Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [155]
After the Communist victory in 1949, this ethnic concept of Chinese nationality became problematic for the government in its dealings with China's millions of ethnic minorities who, although representing just a tiny fraction of the population, occupy roughly 60 percent of China's territory, including strategically important border areas such as Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. For purposes of maintaining control over China's vast territory, the government found it expedient to adopt a geographical concept of Chinese nationality. Today, the official line is that China is a multiethnic nation that happens to be 92 percent Han Chinese but also includes fifty-five ethnic minorities, all of whom are Chinese nationals.’*‘
But like other nations, China cannot escape its history. Lucian Pye once wrote, “China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations;” rather, China is “a civilization pretending to be a state.”16 It is a civilization, moreover, rooted in notions of ethnic identity and superiority. For three thousand years, the Chinese have understood themselves as sharing a common ancestry, an ancestry not shared by Tibetans or Uighurs, and certainly not by any Westerners.
With respect to the twenty-first century, the bottom line is that China is still the farthest cry from an immigrant society. The Western and Japanese expats working in foreign enclaves in Chinese cities today are not immigrants. They are not en route to becoming Chinese citizens; neither is the government seeking to make them citizens. Although there are more foreigners working in China today than there have been for a long time, the government is not trying to integrate them into Chinese society or encouraging them to view themselves as Chinese. In part, this is why China is not even close to being a magnet pulling in the best scientists, engineers, thinkers, and innovators from the West—or anywhere else.
Chinese leaders, of course, fully realize this. China doesn't especially want to be an immigrant society. But it has found two other ways to bring in international skills, technology, and know-how. First, again playing the “ethnic card,” China has appealed with astounding success to the pride and loyalty—not to mention self-interest—of “overseas Chinese”: some fifty-five million people of Chinese descent living in more than 160 countries.* In many ways, the overseas Chinese are an extraordinary pool. They collectively control some $2 trillion in assets, and generate an estimated annual economic output of $600 billion, roughly the current GDP of Australia.17 In addition, they include many highly educated individuals, among them Nobel Prize winners.
Other countries, for example Israel and India, have also successfully made use of their “diaspora” populations. But the size and resources of China's diaspora are unparalleled. From its initial opening in 1978, the central government shrewdly targeted this pool, offering special investment incentives and tax preferences to foreign investors of Chinese descent. At the same time, many local governments bestowed “honorary titles” on overseas Chinese who were particularly generous and “loyal” to their “motherland” and “ancestral home villages.”18
These strategies paid off. In the 1980s and 1990s, overseas Chinese poured more than $190 billion into China, accounting for more than half of the foreign direct investment that helped catapult China from third world backwater to “Rising Dragon.” (In the booming southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, as much as 80 percent of foreign investment