Читать книгу What Does China Think? - Mark Leonard - Страница 5

China crept up on us slowly in the 1990s. For most of that decade, it was the preserve of regional specialists or fantasists from the business world who dreamt of making vast fortunes, but usually lost even more. However, at some indeterminate point around the turn of the millennium, China stopped being a subject for specialists. From my vantage point as director of a foreign policy think-tank in London, I remember noticing how – all of a sudden – almost every global challenge had acquired a Chinese dimension: from African development to the reform of the United Nations system, the Doha global trade talks to the Iranian nuclear programme, genocide in Darfur to oil prices in Venezuela. China was no longer a big country with which one could choose to enjoy trading or diplomatic relationships; instead it was starting to become part of the furniture of global politics, a universal factor with which we are forced to contend. In terms of political influence China had stopped being like other large developing countries such as India or Brazil. It was turning into something quite new: a miniature USA. I suddenly knew that without understanding China, it would be impossible to understand world politics.

I will never forget my first visit to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy’s vice-president (whose grandfather had translated Marx’s Das Kapital into Chinese), and Huang Ping (a former Red Guard who was then co-editor of the intellectual journal Dushu). Sitting in oversized armchairs – arranged in parallel against the wall in order to protect the backs of the hosts and guest of honour from enemy attacks – we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. ‘The Foreign Policy Centre,’ I began, ‘is four years old. We have around twenty staff, we publish twenty-five policy reports a year and host around fifty seminars.’ Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled before delivering his killer blow: ‘CASS is the highest academic research organization in the fields of philosophy and social sciences. We have fifty research centres that cover 260 disciplines and sub-disciplines, and 4,000 full-time researchers.’ As he said the words, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain’s entire think-tank community is numbered in the hundreds; Europe’s in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the USA cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution – and there are another dozen or so other think-tanks in Beijing alone – had 4,000 researchers. I discovered later that even people at CASS think that many of these researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough to intimidate me in that early meeting.

Wang Luolin’s one-upmanship on size was just the beginning of a well-worn strategy designed to bewilder and co-opt outsiders. We spent many hours engaged in polite conversation without touching on the specifics of our co-operation. These elaborate courtship rituals, seemingly devoid of substance or direction, have been honed over centuries to nullify Western negotiating strategies, and bind foreigners into Chinese ways of doing things, creating webs based on personal contact rather than contractual obligations. At the beginning of the trip, I had hoped to get a quick introduction to China, learn the basics, and go home. But after spending what felt like weeks in these introductory meetings, sitting around sipping tea and exchanging pleasantries I ended up getting sucked in.

I had stumbled on a hidden world of intellectuals, think-tankers and activists who were thinking big thoughts. I soon realized that it would take more than a few visits to Beijing and Shanghai to grasp the scale and ambition of China’s internal debates. My mind was made up – I wanted to devote the next few years of my life to understanding these radical developments; to document the living history that was unfolding before me. I became, so to speak, an accidental sinologist, visiting Beijing so frequently that it began to feel like a second home. And, with each visit, my entanglement with China’s fate grew deeper. I became friendly with many of China’s new thinkers and watched their theories develop over time, evolving in tandem with the breathtaking changes to their country. I saw them take Western ideas and adapt them into a new Chinese approach for dealing with the world – joining an intellectual journey that China began when it first became entangled with the West in the nineteenth century.