By Aristides Hall
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
This quote will be well-known to any who have read the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, describing the legendary clash during the Han dynasty between the tripartite kingdoms of Wei, Shu-Han and Wu. It is also as well-known to anyone who takes an interest in Chinese political affairs and has the misfortune of reading an article published in the majority of Western media. The phrase appears as part of a deep dive into Chinese classics to understand the (apparently) overwhelmingly complex system of power that governs that vast realm of China. The only way to truly understand China, according to these writers, is to delve into its history and find precedent upon precedent for the actions that the Chinese state undertakes today, leading to enlightening but worryingly basic conclusions such as “China will prioritise its internal security”.
This begs the question: why do Western analysts feel the need to reach deep into the bag of Chinese legend, mythology and history to “understand” the People’s Republic, when the same standards are not applied to other countries?
Henry Kissinger, one of the most prolific Western authors on China and realpolitik, is responsible for this mysticism. He mentions the “mandate of heaven” 14 times in his work. The “mandate of heaven” essentially acts as an orientalist metaphor that replaces political legitimacy with celestial authority. None, however, discuss the loss of the Bourbons’ “divine right” as a major contributing factor for the French Revolution nor the English Crown’s absence of celestial backing in the American Revolution. Rather the emphasis of this metaphor appears to be reserved only for China. Revolutions in Europe are given political agency and understood to be progressive, with the end goal to bring about status-quo change through the use of power. In China, it seems to be implied that the goal of revolution is to gain power and little else. How could one possibly interpret the idea that power in China is unshifting based on only one true legitimating factor? This is the vicious double standard imposed on scholarship about China. It is difficult to think of the decades-long effort by the CPC to win the Chinese Civil War as succeeding primarily because the Guomindang lost the “mandate of heaven”, a party rife with crisis and instability due to distinctly human, not celestial, factors.
Another characteristic of contemporary journalism about the PRC is its excessive reliance on Xi Jinping as representing the entire Chinese political system. While explaining systems and ideology through the medium of “great men” serves as a useful introduction to the basic concepts, it has the result of condensing an entire era and its infinite complexities into a glorified obituary. While some Western political journalists scoff at the idea of collective leadership and continue to argue that the entire system is run by one man, we see various examples throughout history demonstrating that decision-making in China is an incredibly complex process that does not fit into neat little biographies of singular figures. However, not every senior figure is an amicable, incredibly talented diplomat such as Zhou Enlai, or the martyred liberal Zhao Ziyang. Western journalists seem to miss the age of Mao, and all of his poetry and constant references to classical Chinese literature, which acted as a confirmation of their own preconceptions of China as a civilisation. They would write about the Chinese classics, and Mao would echo their words in a speech that same year.
Now this is no longer the case; the PRC is a well-established state and no longer reliant on charm and psychological warfare on Khrushchev to position itself internationally. The era of charismatic communists has ended, replacing these fascinating characters with a cast of boring bureaucrats. Such apparatchiks do not make for loud and exciting headlines, as Mao frequently did (most famously joking that the world could sustain nuclear war, as it would surely result in the victory of communism). Their headlines are more mundane, such as the dismissal of former MFA Qin Gang due to his public adultery, rather than as the culmination of an exciting power struggle. Nowadays, taking Mao’s dry humour literally is not possible, so more must be made of the Chinese political system. It must be the Romance of the Three Kingdoms again, filled with villains, heroes and larger-than-life characters. While entertaining, this journalistic sensationalism results in heavily distorted analysis that fails to contribute to the landscape of information about the PRC.
Another fault of Western journalists is, presumably whilst looking through the Wikipedia summary for China, stumbling onto the “Etymology” section and discovering something new. They learn that the literal translation of 中国 (Zhong Guo) as “middle kingdom”. This is treated as a grand reveal of Chinese chauvinism–that to the Chinese, China is the centre of the world. Therefore all its efforts at becoming a great economic power since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping are an attempt at rebuilding a Chinese empire. However, the term has been in use since 1000 BCE. China has been called 中国 Zhong Guo (or something to that effect) in Chinese dialects for longer than Rome has been called Roma in Latin. Furthermore, the USA, great opponent of the PRC in the 21st century, is called 美国 (Mei Guo) in Chinese, meaning “beautiful kingdom”. Does this mean that the United States has an exceptional, nation-defining beauty or is it just a character that both phonetically matched the syllable “me” and carried a nice connotation? The reader can decide.
To answer the question posed at the beginning of the article, the reasons Western writers feel the need to adopt such an approach to China are manifold. China is emerging as a new superpower, and latent Western anxieties about this fact are emerging throughout our media. China is an ideologically communist state with thousands of years of civilization under its belt. This gives it a recognisably European “civilisational heft” in that it also boasts a multitude of technological achievements and expansive empire-building. China only fell to the wayside in terms of power during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its ascension to the global stage marks a return to form. China represents a threat to Western economic hegemony due to its Belt and Road Initiative and dealings with African nations that supersede the West’s own. There is no room for an ascendant China in the current global order, which means, as many scholars argue, that we are approaching a “Thucydides Trap”.
Conflict with China will be inevitable, so it is time to both understand and vilify China in a new bout of orientalism.
To conclude, this new orientalism has taken hold everywhere. Culturally, there is much fear about the impact of TikTok on Western youth, with the app’s greatest crime not being the theft of data (rich coming from the collective nations home to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), but seemingly being owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Not to mention the West’s difficulty with identifying Asians correctly, as many will remember from the farcical March 2023 Congress. Chinese cultural products are still treated with much suspicion and scepticism in most areas of the internet. Netizens will frequently decry what they view as CPC interference in games, as in the case of “Hoyoverse”, a Chinese game company that publishes hits like “Genshin Impact” and “Honkai: Star Rail”. Referring to the former game, a move to make female character outfits less revealing received heavy backlash online, with the decision attributed to CPC censorship. One may also remember the reaction to the spread of Covid, with terms like ‘Kung Flu’ being thrown about by senior Western politicians. This, along with other racist presumptions, led to a 339% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US. The wave of racism has still not ended, with 32% of Asian Americans having faced racist verbal abuse since May 2023. It is not difficult to make the link between increasing anti-Chinese sentiment and greater hate towards Asians as an ethnicity. It would appear that the West is sinking further and further into sinophobia.
In all Western scholarship on China, it seems that there is really only one person in which we can truly invest our trust. His words are perhaps the only truly insightful encapsulation of China. As De Gaulle once said: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.” Instead of treating China like a different planet, where mysticism reigns supreme and court politics still play out day-to-day, it is time to bring scholarship back to square one. It is time to open the Chinese-language books, earnestly study the Chinese political system and remember that China is a nation of people with the same expectations of their political system as we have.
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
