Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  The potency of intolerance is undeniable. There may be no force on earth so galvanizing, so identity-creating, so war-enabling as racist nationalism—unless perhaps it is religious fundamentalism of the jihadist variety. Yet fortunately for the world, the same elements that make these ideologies so ferociously mobilizing also set the limits on their reach.

  It is astonishing in retrospect that the Germans failed to take advantage of the tens of millions of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others who might well have become their enthusiastic supporters and soldiers. It is similarly surprising that the Japanese, who had seen in Taiwan how effective strategic tolerance could be in an occupied territory, chose nevertheless to brutalize and slaughter conquered populations elsewhere, guaranteeing the fiercest possible resistance to their rule. But it was the very same ideology that supercharged their rise to power—the same nationalist racial pathology, the same thirst for blood and ethnic cleansing—that prevented both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan from pursuing policies that might have better served their bid for world domination. Needless to say, ideologies of racial supremacy and ethnic cleansing are not particularly good at generating the loyalty of, or recruiting valuable human capital from, the peoples who are to be cleansed.

  Only tolerance can achieve that result. As we return to the twenty-first century in the next chapter, we will see that the three most discussed challengers to U.S. hegemony today—including China and the European Union—are learning this lesson. Can any of these societies gain sufficient wealth and power to bring America's unipolar world dominance to an end?

  ELEVEN

  China, the European Union, and India

  in the Twenty-first Century

  We've had a couple hundred bad years, but now we're back.

  — SHANGHAI RESIDENT

  [The United States] can bribe, bully, or impose its will almost anywhere in the world, but when its back is turned, its potency wanes. The strength of the EU, conversely, is broad and deep: once sucked into its sphere of influence, countries are changed forever.

  — MARK LEONARD, Why Europe Will Run the

  Twenty-first Century

  If international public opinion polls are correct, the majority of world citizenry would prefer to see the end of American world dominance and the restoration of a more balanced constellation of global power.1 This chapter considers the three most frequently mentioned challengers to U.S. dominance: China, the European Union, and India. Interestingly, each of these powers has already been pursuing its own distinctive version of strategic tolerance. Although their models of tolerance are very different from that of the United States—and, in China's case, at first glance barely recognizable as tolerance at all—they go a surprisingly long way toward explaining the enormous successes of these rising powers.

  CHINA ASCENDANT

  In the January 22, 2007, issue of Time magazine, the journalist Michael Elliott concluded his cover story on “the world's next great power” as follows: “[I]n this century, the relative power of the U.S. is going to decline, and that of China is going to rise. That cake was baked long ago.” Elliott also reported on a 2006 survey conducted in China, in which 87 percent of the Chinese respondents felt that China “should take a greater role in world affairs” and more than 50 percent “believed China's global influence would match that of the U.S. within a decade.” According to Kenneth Lieberthal, senior director at the National Security Council's Asia desk under President Bill Clinton, “The Chinese wouldn't put it this way themselves. But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China's century.”2

  Can China become the world's next hyperpower? Any way you look at it, China's economic transformation over the last quarter century has been breathtaking. In 1978, China's per capita income was $230, among the world's lowest, and its growth was stagnant. In terms of development, China was comparable to Indonesia and Tanzania. For the last thirty years, however, China's economy has been expanding at the phenomenal rate of 9.5 percent annually, and today no other country is shaking up the global economy like China.

  In 2003, China overtook the United States as the most popular destination for foreign direct investment. No longer is China dominant merely in labor-intensive sectors like toy, shoe, and clothing manufacturing. Today, China is the number-one producer of cell phones, television sets, and DVD players. Significantly, China is now moving into the manufacture of computer chips, automobiles, jet engines, and military weaponry—sectors typically dominated by advanced economies. It is also the number-one consumer of cell phones and consumer electronics and will probably be the number-one consumer of automobiles in the not-distant future. By 2030, according to some experts, China's economy will be three times larger than that of the United States.3

  What's more, on the international trade front, China is already giving the current hyperpower a run for its money. While the United States continues to battle increasing global hostility, China has quietly connected with nearly all of the world's major countries, both developed and developing, often using debt forgiveness and foreign aid to boost its public image and leverage deals. In the process, China has locked up long-term contracts for billions of tons of Chilean copper, Australian coal, Brazilian iron, and the other raw materials it desperately needs to feed its exploding economic machine.

  In an ironic twist, China has done particularly well by taking advantage of the West's refusal to deal with “rogue states.” In the Middle East and Africa, for example, China has openly refused to condition trade on compliance with international human rights treaties, as have the European Union and the United States, giving China greater access to valuable resources in countries like Angola, Burma, Congo, and Iran. While many protest the U.S. government's inadequate peacekeeping and humanitarian response in Darfur, China has happily established itself as the largest investor in Sudan's massive oil fields. Meanwhile, adding insult to injury, a recent Pew Foundation global survey found that a majority of citizens in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom now view China more favorably than they do the United States.4

  Yet none of this makes the case for Chinese world dominance. If the thesis of this book is correct, America is a hyperpower today above all because it has out-tolerated the rest of the world. More than anything else, the United States’ ability to draw in and exploit the world's most valuable human capital has been responsible for its unstoppable ascent to economic, military, and technological preeminence. If this is true, and if history is any guide, China can overtake the United States as the world's next hyperpower only if it outdoes the United States at strategic tolerance. Can an authoritarian, rogue-state-friendly China possibly do so?

  At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. With only occasional exceptions, China has a long history of xenophobia and ethnocentrism, and for the last fifty years has been notorious for crushing political and religious dissent. Moreover, China—officially described as 92 percent ethnically homogeneous, 94 percent atheist, and with a net negative migration rate—is essentially the opposite of a pluralistic immigrant society.

  But things are more complicated. China's tremendous potential today stems precisely from the fact that it is a spectacular success story of strategic tolerance. Let me explain.

  For most Westerners, even those trying to be open-minded, China's population today probably seems relatively ethnically un-diverse. On any given square block in New York City there can be found Cuban Americans, Korean Americans, Scots-Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and African Americans hailing from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. By contrast, China sports more than a billion people, almost all of whom have black hair (although hair dye is becoming increasingly popular), claim a common ancestry, and consider themselves Chinese.

  But what Westerners and Chinese alike tend not to realize is that the very idea of “Chinese-ness” reflects a triumph of strategic tolerance. Indeed, over its three-thousand-year history, China has essentially accomplished exactly w
hat the European Union is trying to do today—it has brought and kept together in a single political unit a huge number of individuals from vastly different cultural, geographical, and linguistic backgrounds.5 Chinese civilization in fact grew out of a great intermixing of diverse cultures.

  The nation today known as China was “a land long peopled by plural groups” with “extreme linguistic heterogeneity” and stark differences in dress, customs, rituals, and religions. In particular, there has long been a deep divide between the peoples of north and south China, with the Yellow River serving as a rough boundary line.6 Even today, people in southern provinces like Guangdong or my home province, Fujian, speak among themselves Chinese dialects unintelligible to most northern Chinese (or for that matter each other). Chinese from the north tend to eat wheat-based products like the steamed bread called mantou, whereas Chinese from the south tend to eat rice and rice-based products. Moreover, many Chinese (myself included) purport to be able to tell whether someone is from the north or south of China based simply on their physical appearance.

  China was built through a process of conquest and merging of diverse groups. As with the Romans, peoples from the Sichuan basin to the Taiwan Strait found they could not resist the Chinese cultural, political, and military package. Just as the toga and Latin spread from Scotland to Egypt, so too Chinese culture—with its notions of ethnic superiority, Confucian-Taoist strands, the imperial examination system, and the supreme Son of Heaven ruling over all—was embraced by hundreds of millions between the Gobi Desert and the South China Sea. Like the Spaniards and Libyans who turned into Romans in the second century, previously distinct ethnic groups such as the Min, Yue, and Wu peoples all became Han Chinese.

  In overcoming not just north-south, but coastal-inland, rural-urban, and provincial divides, China has succeeded in integrating its peoples beyond the European Union's wildest dreams. A single language—at first only written and now, under the People's Republic, spoken as well—unites nearly all of China's population. Much more fundamentally, a sense of belonging to the Chinese people— of being “Han”—is embraced by at least 92 percent of the population as their primary national and ethnic identity. Western experts on ethnic studies have long insisted that the Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hunanese, and so forth, given their considerable differences in speech, customs, and even physical appearance, are and ought to consider themselves different ethnicities. But they don't. On the contrary, for all their differences and mutual snobberies, these groups, along with the Sichuanese, Tianjinese, Anhuinese, and many others, all think of themselves first and foremost as Chinese—as Zhongguo ren, literally “people of the Middle Kingdom.”7

  This then is the often overlooked story of China's historical internal tolerance. For good reason, what makes the headlines in Western newspapers tends to be the intolerance and repression directed at political dissidents, religious sects such as the Falun Gong, and ethnic minorities like the Tibetans. But the flip side of this intolerance has been the staggering success of Chinese eth-nonationalism as an instrument of strategic tolerance—a success already achieved hundreds of years ago and now simply taken for granted. Today, while the European Union struggles to hold together 450 million people, China commands the loyalty and ethnic identification of nearly 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the world's population.

  So is it possible that unlike every hyperpower in world history, China does not need the talents of immigrants and outsiders? With 1.3 billion people, there is a lot of talent waiting to be mobilized. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that Chinese communities all over the world are famously entrepreneurial, outperforming indigenous majorities throughout Southeast Asia and often disproportionately successful in Western countries.8 Could it be that in the race for world power China already has all the human capital it needs?

  It's possible—but highly unlikely. To begin with, China's own pool of human capital remains sorely undereducated. Although China's education level is much more advanced than that of other developing countries—for example, China's literacy rate for women is 87 percent as compared to India's 45 percent—it is not close to Western standards. Only about half of China's population attends high school, compared to at least 90 percent in the United States. Moreover, China's education system is widely criticized for its tendency to teach rote learning rather than innovative thinking, placing “undue emphasis on speed and memorization of obscure facts” and failing to “produce the kind of students who are able to apply their knowledge in rapidly changing situations in a modern economy.” “Students cram and recite,” complained an education ministry official in 2005. “They remember, but they don't understand.”9

  Meanwhile, at the highest levels of education, China is still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, when forty years ago the country's most gifted and accomplished scientists, researchers, and academics were sent to the countryside to work as field hands— not only a colossal human tragedy and waste of talent but a crippling setback for China's scientific and technological sectors. As of 2000, China had only about 460 scientists and engineers involved in research and development for every 1 million people, whereas in the United States the ratio is roughly ten times higher.10

  To upgrade its “humanware,” as one Chinese official puts it, the Chinese government is devoting massive resources to improving education, with a special emphasis on originality and innovation. Today, some 25 percent of China's student population attend “experimental” primary and secondary schools, designed to encourage debate, “scientific exploration,” and “flexible thinking.” And in a bizarre alliance, the Disney Corporation recently teamed up with the Communist Youth League to hold workshops aimed at “raising creativity”—with the additional benefit of familiarizing the Chinese market with Disney characters.

  At the same time, China has been sending growing numbers of promising young scientists and scholars to study abroad. Known as haigui, or “overseas returnees,” these students were to bring back valuable know-how and to serve as the vanguard of China's technological revolution. (The Chinese word for “turtle” is also pronounced haigui—a source of wordplay among Chinese and a frequent mistranslation in English.) Instead of doing so, however, the great majority of these students chose to remain abroad after obtaining their degrees. From 1986 to 1998, for example, some 85 percent of Chinese students graduating from American universities said they planned to stay in the United States.”

  But this trend may be changing dramatically. In the last five years, as China's standard of living continues to rise, increasing numbers of foreign-educated Chinese are returning to the People's Republic.12 These prize engineers and scientists are often lured back to China with Western-style perks: luxury cars, state-of-the-art condos, and internationally competitive salaries. Many, moreover, are moved by patriotism. The possibility of China's becoming a world superpower fills them with pride and motivation—once again, Chinese ethnonationalism at work.

  Nevertheless, although China's economy has opened considerably, there remains a strong popular perception that hard work and intelligence will not produce commensurate rewards. Shanghai may have a new crop of Prada-wearing real estate moguls, but because corruption in China remains rife, connections continue to be of critical importance. As long as this continues to be the case, China's best and brightest may not want to stay in (or return to) the country. They will try to go where their talents can translate more directly into success.

  But even if China makes great strides in harnessing the energies and talents of its vast population, it is still exceedingly unlikely that this would put China at the cutting edge of the human talent frontier. Why? Because the Western nations have a massive head start. And more fundamentally, because at any given point in time the world's most brilliant, most inventive, most skilled, and most enterprising will never all be found in one locale or among one ethnicity. This, of course, is the thesis of this book: To achieve not regional but world dominance, a society must attract, command the loyalty of, and motivate
the world's most valuable human capital.

  Can China do this?

  There is now a surprising number of Americans and other Westerners working as bartenders and fitness instructors in Shanghai. But attracting relatively unskilled foreigners probably isn't going to be China's ticket to world dominance. More beneficial to China are the significant numbers of Western expatriates who now work for multinational corporations in China. In addition to bringing skills, training local Chinese workers, and consuming luxury goods, these Western expatriates often invest millions of dollars in Chinese property.

  It is worth emphasizing just how dramatically the face of China has changed in the last quarter century. Even after formally “opening up” to the world in 1978, Chinese leaders remained deeply suspicious of the West. Foreigners arrived in a tiny trickle and were viewed as oddities, even in the major cities. According to corporate expats who arrived in Shanghai in the early 1990s, they felt “very James Bond-ish” in a land where few spoke English, “money was flowing really, really stupidly,” and “anything seemed possible.”13

  Around 1995, China began much more aggressively accepting and even recruiting foreigners, explicitly trying to harness the skills and technological know-how of Japanese, French, and Dutch managers, German archaeologists, Lebanese industrialists, Swiss architects, General Electric, Motorola, and the Getty Foundation, to name just a few. Today, China is more cosmopolitan than it has been since the Tang dynasty. Shanghai and Beijing have long ceased to be “hardship posts” for Western expats, who now live in tony Westernized complexes called “Soho” and “Chelsea” and drink lattes at Starbucks and mojitos (or Chivas and green tea) at trendy bars alongside wealthy young Chinese professionals. For better or worse, hummus, bagels, fresh mozzarella, and any number of foreign consumer products are now readily available in Beijing. In addition to the traditional McDonald's and KFC in China, one doesn't have to go far in Shanghai before stumbling on a Taco Bell, a Subway, or even a Mr. Softee truck.14