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Bear with me. I’m going to kick off today’s post with a snapshot about how we organize the blog’s content week by week in order to set the stage for then revealing the slight wrinkle with today’s post. Boring. Hang in there, though … there’s a good reason.
The TEA Collaborative produces three blog-posts per week: on Mondays (aspirationally, at least) we put out a tech-related post which takes care of the T in our name; on Wednesdays (ditto) an energy/environment post which covers the letter E; and on Fridays (ditto) an A post for Ambitions (by which we mean the effort to chronicle the seventy-year undertaking by the government of the People’s Republic of China to leverage their huge population, along with other assets, to confront the world with a new, ambitious model of change at vast scale and speed).
So as not to get trapped into rigidity, we have also been planning all along to fold occasionally a so-called X-factor post into this T-E-A formula. X-series posts will generally be the contribution of an invited guest blogger who is an acknowledged Xpert (sorry, couldn’t resist) in the broad field of U.S.-China relations.
Today’s post turns out to be a bit of a hybrid between A and X. Originally, we were lining up an X-series post which I thought might appear today but, for various reasons, that expert will need to hold off her appearance until September. Since I did not myself have anything particularly cogent prepped for Ambitions as a fall-back, I went through much of the day yesterday mentally open, in equal measure, to either inspiration or dumb luck. Dumb luck won the day.
As a result, I am able to present here both a fortuitous hybrid — content that actually does fit the A-Series perspective but happens to be delivered by a different X-series expert. (The wrinkle is that the X-series expert is not yet aware that he is filling in this way. I’ve written him today to explain and to get his blessing. Having gotten to know him in a sense after listening to more than 100 hours of his podcast series, I’m pretty sure he’ll go for it. If not, though, I’ll have to pull this from the blogsite. So, you might want to read fast.)
OK, here we go …
In our T(ech) post from last week, Fiddling Around with U.S.-China Tech, I asserted: “there was undoubtedly a measure of optimistic naïveté in the West in assuming China’s willingness to dutifully assume the role of a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the post-WWII world order. If the Chinese had conceived of their nation as only having been born in 1949, assuming the mantle of responsible Pax Americana stakeholder might have fit more comfortably. As it was, Chinese conceived the People’s Republic of China as the heir to a Chinese polity which had been the dominant economy in the world for sixteen of the previous eighteen centuries. They weren’t predisposed to simply adopting some newcomer’s rules and norms as to how China should conduct itself on the world stage.”
Today’s post is going to put meat on the bones of that assertion. In order to do so, I will turn to Mike Duncan — creator, author and narrator of the magisterial History of Rome podcast series. On the occasion of the 100th episode of his series, Mike took listeners’ questions. For the remainder of this post, I am going to take his answers to two questions from that podcast, reverse the order in which he answered them, and share his erudition here to shine a bright light on the two component parts of my assertion: first, why would the Chinese not naturally think of themselves as heirs to something very special which pre-dated 1949 by quite a few years; and, second, why would the Chinese not naturally have some skepticism about falling in line with a new-fangled U.S.-led world order dating back to 1949.
Except for the headings, the following two points of text are entirely drawn from the 100th episode of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast.
- China Has More Historical Continuity Than The Roman Empire (And That’s Saying Something)
Question:
What, if any, relationship existed between ancient Rome and China?
Answer:
The majority of the contact between Rome and China was indirect, but the two great bookends of the world certainly knew that the other existed. The Han Dynasty, which persists in one form or another from about 200 BC to 220 AD was rising at the same time as the Romans, and as Rome headed East, the Han headed West. And it was during this period that the links became more overt. With the stabilizing hand of the Han in place the famous Silk Road was able to knit itself together, carrying silk and other Oriental treasures from China all the way to Antioch, and from there to Rome, while, among other things, Roman glasswork made their way back to the Chinese.
In 97 AD a Chinese embassy was sent West to try to make contact with the kingdom of the Da Qin, which is what the Han called Rome. But apparently they were stopped short in Mesopotamia after the Parthians explained that the difficult crossing to Rome would take another two years at least. This bald faced lie was meant to keep the two poles of the lucrative trade routes, which Parthia controlled, from ever meeting and working out a way to bypass the Parthian middlemen.
In 166, though, a Roman embassy was sent east and was able to make contact with the Chinese emperor. Debate still swirls about how the Romans got there, whether by sea or overland, but a meeting definitely occurred and the Romans offered up all kinds of gifts from the West, including a book of Greco-Roman astronomy. Nothing concrete seems to have followed the meeting though, and thereafter the two sides continued to simply trade with one another indirectly via the Silk Road or by the sea routes around India.
For the remainder of the Empire, Chinese silk remained a highly sought after luxury item in Rome, and was a major point of contention, both for old school conservatives who found how revealing the fabric was disturbing, and proto economists who worried about how much gold was disappearing east for nothing but a few scraps of cloth.
2. What’s the Enculturated Chinese Attitude Towards a ‘Pax Americana’ Dating Back to 1949?
Question:
“One of the earliest topics that was brought up is the purported similarities between ancient Rome and the US. What are the main similarities and differences between ancient Rome and the present and historical US?”
Answer:
Well, let’s go through the obvious list. The United States kicked out a monarch, founded a republic wildly skewed in favor of a rich aristocracy (that was self-consciously modeled on Roman institutions), dealt with violent upheavals as the lower social classes attempted to capture some power for themselves, expanded aggressively on their own continent before accidentally capturing overseas territories, and is now utterly dominant militarily, politically and economically. What else do you need to know?
Throw in the fact that if you believe the Soviet Union was Carthage and that the Cold War is our equivalent of the Punic Wars, then you can even locate us within the larger timeline right around the rise of the Gracchi brothers and, hey, look, Tea Parties.
Except that one thing that’s really been driven home to me lately is that while you can find these superficial similarities, there are much deeper differences. Every powerful nation follows its own trajectory, for its own particular reasons, towards own particular end, though usually at the height of each one’s power, they claim that they are the rebirth of the Roman empire.
For me, the biggest difference between America and Rome is that compared to Rome, the United States is a baby and could be very well proved to be merely a flash in the pan. The Roman Empire became the dominant state in the Mediterranean around 200 BC and remained as such in one form or another until the fall of Constantinople in the 1450s. I mean, we are talking about a nearly 2000 year period where you simply cannot talk about anything that occurred in North Africa, Europe, or the Middle East without talking about Rome. America, by contrast, was a pretty decent regional power for about a century, a pretty major world power for about 75 years after that, and has been living with the kind of unipolar prestige Rome enjoyed for centuries for about the last 20 years.
If the United States of America is still around in 3010, I think maybe then we can start talking about comparisons to Rome. Until then, things happen, nations rise and fall, and borders shift. I’m not saying America can’t dominate the world for a millennia. I’m just saying that it’s an awful lot to ask of anyone.
Rome was all about longevity and stability, and that is a test that no one in the West has been able to pass since.
My Personal Postscript
We live in a polarized time. Many people who I encounter in the blogosphere will be inclined to take this post as evidence that I am somehow an apologist for the PRC. Let me set the record straight on that possible perception:
- My entire professional life has been dedicated to supporting U.S. Government institutions (e.g., the U.S. Foreign Service), U.S. Government programs (e.g,. the U.S.-China EcoPartnership program) and U.S.-led People-to-People cooperative programs such as The Philadelphia Orchestra’s engagement with China
- Above and beyond my professional involvements, I personally believe that America’s multi-cultural, future-oriented perspective is the world’s best path forward, at least as far as I have so far encountered
- I do not believe in historical determinism. There is nothing about either Rome’s or China’s longevity which I find instructive for understanding their futures, except for the single fact that the people who grow up in that cultural tradition feel it in their bones
- But, as I took pains to lay out in my Where I Stand post, I will never shy from seeking to understand, take into account, and respect my counterpart’s reality when grappling with a shared problem so that solutions which work for “my side” will also work for theirs. Those are the solutions that stick.
Everything that I have ever done professionally has been approached and viewed through the lens of one of two disciplines. Eventually, I learned to combine the two.
The first was the discipline of cultural anthropology. A twelfth-grade class in 20th c. religious thought led me to major in Asian Comparative Religion at Princeton which led me (after a year of traveling overland from Europe to Taiwan via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal) to a joint MA/PhD program at the University of California at Berkeley. Two and a half years living at 10,500’ in the village of Tengyi in the Manang Valley north of Annapurna (pictured below), taught me how to see the world through the eyes of people with different circumstances and values.
The other was the discipline of diplomacy. I joined the U.S. Foreign Service in the spring of 1988, a little more than two years after getting my degree. (I should mention at this point that I made very good use of the intervening time by moving to New York to court Grace, by marrying Grace, and by renovating our first house in Brooklyn.) Having cleared the various assessment hurdles of the Foreign Service test and having been given an offer to join, it wasn’t a hard decision. My clearest career idea upon receiving my doctorate was that I did not want to stay in academics. And my only interview in the corporate world – with SmithKline (now Glaxo) – could have made for an amusing episode of The Office. So I took the offer. Having come in initially through the State Department, I asked for a lateral transfer into the U.S. Department of Commerce branch of the Foreign Service, because my sense was that — for the two places I really wanted to be posted, China and Japan – a lot of the Embassy action was on the business side. I wasn’t wrong. Anyway, the point I want to make here is that the anthropological viewpoint worked well with the diplomatic viewpoint to help me see issues in three dimensions and, with that better field of vision, helped me resolve some the issues at the heart of the U.S.-Japan Auto Talks and other knotty diplomatic challenges. I don’t think I ever told business clients, and rarely told Embassy colleagues, that I was trained as a cultural anthropologist. I definitely never contemplated for a moment putting PhD on my business cards. But I used the anthropological perspective every day during my time in the Foreign Service.
With this as personal introduction, I’ll share here the three roadmaps – ‘pathmaps,’ more accurately – which have been most helpful in guiding me through both the magnificent panoramas and the minefields of modern U.S.-China relations. In coming weeks, I will give each of these works its own dedicated post. Today will simply list the three with brief thumbnail intros and identify the common thread I have found most useful.
1
Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century
By Orville Schell and John Delury
Random House (2013)
Given to me for Christmas in 2013 by James Gibney — former Foreign Service colleague in Tokyo, editor extraordinaire, and godfather to my younger son – Wealth and Power brings to life a simple but profound insight. Through the life stories of eleven completely different individuals — in some cases, mortal enemies – Schell and Delury show how all eleven hew to a single goal, China’s rejuvenation through the acquisition of wealth and power. The early 19th c. scholar Wei Yuan and the activist Feng Guifen proposed completely different courses of action; the Empress Dowager Cixi, the “new citizen” Liang Qichao and the reformer Sun Yaat-sen all saw radically different pathways to modernization, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong led opposing sides of a decades-long civil war, and Zhu Rongji (whom I met as Mayor of Shanghia on several occasions during my first posting there) and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiabo had entirely different conceptions of the moral duty of a citizen in modern China. Nonetheless, despite differing in their ideas of the best means to reach the goal, they all shared an absolutely identical understanding of the most urgent goal in their lives – helping China acquire enough wealth and power to regain its traditional standing as a world colossus. (This goal, incidentally, continues to be inculcated in the education of every school child in China today).
2
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
By Bruno Maçães
Hurst Publishers (2019)
This book is included not because it is one of the best books about China. Far from it. John Pomfret’s The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom and countless other books would make that cut in front of Maçães. The reason for Belt and Road’s inclusion here is that Maçães does something few too scholars and commentators on China bother to do. He puts himself into the minds and mindset of the Chinese government planners who are charting China’s future. This is what an anthropologist does and the insight it provides helps minimize misunderstanding and creates more space for successful diplomatic outcomes.
Maçães is himself a former Portuguese diplomat with extensive experience in Hong Kong and China. To give just a sense of his approach, Maçães argues that Western theories of international relations entirely miss the basic conception at the heart of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In Maçães’ view, that conception “follows Taoist logic: the single concept first divides in two — land and sea — then in several — the corridors and coutnries — then in many — the specific projects and privileged locations” in the BRI enterprise.
3
The U.S. and China in the 21st Century: Sub-National Sino-American Relations
Course Number IMPA 608 in the School of Liberal & Professional Studies (FY 2019 & 20)
International Masters of Public Administration, Fox Leadership International
Instructor: Terry Cooke Co-Instructor: Liyiran (Shelly) Xia
This is the course I taught at Penn for two years before COVID-19 hit and the course was furloughed. I hasten to point out that I am adding it here because of the input from students, rather than because of my syllabus. The course is designed in two parts: the first seven weeks involves readings, lectures and classroom discussion structured on the basis of my syllabus; the second seven weeks, the most valuable part of the course, is a knowledge co-creation exercise based on original research, much of it in Chinese, which the students conduct and present. It is through this knowledge co-creation exercise and through insights provided by the students and Co-Instructor Shelly Xia that I have been able to articulate the framework which informs the Ambitions portion of the TEA Collaborative project (T = Technology, E = Energy/Environment, A = Ambitions). The Ambitions portion seeks to understand and systematically present the MacroDevelopment vision which Chinese government planners have been elaborating and adjusting since the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (and have been communicating clearly in their Five Year Plans). It is an effort to apply the joint lens of anthropology and diplomacy to better understand the motivation and to better delineate the opportunities and challenges associated with China’s MacroDev trajectory. We use three time periods (and, in the last time, period two different geographies) to organize this undertaking:
1949 – 1978: Version 1.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model
1982 – 2009: Version 2.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model
2012 – Current: Version 3.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model
A) Domestic Release
B) International Release (Belt & Road Initiative
Note: the years not covered above were years of opaque, internal deliberation
within the Chinese Communist Party leadership
The Common Thread
I hope the point is obvious. The common thread here is being able to understand the world as seen through the eyes of your counterpart. As in business, you don’t always know whether your counterpart will prove to be protagonist or antagonist, friend or foe. In order to negotiate the best possible deal, however, it is always vital to understand as well as possible that counterpart’s motivations, core values and thought processes. Whether the climate of U.S.-China relations is chilly or warm, I choose to stand firmly on that ground.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 