[Reader-list] China's new intelligentsia

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10078

March 2008 | 144 » Cover story » China's new intelligentsia

Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying  
much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a  
surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a  
serious challenge to western liberal hegemony
Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard is the executive director of the European Council on  
Foreign Relations. His book What Does China Think? has just been  
published by 4th Estate
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy  
of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin,  
the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's  
Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting  
in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced  
ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that  
his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with  
4,000 full-time researchers.

As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast  
chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the  
hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven  
of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single  
institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing  
alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think  
that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw  
figures were enough.

At the beginning of that trip, I had hoped to get a quick  
introduction to China, learn the basics and go home. I had imagined  
that China's intellectual life consisted of a few unbending  
ideologues in the back rooms of the Communist party or the country's  
top universities. Instead, I stumbled on a hidden world of  
intellectuals, think-tankers and activists, all engaged in intense  
debate about the future of their country. I soon realised that it  
would take more than a few visits to Beijing and Shanghai to grasp  
the scale and ambition of China's internal debates. Even on that  
first trip my mind was made up—I wanted to devote the next few years  
of my life to understanding the living history that was unfolding  
before me. Over a three-year period, I have spoken with dozens of  
Chinese thinkers, watching their views develop in line with the  
breathtaking changes in their country. Some were party members;  
others were outside the party and suffering from a more awkward  
relationship with the authorities. Yet to some degree, they are all  
insiders. They have chosen to live and work in mainland China, and  
thus to cope with the often capricious demands of the one-party state.

We are used to China's growing influence on the world economy—but  
could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story  
of China's intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely  
follow the twists and turns in America's intellectual life, but how  
many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside  
China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent  
think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the  
direction of the country: "new left" economists argue with the "new  
right" about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative  
importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign  
policy realm, China's neocons argue with liberal internationalists  
about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile  
competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global  
markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they  
could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are  
trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a "walled  
world" Chinese version.

Paradoxically, the power of the Chinese intellectual is amplified by  
China's repressive political system, where there are no opposition  
parties, no independent trade unions, no public disagreements between  
politicians and a media that exists to underpin social control rather  
than promote political accountability. Intellectual debate in this  
world can become a surrogate for politics—if only because it is more  
personal, aggressive and emotive than anything that formal politics  
can muster. While it is true there is no free discussion about ending  
the Communist party's rule, independence for Tibet or the events of  
Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading  
newspapers and academic journals about China's economic model, how to  
clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or  
North Korea. Although the internet is heavily policed, debate is  
freer here than in the printed word (although one of the most free- 
thinking bloggers, Hu Jia, was recently arrested). And behind closed  
doors, academics and thinkers will often talk freely about even the  
most sensitive topics, such as political reform. The Chinese like to  
argue about whether it is the intellectuals that influence decision- 
makers, or whether groups of decision-makers use pet intellectuals as  
informal mouthpieces to advance their own views. Either way, these  
debates have become part of the political process, and are used to  
put ideas in play and expand the options available to Chinese  
decision-makers. Intellectuals are, for example, regularly asked to  
brief the politburo in "study sessions"; they prepare reports that  
feed into the party's five-year plans; and they advise on the  
government's white papers.

So is the Chinese intelligentsia becoming increasingly open and  
western? Many of the concepts it argues over—including, of course,  
communism itself—are western imports. And a more independent-minded,  
western style of discourse may be emerging as a result of the 1m  
students who have studied outside China—many in the west—since 1978;  
fewer than half have returned, but that number is rising. However,  
one should not forget that the formation of an "intellectual" in  
China remains very different from in the west. Education is still  
focused on practical contributions to national life, and despite a  
big expansion of higher education (around 20 per cent of 18-30 year  
olds now enrol at university), teaching methods rely heavily on rote  
learning. Moreover, all of these people will be closely monitored for  
political dissent, with "political education" classes still compulsory.

Zhang Weiying has a thing about Cuban cigars. When I went to see him  
in his office in Beijing University, I saw half a dozen boxes of  
Cohiba piled high on his desk. The cigar boxes—worth several times a  
Chinese peasant's annual income—are fragments of western freedom  
(albeit products of a communist nation), symbols of the dynamism he  
hopes will gradually eclipse and replace the last vestiges of Maoism.  
Like other economic liberals—or members of the "new right" as their  
opponents call them—he thinks China will not be free until the public  
sector is dismantled and the state has shrivelled into a residual  
body designed mainly to protect property rights.

The new right was at the heart of China's economic reforms in the  
1980s and 1990s. Zhang Weiying has a favourite allegory to explain  
these reforms. He tells a story about a village that relied on horses  
to conduct its chores. Over time, the village elders realised that  
the neighbouring village, which relied on zebras, was doing better.  
So after years of hailing the virtues of the horse, they decided to  
embrace the zebra. The only obstacle was converting the villagers who  
had been brainwashed over decades into worshipping the horse. The  
elders developed an ingenious plan. Every night, while the villagers  
slept, they painted black stripes on the white horses. When the  
villagers awoke the leaders reassured them that the animals were not  
really zebras, just the same old horses adorned with a few harmless  
stripes. After a long interval the village leaders began to replace  
the painted horses with real zebras. These prodigious animals  
transformed the village's fortunes, increasing productivity and  
creating wealth all around. Only many years later—long after all the  
horses had been replaced with zebras and the village had benefited  
from many years of prosperity—did the elders summon the citizenry to  
proclaim that their community was a village of zebras, and that  
zebras were good and horses bad.

Zhang Weiying's story is one way of understanding his theory of "dual- 
track pricing," first put forward in 1984. He argued that "dual-track  
pricing" would allow the government to move from an economy where  
prices were set by officials to one where they were set by the  
market, without having to publicly abandon its commitment to  
socialism or run into the opposition of all those with a vested  
interest in central planning. Under this approach, some goods and  
services continued to be sold at state-controlled prices while others  
were sold at market prices. Over time, the proportion of goods sold  
at market prices was steadily increased until by the early 1990s,  
almost all products were sold at market prices. The "dual-track"  
approach embodies the combination of pragmatism and incrementalism  
that has allowed China's reformers to work around obstacles rather  
than confront them.

The most famous village of zebras was Shenzhen. At the end of the  
1970s, Shenzhen was an unremarkable fishing village, providing a  
meagre living for its few thousand inhabitants. But over the next  
three decades, it became an emblem of the Chinese capitalism that  
Zhang Weiying and his colleagues were building. Because of its  
proximity to Hong Kong, Deng Xiaoping chose Shenzhen in 1979 as the  
first "special economic zone," offering its leaders tax breaks,  
freedom from regulation and a licence to pioneer new market ideas.  
The architects of reform in Shenzhen wanted to build high-tech plants  
that could mass-produce value-added goods for sale in the west. Such  
experimental zones were financed by drawing on the country's huge  
savings and the revenues from exports. The coastal regions sucked in  
a vast number of workers from the countryside, which held down urban  
wages. And the whole system was laissez-faire—allowing wealth to  
trickle down from the rich to the poor organically rather than  
consciously redistributing it. Deng Xiaoping pointedly declared that  
"some must get rich first," arguing that the different regions should  
"eat in separate kitchens" rather than putting their resources into a  
"common pot." As a result, the reformers of the eastern provinces  
were allowed to cut free from the impoverished inland areas and steam  
ahead.

But life today is getting tougher for the economists behind this  
system, like Zhang Weiying. After 30 years of having the best of the  
argument with ideas imported from the west, China has turned against  
the new right. Opinion polls show that they are the least popular  
group in China. Public disquiet is growing over the costs of reform,  
with protests by laid-off workers and concern over illegal  
demolitions and unpaid wages. And the ideas of the market are being  
challenged by a new left, which advocates a gentler form of  
capitalism. A battle of ideas pits the state against market; coasts  
against inland provinces; towns against countryside; rich against poor.

Wang Hui is one of the leaders of the new left, a loose grouping of  
intellectuals who are increasingly capturing the public mood and  
setting the tone for political debate through their articles in  
journals such as Dushu. Wang Hui was a student of literature rather  
than politics, but he was politicised through his role in the student  
demonstrations of 1989 that congregated on Tiananmen Square. Like  
most young intellectuals at the time, he was a strong believer in the  
potential of the market. But after the Tiananmen massacre, Wang Hui  
took off to the mountains and spent two years in hiding, getting to  
know peasants and workers. His experiences there made him doubt the  
justice of unregulated free markets, and convinced him that the state  
must play a role in preventing inequality. Wang Hui's ideas were  
developed further during his exile in the US in the 1990s, but like  
many other new left thinkers he has returned to mainland China—in his  
case to teach at the prestigious Qinghua University. I met him last  
year in "Thinker's Café" in Beijing, a bright and airy retreat with  
comfy sofas and fresh espressos. He looks like an archetypal public  
intellectual: cropped hair, a brown jacket and black polo-neck  
sweater. But Wang Hui does not live in an ivory tower. He writes  
reports exposing local corruption and helps workers organise  
themselves against illegal privatisations. His grouping is "new"  
because, unlike the "old left," it supports market reforms. It is  
left because, unlike the "new right," it worries about inequality:  
"China is caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and  
crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst elements of both… I am  
in favour of orienting the country toward market reforms, but China's  
development must be more balanced. We must not give total priority to  
GDP growth to the exclusion of workers' rights and the environment."

The new left's philosophy is a product of China's relative affluence.  
Now that the market is driving economic growth, they ask what should  
be done with the wealth. Should it continue accumulating in the hands  
of an elite, or can China foster a model of development that benefits  
all citizens? They want to develop a Chinese variant of social  
democracy. As Wang Hui says: "We cannot count on a state on the  
German or Nordic model. We have such a large country that the state  
would have to be vast to provide that kind of welfare. That is why we  
need institutional innovation. Wang Shaoguang [a political economist]  
is talking about low-price healthcare. Cui Zhiyuan [a political  
theorist] is talking about reforming property rights to give workers  
a say over the companies where they work. Hu Angang [an economist] is  
talking about green development."

The balance of power in Beijing is subtly shifting towards the left.  
At the end of 2005, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao published the "11th five- 
year plan," their blueprint for a "harmonious society." For the first  
time since the reform era began in 1978, economic growth was not  
described as the overriding goal for the Chinese state. They talked  
instead about introducing a welfare state with promises of a 20 per  
cent year-on-year increase in the funds available for pensions,  
unemployment benefit, health insurance and maternity leave. For rural  
China, they promised an end to arbitrary taxes and improved health  
and education. They also pledged to reduce energy consumption by 20  
per cent.

The 11th five-year plan is a template for a new Chinese model. From  
the new right, it keeps the idea of permanent experimentation—a  
gradualist reform process rather than shock therapy. And it accepts  
that the market will drive economic growth. From the new left, it  
draws a concern about inequality and the environment and a quest for  
new institutions that can marry co-operation with competition.

In February 2007, Hu Jintao proudly announced the creation of a new  
special economic zone complete with the usual combination of export  
subsidies, tax breaks and investments in roads, railways and  
shipping. However, this special economic zone was in the heart of  
Africa—in the copper-mining belt of Zambia. China is transplanting  
its growth model into the African continent by building a series of  
industrial hubs linked by rail, road and shipping lanes to the rest  
of the world. Zambia will be home to China's "metals hub," providing  
the People's Republic with copper, cobalt, diamonds, tin and uranium.  
The second zone will be in Mauritius, providing China with a "trading  
hub" that will give 40 Chinese businesses preferential access to the  
20-member state common market of east and southern Africa stretching  
from Libya to Zimbabwe, as well as access to the Indian ocean and  
south Asian markets. The third zone—a "shipping hub"—will probably be  
in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. Nigeria, Liberia and the  
Cape Verde islands are competing for two other slots. In the same way  
that eastern Europe was changed by a competition to join the EU, we  
could see Africa transformed by the competition to attract Chinese  
investment.

As it creates these zones, Beijing is embarking on a building spree,  
criss-crossing the African continent with new roads and railways— 
investing far more than the old colonial powers ever did. Moreover,  
China's presence is changing the rules of economic development. The  
IMF and the World Bank used to drive the fear of God into government  
officials and elected leaders, but today they struggle to be listened  
to even by the poorest countries of Africa. The IMF spent years  
negotiating a transparency agreement with the Angolan government only  
to be told hours before the deal was due to be signed, in March 2004,  
that the authorities in Luanda were no longer interested in the  
money: they had secured a $2bn soft loan from China. This tale has  
been repeated across the continent—from Chad to Nigeria, Sudan to  
Algeria, Ethiopia and Uganda to Zimbabwe.

But the spread of the Chinese model goes far beyond the regions that  
have been targeted by Chinese investors. Research teams from middle- 
income and poor countries from Iran to Egypt, Angola to Zambia,  
Kazakhstan to Russia, India to Vietnam and Brazil to Venezuela have  
been crawling around the Chinese cities and countryside in search of  
lessons from Beijing's experience. Intellectuals such as Zhang  
Weiying and Hu Angang have been asked to provide training for them.  
Scores of countries are copying Beijing's state-driven development  
using public money and foreign investment to build capital-intensive  
industries. A rash of copycat special economic zones have been set up  
all over the world—the World Bank estimates that over 3,000 projects  
are taking place in 120 countries. Globalisation was supposed to mean  
the worldwide triumph of the market economy, but China is showing  
that state capitalism is one of its biggest beneficiaries.

As free market ideas have spread across the world, liberal democracy  
has often travelled in its wake. But for the authorities in Beijing  
there is nothing inexorable about liberal democracy. One of the most  
surprising features of Chinese intellectual life is the way that  
"democracy" intellectuals who demanded elections in the 1980s and  
1990s have changed their positions on political reform.

Yu Keping is like the Zhang Weiying of political reform. He is a  
rising star and an informal adviser to President Hu Jintao. He runs  
an institute that is part university, part think tank, part  
management consultancy for government reform. When he talks about the  
country's political future, he often draws a direct analogy with the  
economic realm. When I last met him in Beijing, he told me that  
overnight political reform would be as damaging to China as economic  
"shock therapy." Instead, he has promoted the idea of democracy  
gradually working its way up from successful grassroots experiments.  
He hopes that by promoting democracy first within the Communist  
party, it will then spread to the rest of society. Just as the  
coastal regions were allowed to "get rich first," Yu Keping thinks  
that party members should "get democracy first" by having internal  
party elections.

Where the coastal regions benefited from natural economic advantages  
such as proximity to Hong Kong, the Cantonese language and transport  
links, Yu Keping sees advantages for party members—such as their high  
levels of education and articulacy—which make them into a natural  
democratic vanguard. What is more, he can point to examples of this  
happening. At his suggestion, in 2006 I visited a county in Sichuan  
province called Pinchang that has allowed party members to vote for  
the bosses of township parties. In the long run, democracy could be  
extended to the upper echelons of the party, including competitive  
elections for the most senior posts. The logical conclusion of his  
ideas on inner party democracy would be for the Communist party to  
split into different factions that competed on ideological slates for  
support. It is possible to imagine informal new left and new right  
groupings one day even becoming formal parties within the party. If  
the Communist party were a country, its 70m members would make it  
bigger than Britain. And yet it is hard to imagine the remote,  
impoverished county of Pinchang becoming a model for the gleaming  
metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen. So far, none of the  
other 2,860 counties of China has followed its lead.

Many intellectuals in China are starting to question the utility of  
elections. Pan Wei, a rising star at Beijing University, castigated  
me at our first meeting for paying too much attention to the  
experiments in grassroots democracy. "The Sichuan experiment will go  
nowhere," he said. "The local leaders have their personal political  
goal: they want to make their names known. But the experiment has not  
succeeded. In fact, Sichuan is the place with the highest number of  
mass protests. Very few other places want to emulate it."

Chinese thinkers argue that all developed democracies are facing a  
political crisis: turnout in elections is falling, faith in political  
leaders has declined, parties are losing members and populism is on  
the rise. They study the ways that western leaders are going over the  
heads of political parties and pioneering new techniques to reach the  
people such as referendums, opinion surveys or "citizens' juries."  
The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the  
political process, but has supplemented them with new types of  
deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do  
things the other way around: using elections in the margins but  
making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central  
part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang  
Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social  
Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu  
restaurant where customers can select the identityof their chef, but  
have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese  
democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the  
Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be  
chosen "à la carte."

Chongqing is a municipality of 30m that few people in the west have  
heard of. It nestles in the hills at the confluence of the Yangtze  
and Jialin Jiang rivers and it is trying to become a living  
laboratory for the ideas of intellectuals like Pan Wei and Fang Ning.  
The city's government has made all significant rulings subject to  
public hearings—in person, on television and on the internet. The  
authorities are proudest of the hearings on ticket prices for the  
light railway, which saw fares reduced from 15 to just 2 yuan (about  
14p). This experiment is being emulated in other cities around China.  
But an even more interesting experiment was carried out in the small  
township of Zeguo in Wenling City—it used a novel technique of  
"deliberative polling" to decide on major spending decisions. The  
brainchild of a Stanford political scientist called James Fishkin, it  
harks back to an Athenian ideal of democracy (see "The thinking  
voter," Prospect May 2004). It involves randomly selecting a sample  
of the population and involving them in a consultation process with  
experts, before asking them to vote on issues. Zeguo used this  
technique to decide how to spend its 40m yuan (£2.87m) public works  
budget. So far the experiment has been a one-off but Fishkin and the  
Chinese political scientist He Baogang believe that "deliberative  
democracy" could be a template for political reform.

The authorities certainly seem willing to experiment with all kinds  
of political innovations. In Zeguo, they have even introduced a form  
of government by focus group. But the main criterion guiding  
political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist  
party's monopoly on power. Can a more responsive form of  
authoritarianism evolve into a legitimate and stable form of government?

In the long term, China's one-party state may well collapse. However,  
in the medium term, the regime seems to be developing increasingly  
sophisticated techniques to prolong its survival and pre-empt  
discontent. China has already changed the terms of the debate about  
globalisation by proving that authoritarian regimes can deliver  
economic growth. In the future, its model of deliberative  
dictatorship could prove that one-party states can deliver a degree  
of popular legitimacy as well. And if China's experiments with public  
consultation work, dictatorships around the world will take heart  
from a model that allows one-party states to survive in an era of  
globalisation and mass communications.

China scholars in the west argue over whether the country is actively  
promoting autocracy, or whether it is just single-mindedly pursuing  
its national interest. Either way, China has emerged as the biggest  
global champion of authoritarianism. The pressure group Human Rights  
Watch complains that "China's growing foreign aid programme creates  
new options for dictators who were previously dependent on those who  
insisted on human rights progress."

China's foray into international politics should not, however, be  
reduced to its support for African dictators. It is trying to  
redefine the meaning of power on the world stage. Indeed, measuring  
"CNP"—comprehensive national power—has become a national hobby-horse.  
Each of the major foreign policy think tanks has devised its own  
index to give a numerical value to every nation's power—economic,  
political, military and cultural. And in this era of globalisation  
and universal norms, the most striking thing about Chinese  
strategists is their unashamed focus on "national" power. The idea of  
recapturing sovereignty from global economic forces, companies and  
even individuals is central to the Chinese worldview.

Yang Yi is a military man, a rear admiral in the navy and the head of  
China's leading military think tank. He is one of the tough guys of  
the Chinese foreign policy establishment, but his ideas on power go  
far beyond assessments of the latest weapons systems. He argues that  
the US has created a "strategic siege" around China by assuming the  
"moral height" in international relations. Every time the People's  
Republic tries to assert itself in diplomatic terms, to modernise its  
military or to open relationships with other countries, the US  
presents it as a threat. And the rest of the world, Yang Yi  
complains, all too often takes its lead from the hyperpower: "The US  
has the final say on the making and revising of the international  
rules of the game. They have dominated international discourse… the  
US says, 'Only we can do this; you can't do this.'"

One of the buzzwords in Chinese foreign policy circles is ruan quanli— 
the Chinese term for "soft power." This idea was invented by the  
American political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, but it is being  
promoted with far more zeal in Beijing than in Washington DC. In  
April 2006, a conference was organised in Beijing to launch the  
"China dream"—China's answer to the American dream. It was an attempt  
to associate the People's Republic with three powerful ideas:  
economic development, political sovereignty and international law.  
Whereas American diplomats talk about regime change, their Chinese  
counterparts talk about respect for sovereignty and the diversity of  
civilisations. Whereas US foreign policy uses sanctions and isolation  
to back up its political objectives, the Chinese offer aid and trade  
with no strings. Whereas America imposes its preferences on reluctant  
allies, China makes a virtue of at least appearing to listen to other  
countries.

But while all Chinese thinkers want to strengthen national power,  
they disagree on their country's long-term goals. On the one hand,  
liberal internationalists like Zheng Bijian like to talk about  
China's "peaceful rise" and how it has rejoined the world; adapting  
to global norms and learning to make a positive contribution to  
global order. In recent years, Beijing has been working through the  
six-party talks to solve the North Korean nuclear problem; working  
with the EU, Russia and the US on Iran; adopting a conciliatory  
position on climate change at an international conference in Montreal  
in 2005; and sending 4,000 peacekeepers to take part in UN missions.  
Even on issues where China is at odds with the west—such as  
humanitarian intervention—the Chinese position is becoming more  
nuanced. When the west intervened over Kosovo, China opposed it on  
the grounds that it contravened the "principle of non-intervention."  
On Iraq, it abstained. And on Darfur, in 2006 it finally voted for a  
UN mandate for peacekeepers—although Beijing is still under fire for  
its close ties to the Sudanese government.

On the other hand, China's "neocons"—or perhaps they should be called  
"neo-comms"—like Yang Yi and his colleague Yan Xuetong openly argue  
that they are using modern thinking to help China realise ancient  
dreams. Their long-term goal is to see China return to great-power  
status. Like many Chinese scholars, Yan Xuetong has been studying  
ancient thought. "Recently I read all these books by ancient Chinese  
scholars and discovered that these guys are smart—their ideas are  
much more relevant than most modern international relations theory,"  
he said. The thing that interested him the most was the distinction  
that ancient Chinese scholars made between two kinds of order: the  
"Wang" (which literally means "king") and the "Ba" ("overlord"). The  
"Wang" system was centred on a dominant superpower, but its primacy  
was based on benign government rather than coercion or territorial  
expansion. The "Ba" system, on the other hand, was a classic  
hegemonic system, where the most powerful nation imposed order on its  
periphery. Yan explains how in ancient times the Chinese operated  
both systems: "Within Chinese Asia we had a 'Wang' system. Outside,  
when dealing with 'barbarians,' we had a hegemonic system. That is  
just like the US today, which adopts a 'Wang' system inside the  
western club, where it doesn't use military force or employ double  
standards. On a global scale, however, the US is hegemonic, using  
military power and employing double standards." According to Yan  
Xuetong, China will have two options as it becomes more powerful. "It  
could become part of the western 'Wang' system. But this will mean  
changing its political system to become a democracy. The other option  
is for China to build its own system."

The tension between the liberal internationalists and the neo-comms  
is a modern variant of the Mao-era split between bourgeois and  
revolutionary foreign policy. For the next few years, China will be  
decidedly bourgeois. It has decided—with some reservations—to join  
the global economy and its institutions. Its goal is to strengthen  
them in order to pin down the US and secure a peaceful environment  
for China's development. But in the long term, some Chinese hope to  
build a global order in China's image. The idea is to avoid  
confrontation while changing the facts on the ground. Just as they  
are doing in domestic policy, they hope to build pockets of an  
alternative reality—as in Africa—where it is Chinese values and norms  
that increasingly determine the course of events rather than western  
ones.

The western creations of the EU and Nato—defined by the pooling  
rather than the protecting of sovereignty—may one day find their  
matches in the embryonic East Asian Community and the Shanghai Co- 
operation Organisation. Through these organisations, China is  
reassuring its neighbours of its peaceful intent and creating a new  
community of interest that excludes the US. The former US official  
Susan Shirk draws a parallel between China's multilateral diplomacy  
and her own country's after the second world war: "By binding itself  
to international rules and regimes, the US successfully established a  
hegemonic order."

The UN is also becoming an amplifier of the Chinese worldview. Unlike  
Russia, which comports itself with a swagger—enjoying its ability to  
overtly frustrate US and EU plans—China tends to opt for a  
conciliatory posture. In the run-up to the Iraq war, although China  
opposed military action, it allowed France, Germany and Russia to  
lead the opposition to it. In 2005 when there was a debate about  
enlarging the UN security council, China encouraged African countries  
to demand their own seat, which effectively killed off Japan's bid  
for a permanent seat. Equally, Beijing has been willing to allow the  
Organisation of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new  
UN human rights council. This diplomacy has been effective— 
contributing to a big fall in US influence: in 1995 the US won 50.6  
per cent of the votes in the UN general assembly; by 2006, the figure  
had fallen to just 23.6 per cent. On human rights, the results are  
even more dramatic: China's win-rate has rocketed from 43 per cent to  
82 per cent, while the US's has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 per  
cent. "It's a truism that the security council can function only  
insofar as the US lets it," says James Traub, UN correspondent of the  
the New York Times. “The adage may soon be applied to China as well.”

The debate between Chinese intellectuals will continue to swirl  
within think tanks, journals and universities and—on more sensitive  
topics—on the internet. Chinese thinkers will continue to act as  
intellectual magpies, adapting western ideas to suit their purposes  
and plundering selectively from China’s own history. As China’s  
global footprint grows, we may find that we become as familiar with  
the ideas of Zhang Weiying and Wang Hui, Yu Keping and Pan Wei, Yan  
Xuetong and Zheng Bijan as we were with those of American thinkers in  
previous decades; from Reaganite economists in the 1980s to the  
neoconservative strategists of the 9/11 era.

China is not an intellectually open society. But the emergence of  
freer political debate, the throng of returning students from the  
west and huge international events like the Olympics are making it  
more so. And it is so big, so pragmatic and so desperate to succeed  
that its leaders are constantly experimenting with new ways of doing  
things. They used special economic zones to test out a market  
philosophy. Now they are testing a thousand other ideas—from  
deliberative democracy to regional alliances. From this laboratory of  
social experiments, a new world-view is emerging that may in time  
crystallise into a recognisable Chinese model—an alternative, non- 
western path for the rest of the world to follow.