• Home
• /
• Opinion

What’s the big rush?

Even Asia’s victors had a hard time regaining their balance, additionally slowed by the mainly abrupt and disruptive withdrawal of Europe’s colonial powers. And, of course, the Chinese will emphasise Western imperialism and so on.

But by the mid-90s you could see the penumbra of the future — the outlines of the Asian Century. Yet as a Westerner you saw this only if you were travelling. The US media was otherwise preoccupied with almost everything and anything else. Probably our American businessmen saw the future best because they had to deal with Asia up front and personal.

For your American journalist, however, there is a date in his mind that works best for him as the true watershed — the passing of the baton from the American Century to the Asian Century. And that occurred three years early, as it were, on July 1, 1997. This was the historic moment when London was required to give back Hong Kong to Beijing after harbouring it in its colonial bosom for 157 years.

Such a geographically tiny place, but such a glittering gem, and so vast a span of political symbolism: For the return of Hong Kong restored a more natural order to contemporary world politics, and reassured the many worriers in the heart of China that their patience had indeed borne fruit — and that perhaps further patience would continue to be the winning hand to play.

Why deviate from success? Few doubt that a confident, careful and considerate China will lead Asia through the 21st century. May China continue to remain patient and show restraint — in no small measure so as not to induce America itself to blunder and overplay its own role in Asia.

I remember so vividly what Lee Kuan Yew said to me back in 1996 when I interviewed him for my first column on Singapore and asked his views about Beijing’s rise: “Where could China go wrong? Impatience; wanting to make faster progress than circumstances allow; pushing too hard; taking shortcuts that could set them back.” Then, almost two decades later, last summer, I took a very helpful 2013 trip to mainland China that served to reinforce this feeling that China’s best game is the long game. But I also came to understand that it will be more difficult for this colossus to settle into that natural historic rhythm if it feels pushed or crowded or hemmed in by the United States. This strategy will trigger the awakening of some of the worst demons in China’s historical memory.

We in the US need to accept that China is not the same as the former Soviet Union, and it never has been. Millennia of history inform us that China ticks to a different clock, aiming to be viewed (and in fact to become) the undisputed geopolitical and honorific center of East Asia. (The fancy word here is suzerainty.)

It’s not more territory for which it lusts but belated respect and, in some modern sense, economic tribute: Beijing, after all, is looking at 1.3 or 1.4 billion mouths to feed. That’s its job. Thus, China’s quarrels with neighbours over neighbourhood islands may seem silly and indeed foolishly provocative to us, and at our level of analysis they are just that. But on their level the effort represents not expansion but restoration.

We need to read out Kissinger if we wish not to misunderstand China. But for its part, if what China wants is for the US to abandon Cold War thinking and accept its return to the center of things without undue alarm, it should try to avoid some of the mistakes we in the West made. In three words: Don’t rush things.

Here is what I mean: In the late 90s I had a long and helpful interview in Beijing with the late Qian Qichen, then the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China. Many years before, Qichen had been deputy editor-in-chief of the book Diplomacy of Contemporary China gifted me (when it had come into English translation) by a contact in the Chinese foreign ministry.

In this very useful book, the phrase “in the fullness of time” appears, at a number of strategic points in the extensive review of China’s diplomacy, from Beijing’s point of view, since 1949. That wondrous phrase — “in the fullness of time” — is used when referring to history’s way of slowly and surely getting things done, such as with the (presumed-by-Beijing) return of Taiwan to the motherland.

And so in the conversation in Beijing, when I felt that the foreign minister was evidencing impatience about Taiwan’s return timetable, I reminded him of that phrase.

“It says here ‘in the fullness of time’, I remind you.”

Qichen was a little startled, said he hadn’t realised that finally the book had been published in English, and then parried: “Well, that doesn’t mean we can wait forever!”

Then me saying: “But neither does it mean you have to have action by next Monday, American style, right?”

Qichen nodded with a smile. “It just has to happen some time.”

I nodded agreeably. “To me,” I said, “China as a civilisation has almost always had a more mature and wiser sense of time and patience than we in the West.” A smile crossed the foreign minister’s face.

I meant, adding: “Why rush?”

Why rush indeed?

Tom Plate, distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University, is an author of the Giants of Asia book series