The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [54]
God and Foreign Policy
Is China’s way of thinking about the world distinctly, well, Chinese? In many senses, it is not. The lessons drawn from that history of great powers are ones many Westerners have drawn as well—indeed, many of the people interviewed were Western scholars. It reflects the same understanding that has driven the behavior of Germany and Japan in recent years. China’s dealings with the world are practical, reflecting context and interests and its self-perception as a developing country. Despite the enormous shadow that it casts on the world, China recognizes that it is still a country with hundreds of millions of extremely poor people. Its external concerns, accordingly, have to do mostly with development. When asked about issues like human rights, some younger Chinese officials will admit that these are simply not their concerns—as if they see these as luxuries that they cannot afford. No doubt this sense is enhanced by the acute realization that human rights abroad are linked with those at home. If China were to criticize the Burmese dictatorship, what would it say to its own dissidents?
There are also, however, broader cultural elements in China’s way of thinking about the world. One can easily exaggerate the importance of culture, using it as a façade for policies grounded in interest. But there are some real and important differences between Chinese and Western (particularly American) worldviews that are worth exploring. They begin with God. In the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, when asked whether one must believe in God to be moral, a comfortable majority of Americans (57 percent) said yes. In Japan and China, however, much larger majorities said no—in China, a whopping 72 percent! This is a striking and unusual divergence from the norm, even in Asia. The point is not that either country is immoral—in fact all hard evidence suggests quite the opposite—but rather that in neither country do people believe in God.
This might shock many in the West, but for scholars of the subject, it is a well-known reality. East Asians do not believe that the world has a Creator who laid down a set of abstract moral laws that must be followed. That is an Abrahamic, or Semitic, conception of God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but quite alien to Chinese civilization. People sometimes describe China’s religion as Confucianism. But Joseph Needham, an eminent scholar of Confucianism, notes that if you think of religion “as the theology of a transcendent creator-deity,” Confucianism is simply not a religion.10 Confucius was a teacher, not a prophet or holy man in any sense. His writings, or the fragments of them that survive, are strikingly nonreligious. He explicitly warns against thinking about the divine, instead setting out rules for acquiring knowledge, behaving ethically, maintaining social stability, and creating a well-ordered civilization. His work has more in common with the writings of Enlightenment philosophers than with religious tracts.
In fact, during the Enlightenment, Confucius was hot. The Confucian classics, Needham reports, “were read with avidity by all the great forerunners of the French Revolution, by Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, etc.”11 Between 1600 and 1649, 30–50 China-related titles appeared in Europe every decade, and between 1700 and 1709, 599 works on China were published. This frenzy of publications on China coincided with the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), when religion had led to grotesque bloodshed. Many European liberals idealized Confucianism for its basis in natural, as opposed to divine, law. Voltaire put it simply in his Philosophical Dictionary: “No superstitions, no absurd legends, none of those dogmas which insult reason and nature.” Immanuel Kant would later call Confucius “the Chinese Socrates.” Leibniz, a philosopher who straddled the line between religiosity and secularism, went so far as to argue, “We