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China Seeks to Create a Sustainable Environment through Galvanising Nation

Slowly but surely, China’s brand of governmental action and political organisation is gaining increased international credence as a model for stable and sustainable growth.  Many surmise (though they may not yet be ready to admit it) that American policy-makers and intellectuals (and certainly American youth) are beginning to realise that finding ways to temper the irrational and shortsighted greed of the individual is the very soul of future collective political action and global ethics. For China and for the World. By whatever name we choose to call it: collectivism, socialism, socialism with market characteristics. The notion that the invisible hand of free markets alone will hold our species' aspirations in good stead, is a theory that may have outlived its usefulness.

In the West, and particularly in the United States, older cohorts maintain their adherence to notions that the individual can and should subsist without obligation to the collective. This is to be expected given lifelong indoctrination. But what of today’s American youth? Those who have experienced the invective-filled nature of the Internet and our capricious capital markets? How do they feel? The results may surprise you.

The most critical lesson I have learned in the past 15 years living and participating to a degree in Chinese mainland’s growth and growing pains in this. Collective spirit is key. Identifying and achieving collectively indicated goals, inspire noble effort. And thus identity and action as a collective are just as and perhaps more indispensable to posterity (given society’s current circumstance) than the European enlightenment’s focus on individual “freedom” and agency in lieu of collective effort, dialogue, justice, and advance; this highly individualistic liberal theory is a school of thought that survives as the dominant social construct in the West, and globally, to this day. One may note America’s current presidential race as clear exemplar. Filled with promises to individual and demonisation of others aplenty, but very little in the way of substantive policy discussions about how to better than environment and real American lives.

Ironically, Classical Liberal theory is dying by virtue of the very gargantuan multinational corporations it and its economic cousin “capitalism” first inspired.  Today we have global corporations with the economic power and status of genuine planetary public utilities (Facebook, Google, and others). Yet these entities are stateless and largely unregulated.  As the need to control these stateless, cloud-based, multinational behemoths that abet the pollution our virtual environment becomes clear, so does the need to regulate the stateless behemoths, the multi-national corporations that pollute our real environment.

Technology mixed with unlimited capital, but unregulated carry with time a potential for great wonder, but if unregulated great danger.  The danger is the wholesale erosion of privacy, and the wanton proliferation of divisive, unwholesome and unsubstantiated myth (often called “astroturfing”) in an attempt to sew confusion, discord or both. With these dangers we realize that our actions in markets, social networks, and mass publishing in which we habitually engage are not confined, rather their effects are universal because they are universally accessible to others and comprehensively surveilled by the stateless Facebook’s and Google’s who watch and record our every page view, communication and transaction.

These multi-national technology and publishing utilities  danger is superseded only by the danger posed by multi-national industrial and manufacturing juggernauts whose pollutive effect is a 2 century-long abomination. It follows then that our prosperity, security, and human rights depend on collectively formed understandings, guidelines, goals and action, born of purpose rising beyond the banal corporate profit motive or the crass and glossy entertainment opiates these same corporations make available on device screens to numb a new generation of humans.

And thus Classical Liberal theory, which says unfettered market-based resource allocation is the natural state of man, has, by virtue of technology and the multi-national corporation, robbed the common man of his true environment. Stripped him of all privacy or his personal and economic security. While it has served to enrich a few, this is a theory clearly showing signs of obsolescence, in a world rapidly realizing that it has been conned.

As polls of youth demonstrate across the globe, I am not alone in a belief in renewed collective spirit, direction, and inspiration, for and towards each other, not merely for ourselves. I have come as many others must, to a deeply ingrained belief in the power of collective communities, nations and groups of nations to maintain their own identity, but act with common purpose in grappling with these large and powerful entities created through vast accumulation of land, capital, viewers, and their data. Mobilised by noble intent fomented by the People, people can reclaim their natural right as human beings, not slaves to a mechanistic system of capital accumulation and population control.  People joining with one another to form a new, more equitable and harmonious basis for humanity’s traverse of the economic, resource scarcity, and environmental challenges and opportunities sure to come.

I unabashedly support substantive, supranational, enforceable acts of collective sanity like the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. China and America’s ratification is a step in the right direction. Agreements like these transcend Classical Liberalism’s focus on transient economic units of measure of (empty) happiness and boldly look toward healing the planet and returning to mankind its natural sovereignty; weaning big gas and oil interests off of death-dealing fossil fuels and bringing a halt (from the Middle East to Venezuela) to the wars started ad nauseam to acquire and control them. Agreements like the Paris Accords are proof of humanity’s nascent recognition that every human action now tangibly affects the life outcomes of every other. The truth: that I cannot be all that I am to be unless and until you are all that you ought to be–  is the very definition of a collective organism.  As MLK Junior said, this interwovenness is the true nature of reality.  Not the fictive rat race toward the debased morality based purely on accrual of capital and power at the expense of a livable future.  I am hopeful this landmark agreement and many others like it signal an end to adherence on outdated economic and social modalities. Placing capital and free markets above justice, and human worth was not meant to take our civilization beyond it pubescence.  The future will look very different than the past.  The environment, and species survival. Sanity and consciousness. Realization of our heightened connectedness may yet rule the day!

Many will disagree with my thesis, but I am convinced history will exonerate my belief in the primacy of inter-connectedness over individual whim and opportunistic greed. China is obviously the nation who has remained committed to core ideals of social collectivism, come what may, as the apogee of human order, justice, and social development. While I cannot advocate for all their policies and certainly not their every action, my passion is to facilitate candid cultural understanding.  To help paint a clearer picture of China’s developmental goals, rich history, and where possible, to dispel some of the misperceptions that currently drive (and often misdirect) America and the West’s China policy. China and America will together in the coming decades, either destroy the world through armed conflict, the unchecked spread of terror, and willful ignorance of the existential threat posed to many by climate change. Or rather save the world by jointly eradicating these scourges permanently.

Never have two more powerful nations intersected at a single point in history. Yet, never have two so interconnected peoples, trusted or known less about each other. And while this epidemic of misunderstanding goes both ways, it is largely an American malady born of a parochial world-view and the incessant grandstanding necessitated by the prolonged quadrennial spectacle of American presidential elections. The time in American politics when demonization is the rule of the game; the goal being the collection of votes with very little thought of how pragmatic policies will be implemented once the winning candidate is actually elected. Democracy has many strengths, but vituperative public grandstanding, backbiting and name calling, in the American context, is almost certainly one of its most debilitating weaknesses.

We must bridge the gap in trust, knowledge and rational discourse. Truth speaking to other valid truth with candid but gentle tongues, because China and America are the largest siblings in a global family. We share a common destiny and single home whether our moral intelligence is ready to accept the fact or not. We are One. We know today with scientific certainty that our only habitable home’s protective layer has been scorched by a European-spawned “industrial revolution” yet another capital “growth” contagion that has gone global, and whose effects have proved ruinous. Assessing blame is not important, recognizing the emergency is.

The people of China and America along with all the peoples of the world have a joint (dare I say “collective”) responsibility to put the house fire out, and draw humanity back from the precipice of self-inflicted destruction. We have less than 10–15 years (assuming drastic measures to increase renewable and green-fueled economic growth while bringing ozone depleting and earth-warming carbon emissions of the 180-year industrial age to an abrupt end. Many scientists set that bar for curbing global carbon emissions use temperature as the litmus test.   Most agree that in order to stave off irreversible climate change, we must maintain no more than a 1.5 degree Celsius increase above pre-industrial temperature averages in any given year. At the current 3–5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial norms, we can expect a 10-meter rise in sea levels, which will utterly devastate many low lying communities, yearly super storms, anthrax epidemics caused by their release from animal carcasses long-frozen and buried beneath northern climes melting permafrost. Massive droughts, and drastic decreases in water supply especially in the Middle East and central Asia, as well as food supply can be expected. The planet if so affected by drought and water shortages will not be able to feed the 10 billion inhabitants of Earth estimated to be alive in 2050. Which all leads predictably to unbridled conflict and misery. This is a fight for our children and their children’s very existence. 1.5 degrees Celsius is the golden number, we as a collective community, not whimsical abstracted individuals, must together fight to reach.

We have no time for war, be it economic, cyber, conventional or otherwise.  This moment and concomitant collective responsibility to save our planet, are a unique moment in our species’ and planet’s history.  

China is the first superpower in the modern era not of European origin, and China- in a sharp rap to the heads of almost every European economic theorist- plans, controls and subsidizes almost all of its large indigenous corporations (public and private) as well as its currency (many say, China to stimulate growth, manipulates both).  China would argue her economic policies are a means of regulating and tempering the indelible exuberance of global market forces. Opinions will differ, but there is broad agreement that the siblings must use their differing strengths to save our shared home from the inferno.

And so as the fire blazes, in our sister China we are presented with a new type of sibling rivalry. She is at once our largest trading partner. She provides most of the goods, at low cost, the American consumer takes for granted today. She provides a sharp counter-proposal about how limited resources, social justice and governmental regulation and collectively mobilized will toward a larger good can make optimal use of human resource for the betterment of the collective family.  China is also our largest source of IP loss and her markets at times seem impenetrable. She remains the largest beneficiary of corporate manufacturing “offshoring”, and she is our largest foreign creditor. China represents all these opportunities and challenges, and no invective-laced tweet or soundbite from our presidential candidates can encompass either the gravity or the opportunity this intermingling represents.  We must speak in substance not soundbite.  Democracy is a mere semantic.  Semantic understandings are not owned by any one nation. The word democracy itself is not a social good, it is not an action, and it means absolutely nothing without an informed, educated, self-sacrificing public engaged in rational discourse about the matters that affect our species’ advance.  This we must remember for a thousand years.   Political rhetoric in self-proclaimed democracies does not in any way equate to sound government policy.  Rather measurable progress in economic justice, social stability, education, peaceful scientific and cultural advance are the primary ways I believe a government’s performance can be objectively measured.

And while their governmental policies and philosophies today broadly differ, the relationship between the US and China could not be more close-knit. This is true whether we like everything about each other or not. It is important to bear in mind, given the minuscule size of earth, that China and America ARE siblings, of one family. Tied inexorably by destiny. It can not be otherwise, and this we shall realize as our moral facilities continue to develop. One great American president Abraham Lincoln's words echo, "We must not be aliens or enemies, we must be friends."

The Sino/US partnership is a new, uniquely 21st Century relationship. It breaks the mold.  We are Siamese twins, joined at the heart, lung, and hip. Will there be squabbles? Yes, but which of us shall incite the insane and do indelible harm to our blood sibling on whom our own life depends? Sanity demands that the answer be- no one will. The only sane choice is comprehensive cooperation. Healthy sibling rivalry may begin with intense competition about who is taller, prettier, or stronger, but it must mature. Good siblings ultimately learn that their most fundamental responsibility is to take care of their parents- mother Earth and Father time. Good siblings grow in the collective realisation that love, cooperation, and an enduring willingness to find common ground is not just diplomatic platitude, it is an imperative as we, who were gifted this gorgeous blue planet pray for its and our continuance.  

This is a story and history that is not being told in America.

From my vantage point, it is The Story of our Age. Will the United States and China decide to engage in petty squabbles for spheres of influence in the 21st Century?  Or will they join together to sustain our tiny planet’s critical biosphere? The choice is stark, binary and will require a paradigmatic leap of love over the notional fiscal quarter, trade surplus/deficit, job offshoring, irrational containment or currency manipulation; all conversations that, along with false narratives about zero-sum (economic status and war) games, while perhaps inevitable are dilatory at precisely the moment in history where every cooperative second counts.

Having built TV programs and businesses in China for 15 years, I have of late born witness to China’s metamorphosis from the more gentle rhetoric of “Peaceful Rise” to the increasingly bombastic rhetoric, “Asia is our yard, and we do intend to be its primary player.” This change in tone, while the subject of much media speculation in the West is not at all different from America’s Monroe Doctrine of 1823. It defies logic that a nation (America) that used to count the Philippines as a colony finds it necessary to use military muscle and the role of self-anointed ombudsman to adjudicate China’s own complex and natural rise in its own Asian neighbourhood.

The goal of the American Monroe doctrine, as stated, was to enable peace through delineating spheres of influence and keep a mercantilistic and war-like Europe out of the Americas. This made sense after an American revolution to throw tyranny back across the Atlantic. So it is somewhat hypocritical for a nation whose Western boundaries to this day extend beyond the formerly sovereign Hawaiian Islands and all the way to Guam, Saipan and beyond to claim that a rising power and the world’s most populous nation should not undergo a similar dialogue, sans outside interference, with its neighbors. Indeed the dialogue seems natural.   Our own occasional crime-abetting history from Shanghai’s concessions to the Rhee regime in South Korea and the Marcos regime in the Philippines post-colonisation should chasten America’s desire to dictate how Asia pursues this conversation today.

More to the point, while many in the West find this new Chinese assertiveness lamentable, they should in no way have found it unexpected. The rise in national pride and nationalist tenor since 2012, rising to a crescendo post the recent Hague ruling came in tandem with China’s “surge” in what it terms “Comprehensive National Power” (CNP) to wit: the theory that China, in order to be heard and dealt with equably as a great power, will need to harness its full media/cyber/public opinion, economic, and military power, mobilized, managed and leveraged by the ruling Party to “wage and win regional conflicts under informatization conditions.” Conflicts that extend beyond the traditional battlefield. Why this focus on CNP? The Century of Humiliation (something Western schoolchildren learn far too little about) foreign concessions, genocide, the forced sale of opium to China’s citizenry by the British Empire, followed by China’s liberation from unprecedented foreign incursion and injustice, made the majority of Chinese people believe that if they remain united, and reclaim their cultural birthright now, especially as historic technological and environmental challenges loom on the horizon, then China will have earned her place renowned British Sinologist Joseph Needham theorized China has naturally enjoyed for most of the last 20 millennia: a place of trade (not conquest) based economic and cultural pre-eminence among its sister nations.

Casus Bellis

Does this mean war? To that I would say no, certainly not high intensity conflict. That is unless the West or its Asian alliance partners totally misperceive China’s intent or vice versa. For the Chinese CCP armed conflict has first always been about preservation of territorial integrity post Century of Humiliation and the sustenance of the Party as a guiding force of administration and order in a nation larger than any other history has yet countenanced.

While perspectives here also may differ, China has found that in the world’s most populous country, a strong, unified central government provides the optimal environ for rapid, peaceful development without the fear of foreign meddling and incursion. More than mere theory, it is a hard lesson learned time and time again: when China’s central government is weak, its borders and then Chinese mainland have been encroached upon, its resources, natural and human treasure, ignominiously drained. With that historical marker as their lodestar, it is quite easy to see why China’s territorial integrity and maintenance of Central Government (Party) rule are beyond reproach from a rational Chinese perspective.

It is noteworthy that China, often the subject of sharp criticism for sitting on the sidelines of global conflict, has extended its firm principle of non-interference/non-intervention in the domestic affairs and politics of the nations with which it engages.  I liken this policy of non-interference to Star Trek’s prime directive.  And though an imperfect policy, I find it the much better choice when compared to America’s determination to interpose itself and its values wherever and whenever it deems prudent. For all the misery it has caused of late, I think America itself knows that less interference and more circumspection is advisable.  

Though China peacekeeping missions are on the rise, China, still refrains from inserting itself into the domestic politics of the nations of Africa, ASEAN, NE Asia, Europe, and Latin America except in matters of bilateral trade and investment. The same surely cannot be said for European and American Corporate and Government entities whose 4 centuries of interventions and conquest are well documented. While the principle of non-interference in places like Darfur may give rise to critique, it is hard to imagine a more stable and even-handed policy by a great power in the wake of the misery colonialism and the supposed superiority of European paradigms over indigenous people’s has left the world in and the past horrors visited on China itself. China looks inward to guide internal policy and political development and looks outward with a restraint and humility that must be recognized as a new and laudable paradigm on the world stage. China is not looking to impose its morals, values or economic system on anyone. That sentence alone is revolutionary in the history of post-renaissance great power world affairs.

At the same time, China has become the world’s leader by putting its money where its mouth is.  China has begun to make the difficult but needed transition from fossil fuel-dependent to a renewable and green technology economy (see graph below).  In doing so has risked its traditional economic pillars of easy reliance on fossil fuels to power its domestic manufacture for export. This is an extremely laudable long-term environmental protection strategy. This dramatic shift, given China’s historical reliance on fossil powered manufacture for export, is a clarion call that China’s leadership is ready to trade some short-term growth and countenance millions of short-term layoffs for the sake of it’s and the entire planet’s long-term prosperity. Given its progressive arms development, China no longer fears land invasion from any quarter; it only fears fracturing and fissures from within, and this it is fair to say, China and the Party will stop at nothing to avoid.

So Why the Sudden Shift in China Policy, and Why Now?

A reassessment of China’s seemingly bombastic nationalist stance regarding territorial disputes and foreign investment must be engendered. Demonising new paradigms is as old as the welcome Copernicus and Confucius’ ideas first received, but a bold new context for viewing China’s advancing nationalist rhetoric is needed.   Over 40 years China has re-earned national pride of place as the world’s second (and soon to be first) largest economy.  That alone can partly explain  the uptick in national pride sentiment, a pride encouraged by the government. But viewed with a stronger microscope, the upswing in Chinese nationalism and economic protectionism today is not a China looking for conflict, rather it is a China preparing to exhibit strength and galvanise national will for the challenging economic, cultural and lifestyle transformation that is inevitable if China’s “green Revolution” is to find grassroots support and success, and the planet is to survive.

China is taking the measure of what it will take to achieve true environmental sustainability, sans neo-liberal legislative gridlock, and the diktat of multinational corporations.  Corporations who, if unregulated, are guaranteed to put shareholder interests ahead of sound environmental policy or the species’ posterity. China is mentally preparing its citizens to make sacrifices, if needed, for the collective, via a rapid transition toward green sustainable growth. Ergo the nationalism we view as a foreign threat, but is actually a domestic rallying cry for collective solidarity.  What one sees is often determined by what one believes.  The West believes China is looking to control others, so that is what it sees.  The facts viewed from within, belie the flaw in that western interpretation.

A Nation that is prepared when necessary to say “No”

A non-aligned nation saying “no” to the West and its 3 century-long dominant economic and sociocultural paradigms is a new phenomenon on the world stage. So why, we might ask has China seen fit to do so?  I think there are two primary reasons: First, China is saying no to certain conditions placed on it from the outside, because they have a different construct for internal stability and global cooperation in mind. They now feel sufficiently prepared to articulate it.  Their construct is less reliant on fixed alliances and relies more on dynamic, bilateral assessments of cultural, economic and environmental circumstance.  Secondly, China is prepared to say no because China knows that if she maintains domestic solidarity.  If she demonstrates that she can move from one of the two largest emitters of carbon to the most avid green tech catalyst, then she can again create a transformative event that will shock the world, just as her economic growth over the past three decades has taken the world by storm.  And while the transition China has planned will inevitably put great pressure on both the Party and the people to do the hard but necessary transformative work, the leadership’s calculus is that receiving some ire for so-called nationalist sentiment today, as the galvanise the collective, is well worth the long-term return; a world environmentally transformed and a China recognized for its willingness and ability to change and lead by example.

China views its place in history not in the 4 or 6 year units liberal democracy uses as the lens of progress. China views its evolving over the course of millennia. The territorial disputes are a shell game that will be resolved by shared utilisation of the resources via bilateral negotiations at some later date. China understands the nations surrounding it are worried and these issues. China does not view these disputes as hypercritical, but does view them as historically and nationally galvanizing. They will need to be addressed, but for today the nationalist rhetoric serves a greater purpose by imbuing the nation with greater "sense of purpose." And while short-term rancor and even possible low-level conflict is a possibility, China, in taking the long view, believes that using these territorial claims as a foil to prepare its collective community for the radical environmental, culturally economically deep transition ahead, is the right move. They believe and I agree that this strategy will bear ultimate proof of China’s scientific ingenuity, altruism, example based leadership, and perhaps, national greatness.

China’s change in tone was inevitable, the West’s misread of it in the run-up to the G20 summit and Paris Agreement ratification was not.

We must learn to learn about China's future, by living among its people, hearing the stories of their present, the hopes of their future and the echoes of generations past and their rediscovered collective ethos. If that deep, soulful, ethos is returned to by young and old alike, I have no doubt China will play a decisive role in saving and more vitally, renewing this planet and her inhabitants

（青年觀察者胡怡瑩譯，楊晗軼校）

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