is said to
have responded, “There’s nothing especially mysterious about China, Dr
Kissinger, once you know a little about it.” Given how deliberately and
consistently the Communist Party had and has always played the Middle
Kingdom game, this was unusually frank on Zhou Enlai’s part. It was also
correct. A necessary corrective to much starry eyed or over-awed waffle
about China is to think dispassionately about it, just as one can and should
about any other subject. Three very basic observations should serve as
points of departure in this respect. (1) The Chinese language is the world’s
greatest creole, not some pure, primordial, mandarin tongue. (2) Confucius
is to China roughly what Plato has been to the West and should be analyzed
and evaluated not idolized. (3) The Chinese state now lays claim to the
borders of an empire, not those of a nation state, and those borders were
never the borders even of the classical Chinese empire, only those
established by the foreign Manchus, who were overthrown in 1912.
The real
key, however, to understanding modern China is the debate that has gone on
in China itself for over a hundred years about how to bring the hobbled old
Middle Kingdom and its archaic system of governance into the modern world.
That debate is deeply interesting and pivots on the calls by students during
the years immediately after the overthrow of the Manchus for science and
democracy to be brought to China. Those are still the catch cries. And no
single consideration is more important to an understanding of what China is
than the knowledge that precisely these two things have been much more
hindered than helped by the Communist Party’s half century of dictatorship
over China.
When the
Chinese Ambassador, Madame Fu Ying, asserted recently, in regard to the
fears of defector Chen Yonglin, that “This is not the 1970s, China has moved
on”, she was, at best, fudging the truth. The arrest of Ching Cheong on
charges of espionage in April, simply because he sought to obtain a
manuscript copy of the last interviews with Zhao Ziyang, was a stark
reminder of how far the Communist Party still has to go with regard to
democracy. The efforts of the Communist government to discourage Chinese
scientists from investigating the origins of avian flu H5N1 in Qinghai, as
reported in New Scientist in early July are an equally stark reminder
of how far it still has to go in regard to science. And here’s the thing:
these considerations are culture-independent ones. Neither abuse can be
justified on ‘cultural’ grounds. Both involved repression of Chinese
thinkers by the Chinese Communist government. Repression, not something
mysterious about China is the issue and, Madame Ambassador, there is a way
to go yet.
But let me
give a particular focus to the question of debates about the nature of
China, from a cultural point of view. I enjoy Chinese cinema. Not the old
Communist propaganda films, but the new wave of films made since Mao at long
last died and his dead hand was at least partly lifted from the country’s
throat. Two such films made a particularly great impression on me in the
couple of years before I wrote Thunder From the Silent Zone. They
were Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin and Zhang Yimou’s
Hero. In chapter 8 of the book, I systematically compare and contrast
the two films. The first bears comparison with Shakespearean drama or the
great films of David Lean and Akira Kurosawa. It is a powerful study, for a
contemporary audience, of the effort to assassinate the tyrant of Ch’in in
the 3rd century BCE, as he sought, by ruthless use of force, to
bring all kingdoms in the Chinese world under his sway. The second film,
Hero, is superficially an effort to outdo Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, as a martial arts extravaganza. It is best understood, however,
as a disturbing propaganda film comparable to Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious
work of art of 1934, Triumph of the Will.
Like The
Emperor and the Assassin, Hero is about an effort to assassinate the
tyrant of Ch’in, the founding emperor of China. The difference is that, in
Hero, the Emperor is presented as a figure of overpowering courage,
insight, vision and dignity, before whom, in the end, the assassin bows.
There is no doubt that, in both films, the Emperor stands for the Communist
Party. There are good reasons to believe that Zhang Yimou, director of the
much more biting film Shanghai Triad, in which the Party in the late
1990s is likened, implicitly, to the brutal and corrupt Green Gang in
pre-revolutionary Shanghai, has struck a deal with the Party, or embraced a
new style of quasi-fascist nationalism, in Hero. By contrast, Chen
Kaige, in The Emperor and the Assassin, has the violence and tyranny
of the Emperor directly challenged by a series of figures, not least among
them his sweet heart and mistress Lady Zhao, played by Gong Li.
The
contrast between these two films, both Chinese, takes us to the heart of the
debate about what China is and what it might yet become. It is not a new
debate, it did not begin with these films, or in the ill-fated Beijing
spring of 1989, or with the ill-fated Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79, or
the ill-fated Hundred Flowers period of 1957. It goes back to the late
nineteenth century, when Yan Fu translated the works of John Stuart Mill,
Montesquieu and Herbert Spencer into Chinese and reformers at the Manchu
court called for political reform and a constitutional monarchy. This is the
rethinking inside China itself that no responsible outsider has any excuse
for remaining ignorant of and no sound reason for remaining aloof from. It
is in this cause that Wei Jingsheng was sent to prison. It is in this cause
that Hu Yaobang was sacked as nominal leader of China. It is in this cause
that Zhao Ziyang was forced to resign as nominal leader of China. It is in
this cause that Fang Lizhi was forced into exile. It is this cause that
recent defectors to Australia have renounced their allegiance to the Chinese
Communist dictatorship.
What cause?
The cause of bringing into being what I have called scenario one: the
mutation of the polity in China into a democratic form, with more soundly
based institutions than the Communist dictatorship has ever been able to
achieve. Thunder From the Silent Zone is written in that cause. That
is why seven of its chapters are devoted to examining aspects of Chinese
culture and questions to do with human rights and democratization. That is
why it is dedicated to the tens of millions of victims of communism in
China: millions who perished in civil war atrocities and terror campaigns,
millions who perished in concentration and so-called ‘re-education’ camps,
China’s Laogai, millions who perished during the Cultural Revolution,
the 30 million who starved to death as a direct consequence of the Party’s
irrational and irresponsible ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1959-61. That is why it
is called Thunder From the Silent Zone, a phrase borrowed from the
great 20th century Chinese novelist and poet Lu Xun and alluding
to the anguish of those suffering and silenced in a repressive society.
Now, some
may recoil from this litany of criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party and
ask, but is there not much truth in Madame Fu’s claim that China has moved
on? Has it not compensated for the victims at least by raising the living
standards of hundreds of millions since Mao died? Is it not now a force for
stability and progress, the guarantor of reform and social cohesion in
China? There is no simple, satisfying answer to this question, since so many
considerations are in the balance. What can be said and should be said,
however, is that living standards in China have not risen because of the
Communist Party. They have risen just to the extent that the Communist Party
has allowed market forces to overturn communist economics. It has left much
of the economy, however, in a half way house and vast inequalities, massive
inefficiencies and potentially disastrous institutional fragilities have
resulted. At the same time, the Party has failed to replace communist
politics with a healthy and legitimate form of democratic politics. In
consequence, frustration, resentment, confusion and cynicism are building up
in Chinese society, in a manner every bit as volcanic as the rumbles Lu Xun
detected seventy years ago.
Not the
least of the rumbles that we hear every so often is the rumble of thunder
that rolls across the Taiwan Strait. So significant is the question of the
fate of Taiwan for the future of China and the whole Asia Pacific world that
I have devoted four chapters of the book to it. You will not be particularly
surprised, I trust, if I tell you that I call for and assay a quite
fundamental rethinking of how this matter should be understood and the
dangerous impasse at which it now stands might be transformed. Once again,
however, I do not engage in prediction. I simply point out
that there are assumptions at work which tend not to be critically examined
and which, if revised, could bring into being a future that is waiting to
happen – a free Taiwan securely within the orbit of a free China and the
abatement of strategic anxieties around the Pacific Rim.
The
brilliant young Chinese scholar, working in the United States, Dali Yang, is
the only author who gets two epigraphs in Thunder From the Silent Zone.
Each heads one of the chapters in the Taiwan part of the book, although
Dali does not himself write about the problem of Taiwan. In his excellent
study of the Great Leap Forward, Calamity and Reform in China, he
drew on cognitive science to try to explain the blind spots and biases
behind the errors of judgment that human beings make and how setbacks and
impasses can compel them to learn. Here are the two short passages I use as
epigraphs. At the head of a chapter called ‘Conceiving a Paradigm Shift’, I
quote him as writing, “Since beliefs about opportunities are crucial to
human choice, a better understanding of belief formation and belief change
is therefore vital to the social sciences”. At the head of a chapter called
‘Can Rationality Save Us?’, I quote him as writing, “Incomplete rationality
coupled with environmental constraints leads to inefficiencies in history,
some of which we call tragedies.”
It would be
a tragedy of historic proportions if there was a Sino-American war over
Taiwan. It would be a tragedy, also, if Taiwan was abandoned by the United
States and compelled by one means or another to bow to the will of the
Communist government in China. There is another possibility: that the
evolution of Taiwan towards a separate national identity and democratic
self-government will finally be acknowledged graciously by a China that is
itself evolving toward a different kind of polity. Let me repeat, I am not
predicting this outcome. I do, however, articulate the possibility and the
rational case for it at some length. By contrast with what I dub the ‘Hong
Kong gambit’ – external powers cutting a deal with China which pushes Taiwan
back under the aegis of the People’s Republic of China – I describe what I
call ‘the Singapore gambit’ and ‘the Australian outcome’. Some forty years
ago, Singapore was detached from the Malaysian Federation, in order to solve
a problem of communal tensions. Just over a hundred years ago, the colonies
in Australia were granted independence as a commonwealth without any need to
wrest such independence from the British crown. The outcome has been a
century of extraordinary, sportive amity and peaceful commerce.
Thunder
From the Silent Zone does argue for Taiwan to be granted its de jure
independence by China, just as it does argue for democratization in China
itself. For both these reasons, it is virtually certain that the book will
be banned in China. That is, of course, exactly why the people of Taiwan do
not want to be part of the dominion ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. It
is exactly why there are so many democratic dissidents in China and or in
exile from China. It is why there is a fundamental challenge for Australia
in working out its relationship with China in the years ahead. That
challenge is often cast as simply one of cross-cultural communication, but
it isn’t. Certainly, there are issues of cross-cultural communication that
need to be addressed, but the fundamental challenge is not cultural,
because those raised in a Chinese culture and even within the Chinese
Communist Party itself are demonstrably able to understand arguments about
science and democratic principles every bit as clearly as anyone in the
West. Just ask Fang Lizhi or Wei Jingsheng, or read their writings.
There are
many very good reasons for Australians to seek to understand and enjoy the
roots of Chinese sensibility and art and the achievements of Chinese
culture. These are not, however, where the challenge really lies for us. It
lies in inventing ways to encourage scenario one, mutation, in the Chinese
polity, while hedging deftly and intelligently against the possibilities of
scenarios two, three or four emerging. There is a power of work to do in
this regard and what cautious diplomats like to call ‘megaphone diplomacy’
is not, I concur with them, necessarily the most tactful or fruitful way to
do such work. Rather, such work is for the most part for us to do, work on
our own thinking and strategizing, on our perceptions and priorities. But,
as far as possible, it will consist, also, in working with the
Chinese, in a sustained dialogue about what is possible and about practical
means for bringing better possibilities into being. I see wide scope for
Australia and Australians to engage in such dialogue and I would like to
think that Thunder From the Silent Zone will, at the end of the day,
open rather than narrow the scope for it.
Let me draw
these remarks to a close with that hope, in order to give Rowan Callick the
floor and then to open the space for a dialogue with all of you who have
exhibited your interest in the broader dialogue I refer to, simply by coming
along here this evening. Thank you. |
