23 May 2022, NIICE Commentary 7923
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra & Dr. Shraddha Rishi
China is poised to reshape the world order. The rising Chinese centrality to the international economy is recognised in a few instances. According to Chinese customs data, bilateral trade between India and China in 2021 stood at 125.66 billion USD, up 43.3 percent from 2020 when bilateral trade was worth USD 87.6 billion. The trade deficit between the two countries remained in favour of China – at USD 69 billion. The USTR requested comments on US imports from China that were necessary to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In response to these comments and input from advisory committees, in December 2020, the USTR determined to extend 80 existing exclusions and grant 19 new ones—all on medicare products. China accounts for around 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt. From 1995 to 2012, Germany, Europe’s Economic Powerhouse, enhanced its industrial value by 37 percent, the largest chunk of which came from the supply chains of China. Recent studies point to Australian GDP decreasing by 0.1 to 0.2 percent in response to a 1 percent fall in Chinese GDP. It all shows China’s strategic economic depth and viability to establish itself as the new hub of the world economy. On other hand, China is classified as an “authoritarian regime” in the Democracy Index. It has a score of 0.88 for civil liberties: there is no free print, broadcast or social media, no freedom of expression. An authoritative China wants to dominate the world order.
The present article has assumed the expansion of freedom as methodological essentialism. Expansion of freedom is viewed, in this approach, both as the primary end and as the principal means of development. The development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. China’s potential and legitimacy as providing an alternative to the westerns capitalist global order depends on its performance on the parameters of development that leads to greater freedom.
The Ontology of the ‘Party-State’ brand of Chinese Nationalism
The term ‘ontology’ refers to the ‘logical discourse’ (logia) of ‘being’ or ‘that which is’. It emphasises that the nature of being or substance is to be investigated through the ‘predictive knowledge’, i.e., the knowledge of what is certain and necessary that focuses on things that are fixed and settled and known with certainty. It believes in the Platonic state. Truth is fixed and known with certainty and any change or diversion from it is evil. It gave birth to the Party-state’ (One party, one state) which knows the truth and is better suited to guide the nation. It is called the ‘Party-state’ brand of nationalism. It derives its inspiration from China’s dream of ‘Great rejuvenation’. To realize national rejuvenation, the Party has united and led the Chinese people in pursuing a great struggle, a great project, a great cause, and a great dream through a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, and innovation, achieving great success for socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era. With the dream of great rejuvenation and shaping the world order with Chinese characteristics, China has abandoned its ‘peaceful rise’ foreign policy. Moreover, the constitution of China has been amended to get rid of the principle of collective leadership and allow a personality cult to lead the party and the state. It permits the President to serve beyond a 10-year term.
The first concerted effort by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to shape Chinese nationalism came with the launch of the ‘Patriotic Education Campaign’ in the 1990s. It aims to correct “three belief crises” (sanxin weiji): the crisis of faith in socialism (xinxin weiji), the crisis of belief in Marxism (Xinyang weiji), and the crisis of trust in the party (xinren weiji). It created and etched a narrative of a ‘century of humiliation’ in public memory as a historical fact. As such the very legitimacy of the CPC within Chinese politics is based upon an imaginary enemy or a threat perception. Moreover, the ontology of the ‘Party-State’ brand of Chinese Nationalism and Patriotic Education Campaign follows Hegel’s scheme of the historical theory of the nation which presumes the concept of the Great Nation and Great Leader in a Platonic sense. In the scheme, a nation is united by a spirit that acts in history. It is united by a common origin, a common language, a common foe and a common history. It is the ‘historicist essentialism’, i.e., the history of a nation is the history of its essence or Spirit, asserting itself on the ‘stage of history’ being motivated by the century of humiliation. It tends to overlook the differences in its zeal for commonness. It proves the great enemy of a free and open society and friendly with unfreedoms.
Liberal Democracy’s Zoetological Response
The democratic republic model facing an increasing challenge from China need not focus on how to prevent China from becoming the dominant global power, but to manage that process in such a way as to avoid war and preserve democratic republicanism.
The ‘zoetology’, the term borrowed from Roger Ames, a Philosopher at Peking University, refers to the ‘logical discourse’ (logia) of ‘living’. It is called the art of living. It posits a holistic, aesthetic and genealogical understanding of differences in which there is no final beginning or end, contrary to ontological thinking, and no privileged single order. It suggests a comparative cultural hermeneutics as a methodological nominalism; it believes that emphasis on essence, spirit and Great Nation and Great Leader hinders the growth of knowledge and encourages enshrining tradition and authority. It advocates an interpretative content for taking and engaging another tradition but on its terms. It affirms ‘Let noble thoughts come to us from every side’. It deals with possibilities. China’s centrality in the international sphere offers a possibility to engage it to take advantage of rising China rather than wasting one’s energy to counter or destroy it. Beginning with, liberal democracy needs to accept the ‘different’ China. Liberal democracy provides an umbrella under which different political and economic regimes could experiment with the condition of non- hampering reason and humanitarian values. In addition, liberal democracy has to make global institutions more inclusive and representative with the inclusion of nation-states and accommodation of subaltern issues. Furthermore, China’s economic centrality in bilateral engagements is not alien to economic interdependence as propagated by liberal democracy. It has to be dealt with bilaterally. For example, India can reduce its trade deficit with China by reducing logistics cost that pegs at 14 percent of GDP to encourage investment and more specifically export-led investment, optimising the current modal mix (road- 60%, rail- 31% and water- 9%) in line with international benchmarks (road-25% to 30%, rail- 50% to 55% and water- 20% to 25%), developing state-tailored export approach and moving to value-added services like telemedicine. Finally, China’s hegemonic emergence coincided with the emergence of autocracies and dictatorships around the world. V-Dem report on democracy (2022) observed that while the number of liberal democracies stood at 42 in 2012, their number has shrunk to its lowest level in over 25 years, with just 34 countries and 13 percent of the world population living in liberal democracies. The world needs to have a more liberal democracy to engage rather than contain contrary regimes.
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra is an Assistant Professor at Lalit Narayan Mithila University, India and Dr. Shraddha Rishi is an Assistant Professor at Magadh University, India.
