Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [151]
In an ironic twist, China has done particularly well by taking advantage of the West's refusal to deal with “rogue states.” In the Middle East and Africa, for example, China has openly refused to condition trade on compliance with international human rights treaties, as have the European Union and the United States, giving China greater access to valuable resources in countries like Angola, Burma, Congo, and Iran. While many protest the U.S. government's inadequate peacekeeping and humanitarian response in Darfur, China has happily established itself as the largest investor in Sudan's massive oil fields. Meanwhile, adding insult to injury, a recent Pew Foundation global survey found that a majority of citizens in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom now view China more favorably than they do the United States.4
Yet none of this makes the case for Chinese world dominance. If the thesis of this book is correct, America is a hyperpower today above all because it has out-tolerated the rest of the world. More than anything else, the United States’ ability to draw in and exploit the world's most valuable human capital has been responsible for its unstoppable ascent to economic, military, and technological preeminence. If this is true, and if history is any guide, China can overtake the United States as the world's next hyperpower only if it outdoes the United States at strategic tolerance. Can an authoritarian, rogue-state-friendly China possibly do so?
At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. With only occasional exceptions, China has a long history of xenophobia and ethnocentrism, and for the last fifty years has been notorious for crushing political and religious dissent. Moreover, China—officially described as 92 percent ethnically homogeneous, 94 percent atheist, and with a net negative migration rate—is essentially the opposite of a pluralistic immigrant society.
But things are more complicated. China's tremendous potential today stems precisely from the fact that it is a spectacular success story of strategic tolerance. Let me explain.
For most Westerners, even those trying to be open-minded, China's population today probably seems relatively ethnically un-diverse. On any given square block in New York City there can be found Cuban Americans, Korean Americans, Scots-Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and African Americans hailing from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. By contrast, China sports more than a billion people, almost all of whom have black hair (although hair dye is becoming increasingly popular), claim a common ancestry, and consider themselves Chinese.
But what Westerners and Chinese alike tend not to realize is that the very idea of “Chinese-ness” reflects a triumph of strategic tolerance. Indeed, over its three-thousand-year history, China has essentially accomplished exactly what the European Union is trying to do today—it has brought and kept together in a single political unit a huge number of individuals from vastly different cultural, geographical, and linguistic backgrounds.5 Chinese civilization in fact grew out of a great intermixing of diverse cultures.
The nation today known as China was “a land long peopled by plural groups” with “extreme linguistic heterogeneity” and stark differences in dress, customs, rituals, and religions. In particular, there has long been a deep divide between the peoples of north and south China, with the Yellow River serving as a rough boundary line.6 Even today, people in southern provinces like Guangdong or my home province, Fujian, speak among themselves Chinese dialects unintelligible to most northern Chinese