Maximum country

Mark Leonards book is one of the first to bring out the rainbow hue of opinions and views within China.

The 800-pound Chinese gorilla has suddenly descended on the worlds front garden and is squatting untidily on the flowerbed and the cabbage patch. It looks set to be there for a long, long time and no one, not even the gorilla, seems to know what to make of all this.

Mark Leonard, head of the first pan-European think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, has asked questions and sought answers for this phenomenon within China itself and now lets the world know about what he learnt in a remarkable book, What Does China Think? It is the kind of work that makes you wonder why it was not written earlier.

As books on China go, I do not recollect a smaller one; at around 160 pages What Does China Think? can almost be passed over in a bookshop for a less than serious work on that huge and confounding country, meriting no more than a flip through and a return to the shelf. But the books size belies its importance and uniqueness; it is one of the first to bring out the rainbow hue of opinions and views within China. These are influencing Chinese policy at all levels and impacting on countries as small as Nauru and as populous and large as India or the United States.

Chinas rise is indeed one of the two big stories of our time the other, largely ignored by much of the world, is Indias progress, mostly viewed as a glass half-empty, but in reality about as significant as Chinas and as vital for the rest of the world to know. Having said that, without doubt China is the flavour of the day. Its rise is indeed as stupendous as it is unprecedented; nothing in history has prepared the world for this, compelling us to agree with Leonard that without understanding China it would be impossible to understand world politics.

An accidental Sinologist, Leonard spent several years trying to understand China through those who influence its policies. He travelled extensively in the country and met and interacted closely with leading opinion-makers. Amongst those he met were New Left intellectuals, die-hard nationalists, middle-roaders and champions of reform.

Many of these intellectuals and experts have been educated in the best universities of the West or have held influential positions in China for a long time. What Leonard discovered was that through the ruling Chinese Communist Party, such intellectuals and experts do significantly influence national and foreign policy. To understand China, one, therefore, needs to know what such people think; Leonard gives us a very good introduction to several in his book.

Contrary to popular perception, the billion plus Chinese are not quite the robots they have been made out to be; there are a few more opinion-makers, influencers and shapers of policies in China than the world is aware of. They are varyingly contributing to the changes taking place in China, which, as Leonard informs us, are leading to steady improvements in developing the rule of law and professionalising its civil service.

Will all this lead to the emergence of liberal democracy in China (a persistent Western obsession) is something that only time will tell. But Chinas exemplary openness in handling its most recent disaster, the huge earthquake that has killed thousands and left millions homeless, is a warning, suggesting that India needs to watch out.

As we fritter away the advantages of an open society it is possible that China is well on its way to becoming one; with its ever rising prosperity, it also looks fully capable of sustaining it.

If, in a few years down the line, China does emerge as the worlds largest economy with much more political liberty for its people, it would then have emphatically closed the ongoing debate on development and freedom. However, the jury is still out and it is somewhat premature for Leonard to conclude that China is the first country since the end of the Cold War with the ingenuity, scale and global exposure to shape the world in its image or that because of its stunning economic record, people around the world are starting to listen and copy the Chinese model.

If indeed there is a model, it is as yet not obvious to anyone. China, for all its success, is very much a work in progress and the future is uncertain and not only for China. In a famous interview with Edgar Snow in 1975, Mao Zedong observed with great perspicacity that future events would be decided by future generations, and in accordance with conditions we cannot foresee.

For more than three decades now, China continues to unceasingly astonish the world. It has become the largest consumer of steel, cement and soon oil. In no time at all it has become the worlds second largest producer of cars, largest manufacturer of computers and has now emerged as a leading builder of ships as well.

Leonard cannot contain his astonishment that every year a city the size of London comes up somewhere in China. Astounded by all this, he concludes that China is fast emerging as a political and possibly intellectual role-model for the rest of the world. One needs to contest that. China continues to be an authoritarian state albeit one which is allowing a lot more freedom to creep into the lives of its people every day.

The intellectual base for policy making is still too narrow for a country so large. Unlike India, which wears all its problems on its sleeve, much of what is dirty about China its environmental degradation, its low-intensity conflicts and intense local-level tyrannies, and its ineptness in managing protest continues to be masked by a regime that has brought Yahoo and Google to heel and sent a cannot-bend-anymore-backward Murdoch packing.

Chinas reforms, which began a long time before Indias, have brought unprecedented prosperity to its people, lifting nearly all of them out of the kind of abject poverty that still blights India. But however much China impresses, we need to recognise that it is a hard and often nasty road that it has taken to get to where it has got today. Leonard glosses over all this, just as he also underplays the fact that China is still an evolving entity.

Leonard, while so impressed by Chinas achievements, almost completely ignores India about the only other country it can be compared to. Several of Indias problems are horrendous and some, such as its caste conflicts, endemic corruption and continued mass poverty, are inexcusable. But with all that, to the utter surprise of everyone, India too has progressed in a robust manner while remaining an open society, providing the world with a unique model in nation-building.

Indias achievements, especially in integration under extremely difficult and trying circumstances, have been spectacular. No other country in history has so successfully accommodated so much of regional, ethnic and religious variety and yet thrived as a nation as India has.

The European Union, to which Leonard belongs, would do well to look at Indias experience in nation-building, as it expands and struggles to come to terms with ethnic and religious differences and endlessly waffles over the entry of Turkey into the E.U. China, in sharp contrast, has as yet, nothing comparable to offer.

Leonard can be excused for being bedazzled by China. Who, India included, is not? Nothing that is happening there is less than mind-bogglingly gargantuan the mostest of everything! Just take air travel; the latest Economist informs us that 47 million Chinese journeyed overseas and 1.6 billion made trips at home. All this is set to quadruple in the next decade. Huge airports, massive buildings, spectacular universities, maglev trains China has them all. Every time one asks the question Will all this last?, China yanks yet another monster rabbit from a seemingly inexhaustible hat.

What Leonard and the rest of the world, however, fail to recognise is that the lack of public debate on important issues in China leaves its in-favour intellectuals dangerously empowered to speak for more than a billion people. As Chinas relentless progress continues, this one shortcoming can lead to a huge mistake that can derail everything; history is replete with examples.

Having said that, Leonard does significantly enlighten us on What does China think? in a refreshingly interesting, yet serious, way. For that reason alone Leonards slim work is important one that must be read by anyone trying to understand a massive country that is getting stronger by the day, feels that its time to lead the world has come and frets that it is not allowed to do so.

China indeed is the worlds first maximum country a reality we all have to live with and make sense of; reading Mark Leonard helps.