Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia

Author

Allen Carlson is an Associate Professor in Cornell University’s Government Department. His work mainly focuses on issues related to Chinese politics and foreign policy and Asian security. In 2005 his Unifying China, Integrating with the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty in the Reform Era was published by Stanford University Press. He has also written in the Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Affairs, Asia Policy, Nations and Nationalism and The China Quarterly (forthcoming). His most recent books are the co-edited Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods and Field Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and New Frontiers in China’s Foreign Relations (Lexington, 2011). In 2014 Carlson was the Class of 1955 Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College, and he was named a recipient of an East Asia Institute Fellowship. Professor Carlson is currently developing a research project that examines the emerging role of transnational public intellectuals in shaping debates within China about the country’s rise and its implications for the international system.

Introduction

This paper, which is part of a larger research project, takes up the issue of contemporary China’s relationship with the rest of the world, and between its government and people. In so doing it challenges much of the conventional wisdom about China, both in terms of how to study the country, how it got to this juncture, and where it is headed. It contends that China’s recent emergence on the world stage is much more complex, and mercurial, than observers have so far recognized. It is also one that China’s leaders have found to be increasingly vexing as they have raced to make sense of their new found international position and to maintain control over developments both at home and abroad that are part and parcel of the country’s emergence as a major power.

The paper’s central argument is that China should be viewed as a transnational polity. This state not only involves a deep level of integration between its economy and the international one (a topic that has already been discussed at length by political economists), but also how those within China think of themselves and their country’s relationship with the rest of the world. This is not to say that China have become particularly cosmopolitan, but rather that it is deeply entwined with the international system in ways that extend well beyond how we normally think of the country. Such a development has stimulated deep and far reaching debates within the China over fundamental issues of collective identity and China’s place within the existing international order, while posing a series of troublesome difficulties for a Chinese leadership looking to coral such discussions in a direction that will enhance rather than erode its authority and control over one of the world’s largest, and most powerful, states.

To be clear from the start this is not to contend that such a change is pervasive, or irreversible, but rather that it is meaningful, and constitutes one of the most important recent (even though it is embedded in a longer history of openness) developments within China, and its relationship with the outside world. It is also a shift that has largely gone under-reported by those who study the country. The project from which this paper is drawn looks to rectify such a shortcoming via a focus upon the prominent role within the country of elites who have deep intellectual bonds outside of China, but whom have attain a level of prominence within the country. More specifically, I contend that this group has attained a high level of significance and influence within China, especially following the removal of many of the physical barriers to movement into and out of the country over the last several decades, and with the more recent rise of Internet-based social media that has eclipsed more traditional, territorially grounded, forms of communication. Such actors stand in a nebulous, but crucial, space between China and the world, but also between the country’s top leaders and its vast population.

Over the last 25 years these transnational public intellectuals have moved relatively unfettered across China’s territorial boundaries, gained access to the highest levels of power within the country, and influenced the tone and tenor of popular debates and discussions, while also serving as its main interlocutors on the international stage. It is my impression that many within China are aware of this trend, however, I also feel as was the case with Montesquieu, and the light he shed on American politics over two hundred years ago, outside insight into this Chinese dynamic is needed if we are to fully describe and explain its development and significance.

This paper then places transnational public intellectuals at the center of studying contemporary Chinese politics and foreign relations. The larger project from which it draws upon then considers two primary cases (international relations scholars and contemporary artists) and four secondary ones (economists, legal scholars, leaders of religious movements, and the musicians in the underground music scene). The main empirical chapters of the manuscript that will follow examine how those within these groups have spoken to each other, influenced the state, and shaped public discussions both within their specific areas of expertise, but also more broadly, through contributing to and shaping public debates about what it is to be Chinese, and where the country now fits into the existing international order. Such broader questions have been grounded with a particular attention to the extent to which over the last three decades those within these groups have tended toward either insular or cosmopolitan interpretations of China and its place in the world.

Such a survey, though, extends beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, on the following pages I set out the foundations for the project by considering how the transnational has played a role within contemporary Chinese politics, outlining the extent to which such influences have been under-reported in the existing secondary literature on the country and its foreign relations, and mapping out the conceptual framework for overcoming such limitations.  

Part 1: Questioning the Naturalness of Insularity and Autarky within Modern China

China’s present is very often studied with reference to the country’s propensity and attachment to isolation and insularity, to wall building, to xenophobia. The prevalence of such an interpretation of what was normal for China is evident in both casual studies of the country and in more sophisticated academic treatises. It is a perspective that makes it difficult to see the extent to which the transnational has played a pivotal role in shaping China’s modern development and current trajectory. Thus, for any study seeking to put the transnational at its center it is a necessary first step to challenge the natural, taken for granted nature, of such a narrative.

In brief, the stepping off point for viewing modern China as insular can be found in virtually every conventional study of the turn of the previous century when the Qing dynastic system teetered, and then finally fell in 1911, to be replaced, eventually, by a modern nation-state structure. Not surprisingly this period of rapid transition has long attracted historians and political scientists seeking to describe and explain its tumultuous politics. One might expect that work of this period would give broad consideration to the possibility that the new China that emerged from the wreckage of the Qing was more open to the external world than had previous been the case. Indeed, at first glance, this emphasis is visible in the way the period is normally presented. However, upon closer examination it becomes apparent that most surveys of the time fall back upon known truths about Chinese preferences for insularity.

This being the said, it is also the case that the conventional story in this literature is told with reference to surging levels of economic and political interaction with the outside world, which reveals that China at the end of the 1800s was an entity that was no longer closed off to the outside world. However, fascinatingly, most such narratives also tend to place a heavy emphasis upon the extent to which those within China attempted to channel such a development in the direction of preserving Chinese distinctiveness, and limiting the degree to which change breeched both the territorial and intellectual boundaries of the new country.

The anchor for such a constrained view of the period is located in the famous zhongti, waiyong (中学为体 西学为用) concept that appears to encapsulate how those in China at the time viewed the rest of the world. Chinese scholars first formulated this idea during the end stages of the Qing as an intellectual framework for making sense of the changing world they were confronting. As such zhongti waiyong was central to subsequent May 4th era intellectual debates.

The term is usually translated as “preserving a (Chinese) essence, making use of the foreign” and is generally seen as referring to the preference within the country to somehow save its culture and tradition even as it had to utilize external, western approaches to economics, politics, and culture, in order to survive in a world dominated by others. Most scholars peg this approach to the outside world to the work of Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), especially as his influential essay, “Exhortation to Learning,” which contained a vigorous defense of the old, insular Chinese order, coupled with a limited acknowledgement of the need to change and modernize China through a limited importation of western learning. As Zhang was the first to articulate this position he is deserving of a prominent spot in reflections on this period. However, the enshrinement of his rather static interpretation of the concept is more an artifact of our own preference for continuing to imagine the country’s past as insular than it is reflective of the political and cultural debates of his time...(Continued)

* PLEASE NOTE: This paper is a draft of the introductory chapters of a manuscript that is in progress. Please do not cite or circulate without the author’s written permission.