Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [152]
China was built through a process of conquest and merging of diverse groups. As with the Romans, peoples from the Sichuan basin to the Taiwan Strait found they could not resist the Chinese cultural, political, and military package. Just as the toga and Latin spread from Scotland to Egypt, so too Chinese culture—with its notions of ethnic superiority, Confucian-Taoist strands, the imperial examination system, and the supreme Son of Heaven ruling over all—was embraced by hundreds of millions between the Gobi Desert and the South China Sea. Like the Spaniards and Libyans who turned into Romans in the second century, previously distinct ethnic groups such as the Min, Yue, and Wu peoples all became Han Chinese.
In overcoming not just north-south, but coastal-inland, rural-urban, and provincial divides, China has succeeded in integrating its peoples beyond the European Union's wildest dreams. A single language—at first only written and now, under the People's Republic, spoken as well—unites nearly all of China's population. Much more fundamentally, a sense of belonging to the Chinese people— of being “Han”—is embraced by at least 92 percent of the population as their primary national and ethnic identity. Western experts on ethnic studies have long insisted that the Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hunanese, and so forth, given their considerable differences in speech, customs, and even physical appearance, are and ought to consider themselves different ethnicities. But they don't. On the contrary, for all their differences and mutual snobberies, these groups, along with the Sichuanese, Tianjinese, Anhuinese, and many others, all think of themselves first and foremost as Chinese—as Zhongguo ren, literally “people of the Middle Kingdom.”7
This then is the often overlooked story of China's historical internal tolerance. For good reason, what makes the headlines in Western newspapers tends to be the intolerance and repression directed at political dissidents, religious sects such as the Falun Gong, and ethnic minorities like the Tibetans. But the flip side of this intolerance has been the staggering success of Chinese eth-nonationalism as an instrument of strategic tolerance—a success already achieved hundreds of years ago and now simply taken for granted. Today, while the European Union struggles to hold together 450 million people, China commands the loyalty and ethnic identification of nearly 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the world's population.
So is it possible that unlike every hyperpower in world history, China does not need the talents of immigrants and outsiders? With 1.3 billion people, there is a lot of talent waiting to be mobilized. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that Chinese communities all over the world are famously entrepreneurial, outperforming indigenous majorities throughout Southeast Asia and often disproportionately successful in Western countries.8 Could it be that in the race for world power China already has all the human capital it needs?
It's possible—but highly unlikely. To begin with, China's own pool of human capital remains sorely undereducated. Although China's education level is much more advanced than that of other developing countries—for example, China's literacy rate for women is 87 percent as compared to India's 45 percent—it is not close to Western standards. Only about half of China's population attends high school, compared to at least 90 percent in the United States. Moreover, China's education system is widely criticized for its tendency to teach rote learning rather than innovative thinking, placing “undue emphasis on speed and memorization of obscure facts” and failing to “produce the kind of students who are able to apply their