PLANETARY AGE IN THE ERA OF CHINESE PREEMINENCE

PLANETARY AGE IN THE ERA OF CHINESE PREEMINENCE
Irnerio Seminatore

Table of Contents:
The era of Chinese preeminence and the hierarchical order of the world. Hegel and the History of Humanity
Homogeneity of the West and heterogeneity of Asia
The Middle Kingdom and the “Myth of Origins”
Singularity and universality of China
The Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. Strategist-Leaders between hubris and catastrophe
On the great turning points

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The era of Chinese preeminence and the hierarchical order of the world.
Hegel and the History of Humanity

What would an international system be without China, its civilizational singularity and its millennial history? Philosophy long preceded geopolitics in giving substance to Hegel’s idea, according to which the final stage of Western modernity is merely the return of the wind that now blows from West to East, from Europe toward Asia, in a direction opposite to the history of the world, which had traveled from the Orient toward the Occident at the dawn of the history of Humanity.

“Enter Asia in order to free oneself from the West!” This is the inversion of Yukichi Fukuzawa’s old slogan of 1885, at the height of the rise of the European countries: “Leave Asia in order to join Europe!”

The origin of millennial China reaches back to an antiquity so remote that it seems to have no beginning and, in its present constitution, it has stood opposed both to the Europe of nation-states and to the imperial figure of the Hegemon, and today participates in the rivalries among the competitive autocracies of the Triad United States–Russia–Celestial Empire. According to the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong, China must not nourish an imperial vocation as a tendency toward supremacy and empire. On the contrary, it must combat this tendency, which stems from the Western and monist vision of history, in contrast to multipolarity based on the heterogeneity of the world and the pluralism of states. The Chinese approach thus opposes the imperial monism of the West, since it follows the morality and prescriptions of the secular philosophy of Confucius (551–479 BC), who preached a hierarchical social order entirely remote from the Western mythology of a cosmic creation.

Homogeneity of the West and heterogeneity of Asia

From time immemorial, East and West have been distinct and relatively isolated civilizational spaces, for human history divided these two great regions of the world into distant theaters. Before the twentieth century, the world was not unified from a diplomatic or strategic point of view, and the Asian system functioned according to its own rules, its own hierarchy and its own codes of legitimacy, largely independently of the European system. Its heterogeneity clearly distinguished it from the cultural and civil homogeneity of European societies and their forms of government. This particularity influenced the duties of princes and the obligations of peoples, for the model of good government draws inspiration from two incompatible conceptions of time, sacred or secular, as well as from two conceptions of the order of the world. Sacred time, in a free interpretation of the religious, is a form of knowledge linked to the myth of the origins of power and, in fact, to its justification and its legitimacy. Deprived of divine anointing, modern power stumbles and collapses as philosophy and as morality. Reduced to secularism and the human order, man can rebel only against himself and his carnal nature, in other words against his own limits. Secular time, that of Buddha and Confucius, refuses all metaphysics and reveals, in the immobility of time, the hierarchy of the natural order of things, opposing pernicious upheavals. If in traditional societies everything is sacred, in modern and secularized societies a clear distinction exists between the religious domain and the domain where, following the wars of religion and the affirmation of the principle “Cuius regio, eius religio,” the loss of influence of the religious in the life of a society sacralizes the secular notions of liberty, equality, fraternity, tolerance, private property, etc.

The rules of government and the duties of princes differ in the two contexts, which for centuries were the Asian societies and the European societies. In the course of history, the world of the sacred progressively contracts in the West, and the East operates and legislates in a universe that has divinized power as the expression of a sacredness of origins, indisputable and absolute. Several sovereigns thus formed themselves through military or spiritual conquests in the geographical spaces of immense Asia, with the codes, rituals and norms of isolated societies or societies without exchange with others, and primarily of a superior civilization and society imposing itself by evidence, by its technical and social advances as well as by its artistic and cultural refinement—that of the Middle Kingdom. The heterogeneity of the geographical and cultural environment found its counterweight in the universality of a philosophy that codified, like the old religions, the rights and duties of all the subjects of the empire. Heterogeneity prevailed in Asia and homogeneity in Europe.

The Middle Kingdom and the “Myth of Origins”

In the time of the myth of origins, the first duty of a Prince, according to Confucius (551–479 BC), is to live in harmony with the principal tendencies of his time, to recreate a just and harmonious order, and to know his place within the framework of a Sino-centric world. The primary metaphysics of the expansion of the territorial claims of Chung Kuo stops beyond Taiwan, excluding Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia, for the only recognized demarcation is cultural differentiation for a system of power in which China is at the center, at the summit of a universal political hierarchy and surrounded by vassals. Moreover, and in a very different context, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, as new “Sons of Heaven,” belong to the category of gathering Sovereigns, capable of bringing the people back to the heights of the world’s highest ambitions, while avoiding playing a kind of “soft balancing” with the other dominant powers of the system. In the European imagination the Asian system has been a cultural area shaped by culture, where history and civilization prevail over geography, where the sky and secular time design the roofs of the pagodas and the fears of men. Globally it is Asia—geographically interdependent regions but long isolated: the Near and Middle East, the Greater Middle East, the land of the steppes and the Mongols, the Persia of Xerxes, the King of Kings, heir of Babylon, India or old Bharat, land of Sanskrit and the four Vedas, Samarkand, hearth of the cultures of the world, millennial China, the Japan of the shoguns, and all that travel, commerce and the interest of the dominant powers have imagined and transmitted concerning the central land, the “Middle Kingdom,” the “zhongguo.” The Orient has often been identified with China, over which was exercised the mandate of the “Son of Heaven,” the pivot of the “Great Harmony,” the Emperor who reigns over “all that is under Heaven,” at the crucible of the four equinoxes, before whom one prostrates oneself, recognizing in him a superiority of celestial nature. Is it with this Orient that the twenty-first century will have to deal? Or, on the contrary, with the People’s Republic of China, in which a very glorious past and an intimidating future coexist? One term does not exhaust the other, and it seems to me opportune to bring out what history conceals and perpetuates.

Singularity and universality of China

China is a forty-century-old civilizational state which, from the Temple of Heaven in Beijing to the monasteries of millennial Tibet, embraces the horizon of a red sun of intense tonality. No other country can possess the singularity of a civilization so ancient and yet so permanent. China today projects itself into a hegemonic, planetary and multidimensional perspective, defining the balance of powers on the scale of the world. It will be the giant of the century to come! From the period of the first legendary dynasty (2100/1600 BC), and especially that of the “Springs and Autumns,” military conflicts gave birth to the Warring States that absorbed the smaller ones by cunning, by court intrigues and by force. The flowering of Chinese philosophy and culture, with Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism, gave particular importance to this period and characterized it by the blossoming of literary writings, among them the “Book of Changes” and those of Lao Tse and Sun Tzu. These writings summarize the sum of the dilemmas and interrogations that men of thought and of action must resolve in the dramas of their lives or in the collective engagements of their peoples. No other state has known so profoundly the term “restoration,” that is to say renaissance and new life. In the reading of their past, the intellectuals of Chung-Kuo have always presented Chinese civilization as inspired by the watchword of “harmony,” which had marked the golden age of culture and had periodically sunk into chaos. Thus they have continually recalled that the Great Wall was built to protect and not to conquer, and that the Silk Road had as its vocation commerce and not expansion. They have often reminded us that Admiral Zheng He (1433), known for his seven maritime expeditions, filled his fleets with porcelains, books and teas, and not with weapons. They have invited us to remember, long after the Opium War of 1840, that China was always the victim of European aggressions and unequal treaties, which inflicted wounds of self-esteem and unforgettable humiliations through the politics of the stronger. In the course of the tragic twentieth century the bottom was touched by the civil wars, the world wars and the revolutionary wars. Always seized by the paradox of its origins and the struggle between past and future, China, having become the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949, took the path of conciliation with Deng Xiaoping and his policy of the Four Modernizations.

The Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping

In the objectives displayed at the end of the 1970s, the “Four Modernizations,” which include industry, agriculture, science, technology and national defense, were intended to make China a great economic power at the dawn of the twenty-first century. These reforms, centered on independence, increased the volume of the country’s exchanges, which opened its market, particularly for the purchase of machine tools from Japan and the West. Launched by Deng Xiaoping, this policy transformed China, making it pass from a planned economy to a world economic power, thanks to commercial opening and foreign investment, while parallelly reinforcing the authoritarian control of the Communist Party through the repression of democratic demands, as was seen in Tiananmen Square (15 April–4 June 1989). The failed Fifth Modernization was the name of a wall poster (dazibao) placed and signed by Wei Jingsheng on 5 December 1978 on the “Democracy Wall” in Beijing. It was the first poster that openly recommended broader political liberties, suggesting, by a strange illusion, that liberty and democracy were the only “modernizations” that made sense. The poster was a response to the campaign of the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Four Modernizations and led to a bloody repression. In the eyes of Beijing, the process of modernization Chinese-style was to make it possible to assert a global Leadership alternative to the Western model and to promote peaceful development. Yet after the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (16–22 October 2022), the new line prescribed by Xi Jinping aimed to explain that “Chinese-style socialist modernization” intends to offer an alternative to a dominant model of Hegemon and at the same time consecrates China’s worldwide ambitions.

Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping.
Strategist-Leaders between hubris and catastrophe

On the subject of a permanent theme of reflection, the theme of “Leadership,” H. Kissinger recalls in his work On China that without leadership societies drift and risk running toward catastrophe (EU), since the role of the leader is to possess an intuitive understanding of direction, which enables him to define objectives and to conceive strategies. A Leader must situate himself—he says—at the intersection of the past and the future, intrinsically conjectural and uncertain, and possess the essential and natural virtues of courage and strength of character. Insisting on the value of instinct and the capacity for judgment, Henry Kissinger recalls that the Leader is obliged to navigate within very narrow margins of maneuver and in a risky equilibrium, between the sanction of excessive ambition (hubris) and the price to be paid for failure and catastrophe. Thus, and although in different contexts, Deng Xiaoping astride the century and Xi Jinping today deserve to be classed in the category of “Strategist-Leaders” of the present historical conjuncture. Deng within the framework of national policy and Xi in the space of world power politics, as gathering Sovereigns, or new “Sons of Heaven.” The celestial task of the latter must bring the people back onto the path of virtue from which they had strayed, inside the country, and China itself into the “great harmony” of the universe at the heart of external relations. By comparison, European governors and politicians, as dwarfs of “Great Politics,” remain in the fog of historical insignificance and international blindness. Thus the Chinese approach to the order of the world, incontestably hierarchical, differs profoundly from that of the Westerners (the barbarians come from the south), for the finality is not to enslave the barbarians but to divide them, by exploiting their discords, by “using the barbarians to defeat the barbarians,” or again “to maintain a war among them favorable to China” (a war in Ukraine, but not a double conflict, in Ukraine and over Taiwan).

On the great turning points

Yesterday as today, the great turning points in the relations between China and the rest of the world are scarcely economic relations, nor privileged relations with global actors of size, but first and foremost the joint Sino-American relations concerning a shared order of the world and the more pertinent morphology of the international system of tomorrow.

This explains why, given the geopolitical logic and the prior and absolute defense of national interests, the attitude of China and of the United States remains ambivalent regarding crisis situations and their respective roles as partner-adversaries in bilateral relations, as well as regarding their own role in the world. Within the highest functions of their respective states, the helm of a country may entail a distinct vision of political direction, of the role of the captain, of the force of the wind and of the storms to come. Society itself may entail a different tolerance of normality and stability and approach dangerously situations of implosion. China, which for several decades benefited from a peaceful environment of development and growing ease, has been able to endure major traumas for years (demands for reforms and liberties in China—Tiananmen, Hong Kong), and the United States the wars of Vietnam, terrorism and today immigration, Islamism, the Israeli-American conflict against Iran, destabilization in the Gulf, even though their worldwide responsibilities place the two countries at the four corners of the world. What other country or group of countries can boast to the world such historical consciousness and such experience, associating rigor and clarity of reasoning in order to dominate intellectually the logic of systems and to conceive a regional security strategy founded, rather than on a community of values, on a community of interests, reduced intellectually and virtually to a common will for peace and stability.

The original French-language version of this text has been translated using AI technologies.