BRAND CHINA (淡色中国)
By Joshua Cooper Ramo
February 2007
2
BRAND CHINA
Joshua Cooper Ramo
First published in 2007 by
The Foreign Policy Centre
Suite 14, 2nd Floor
23-28 Penn Street
London N1 5DL
UNITED KINGDOM
Email: info@fpc.org.uk
© Foreign Policy Centre 2007
All rights reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1-905833-07-8
ISBN-10: 1-905833-07-5
3
About the Author
Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director and partner at Kissinger
Associates, one of the world's leading geo-strategic and cross-border
advisory firms. He is based largely in Beijing.
Prior to entering the advisory business, he was a journalist, the
youngest Senior Editor and later Foreign Editor in the history of TIME
Magazine. The World Economic Forum has called him "one of
China's leading foreign born scholars". His paper ‘The Beijing
Consensus’ (Foreign Policy Centre, 2004) was widely distributed and
discussed in China.
Ramo has been, among other things, a member of the World
Economic Forum's Global Young Leaders, a Crown fellow of the
Aspen Institute, a co-founder of the US-China Young Leaders
Forum, and a member of ASIA 21. An avid fixed wing and helicopter
pilot, his book about his experiences as a competitive aerobatic pilot,
"No Visible Horizon", was published by Simon & Schuster. His
forthcoming book on geo-strategy will be published by Little, Brown.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the assistance of a number of people with this
report. They include Andrew Small, Thomas Rafferty, Sam Vincent,
Omaha Schlumberger, Diane Fisher, Feng Zhang, Stephen Twigg
and Alex Bigham. The Foreign Policy Centre would also like to thank
Hill & Knowlton for their support of this project.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this report are not necessarily those of The
Foreign Policy Centre.
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Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: China’s Image Emergency 12
Chapter 2: The Uses of National Image: Maximum Power at
Minimum Cost 20
Chapter 3: The Risks of a Poor Image and The Uses of
Reputational Capital (名胜资本) 27
Chapter 4: Brand China (淡色中国): An Approach to National
Image 37
Chapter 5: The Way Forward 43
5
Introduction
Letters to a Queen, Peaceful Earthquake and other Mis-
adventures in Nation Branding
By the time he was named Commissioner of Canton in 1838, Lin
Zexu (1785-1850) had already enjoyed a spectacular career, the sort
of bureaucratic rise that in many countries and in many eras has
elevated brilliant men to positions of power and influence. Born and
raised amid the mountains and gentle tea culture of coastal Fujian,
Lin had the sort of plastic and curious mind that fitted the demands of
late-Qing imperial court politics. He was blessed with a brilliant
memory, a willingness to throw himself into the very hardest
problems of government and a fingertip feel for court politics. And Lin
was effective: His colleagues called him “Clear Sky”, a nickname that
hinted at his ability to clear clouds from the murkiest of bureaucratic
squalls. He was an accomplished poet – the sort of Chinese
“renaissance man” common in the Qing-era, a time when emperors
like Kangxi found strength and legitimacy in a love of beauty and
justice. (Traces of this model of governance remain: Current Foreign
Minister Li Zhaoxing, for instance, writes poetry; People’s Bank of
China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan is an opera fan.) Wen Jiabao,
speaking at his first press conference as Premier in 2003, mentioned
old Lin by way of introducing himself to the Chinese people. “Ever
since I took office,” he said, “I have been whispering two lines of Lin
Zexu to myself: ‘I would do whatever it takes to serve my country,
even at the cost of my own life and regardless of misfortune to
myself.’”1 The message was clear: for Chinese officials there should
be no boundary between personal and political life.
In the spring of 1838 the 53-year old Lin received an urgent
summons to Beijing. He was wanted on imperial business at the
highest level. Dao Guang, who ruled China from 1820 to 1850, was
determined to eliminate the trade in opium. In the half-century since
the drug had arrived in China on British trading ships, it had
strangled the intellectual and cultural life of the Qing dynasty. As if
watching his empire rot around him wasn’t enough, Dao Guang had
seen the drug kill one of his sons and seduce through greed or
1 Wen Jiabao press conference transcript March 18, 2003
6
addiction many of the country’s most powerful minds. He was
determined to wipe it out and determined that “Clear Sky” was the
man for the job. Lin, with his imperial orders in hand, quickly travelled
down to Canton, the port where foreign ships exchanged their
Indian-grown opium for black and green tea destined respectively for
Europe and the United States. After a few months of research and
careful planning, Lin began his anti-drug campaign by publishing a
broadside that remains, historically at least, probably the most
important thing he ever wrote: A Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria.
The arrogance of the title in Western eyes – “Who would dare advise
Queen Victoria?” British traders asked at the time – masks an
impressive and carefully reasoned piece of writing. Lin’s Letter of
Advice, which appeared on the walls of Canton on September 29th,
1839, offered a short summary of the state of opium trading as he
saw it and asks the Queen to try to control a trade that is destroying
China. “Suppose there were people from another country who
carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into
buying and smoking it,” he writes in a typical passage. “Certainly
your honourable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused.”2
Though early 19th century China still considered itself the centre of
the world, Lin’s letter hardly radiates the arrogance of such
worldview. Lin comes off as neither nationalist nor isolationist.
Rather, he appears to be a man who has thought through the
problem of stopping opium flow, decided on the policy of, among
other things, stifling opium traders, and now wishes to explain it as
clearly as possible – and even to kindly suggest ways for England to
become what 21st century scholars might have called a more
responsible player in the international system. “We have further
learned that in London, the capital of your honourable rule, and in
Scotland, Ireland, and other places, originally no opium has been
produced,” he writes, laying a gentle hand on the English empire’s
hypocrisy, before suggesting that the British turn to producing less
destructive crops such as millet and barley.
2 Lin Zexu, “Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria,” in From Ssuyu Teng and John
Fairbank, China's Response to the West, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
1954), repr. in Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History, Volume II, (New
York: HarperCollins CollegePublishers, 1995), pp. 266-69
7
No one knows if Queen Victoria actually saw Lin Zexu’s letter3. In
any event, she did not take his advice. Months later, British warships
steamed up the river near Canton and began the Opium War and
more than a century of internal Chinese chaos. Between the first
shots from the Royal Saxon on November 3, 1839 and the founding
of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, China was invaded by
nine different nations; it was stripped of anything resembling an
effective central government and shattered by internal conflicts. Tens
of millions of Chinese died. Everything that has happened since the
Opium War, including some of the most prominent elements of the
last three decades of reform and development, has some intellectual
and emotional root in that defeat. China’s obsession with technology,
its relentless drive to global integration, its focus on supporting
international law, all share some connection with the national
experience that began with Lin Zexu’s letter.
The traditional reading of the “lesson” of the Opium War by Chinese
is that their nation needs to be strong and, crucially, open to other
nations’ technology and ideas. “Ships, guns and a water force are
absolutely indispensable,” Lin himself wrote to the Emperor in 1842.
But there was something else afoot at the start of the Opium Wars.
Lin’s letter, read carefully and with a sense of context, can be seen
as a signal of a horrifying historical fault line: China’s image of
herself and the rest of the world’s image of her had ruptured like
tectonic plates. To men like Lin, writing at the tail end of 2,000 years
of imperial rule, evidence of China’s power was everywhere around
them, it had become as comfortable as the Commissioner’s silks Lin
slipped into each morning. Unfortunately, the country was truly as
strong as silk. China’s image of herself and the world’s image of
China had become disharmonious (bu hexie). Madness was
inevitable (bu kebimian).
In the late spring of 2004, across from the same coastline where Lin
Zexu had first published his Letter of Advice, several dozen Chinese
3 One British diplomatic historian who served as Ambassador to China told me he
thought it was unlikely Queen Victoria had seen it.
8
and international scholars gathered to refine a new message to the
outside world. Meeting together in Bo’ao, a resort town on Hainan
Island in the South China Sea, the purpose of the meeting was to
discuss a new concept advanced by Zheng Bijian, a Chinese
intellectual known for his connections with Chinese President Hu
Jintao. Zheng had been Executive Vice President of the Chinese
Communist Party Central Party School when President Hu served as
its head. And though his Chinese rivals carped among themselves
about exactly how close Zheng was to Hu, Zheng’s intellectual
pedigree stretched back to the late 1970s when he had been part of
a group of scholars who had travelled to the West at Deng
Xiaoping’s request. Zheng then went on to work for reform-minded
Chinese Premier Hu Yaobang, the capacity in which he says he first
met Hu Jintao, then a rising star. For most of the 1980s and 1990s,
Zheng developed a career as a sort of intellectual ambassador for
Chinese leaders. His new theory, which he called “The Peaceful Rise
of China,” was a latter-day version of Lin’s Letter of Advice: a
message for the world that was reasonable, logical and relatively
free of any taint of historical anger or arrogance.
“Peaceful Rise,” was a response to a school of thought among some
Western scholars and policy makers known as “China Threat
Theory,” (zhoungguo wexie lilun), which suggested that China’s
emergence at the start of the 21st century resembled nothing so
much as Germany’s bristling, angry rise at the start of the 20th
century. China, this line of thinking went, was a nation that was
simultaneously humiliated and arrogant, a country that would spare
no effort in restoring what future Bush administration official Paul
Wolfowitz called “its place in the sun” in a sharply written 1997
essay.4 The implication was that conflict, even war, between China
and the U.S. was inevitable. The gathering of scholars in Hainan on
that spring day in 2004 was part of a carefully planned series of
events to test, strengthen and market what Zheng considered the
best hope to counter that bias, his idea of China’s Peaceful Rise
(heping jueqi).
4 Wolfowitz, Paul “Bridging Centuries – The Fin De Siècle All Over Again” Spring 1997
page 7 and “Remembering the future”, The National Interest, Spring 2000,
9
But there was a problem: the Chinese participants couldn’t agree on
a translation of “jueqi”. Even if you don’t read Chinese you need only
look at the ideogram “jue” to understand why an exact translation
might present a problem:
崛
The three-pronged symbol on the left of the character is the Chinese
“shan”, which means mountain. The p-like figure in the middle might
here be thought to represent a plateau or a plate and, under it, is the
Chinese character “chu” which suggests upward and outward
movement. In short the Chinese “jue”, which like all Chinese
characters is a pictogram of sorts, shows a large, slightly smashed
mountain being pushed out of the way. The character might have
been more at home in a discussion of geology than international
politics: it was a picture of an earthquake.5
Of course “Peaceful Earthquake” was not the image Zheng had in
mind to answer “China Threat Theory.” On the afternoon before the
conference started, Chinese participants were called for a closed-
door pre-conference meeting to discuss how best to translate the
word on the following day. Perhaps it should be rendered as
“emergence,” one scholar suggested. No one thought the word
“surge”, which was probably the best translation, fitted with the
Zheng’s core idea. Even as the main conference began the following
day, Chinese intellectuals, many of whom spoke precise and fluent
English as a result of decades spent living and working in the US or
UK, were buttonholing Chinese-speaking foreign friends to ask us for
advice. Was Peaceful Rise a correct translation?
5 The central p-like character in jue is actually a formal Chinese word for a dead body
(shi), derived from the fact that the character in ancient times referred to the person
who sat behind the altar at a funeral. This perhaps suggested an even less flattering
interpretation of jueqi: China’s rise was rolling the old dead corpse of the world order
out of the way. Few neo-cons on either side of the Pacific had to look hard to figure
out the implication of which nation China thought would be buried and which would do
the burying.
10
That initial debate over how to translate “jueqi”, which might have
appeared to be little more than a minor etymological detour, was
more important than it seemed at the time. As the phrase “Peaceful
Rise” began to make its way into international intellectual circles it
often had the opposite effect of what Zheng had hoped. Rather than
feeling reassured by Zheng’s promise, China’s critics instead used
the slogan to demonstrate China’s untrustworthiness. “How can they
claim a peaceful rise while threatening to attack Taiwan?” critics
pointed out in various venues, most notably at meetings in Europe in
2004 designed to perpetuate the post-1989 ban on arms sales to
China. If they are peacefully rising, one influential American neo-con
asked, why do they need your weapons? Zheng responded to the
Taiwan point by explaining that issues related to the island were an
“internal” matter, and therefore exempt from the doctrine.6 That did
little to answer his critics7. As American Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld observed in the summer of 2005, “Since no nation
threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment?
Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?8”
What was most surprising about this was that the phrase “The Rise
of China” had been around for more than a decade. But when Zheng
added an essentially positive adjective—peaceful—it made
international observers more nervous, not less. “As Zheng's essay
makes clear,” one neo-conservative wrote of the theory, “China's
main goal continues to be amassing national power.”9 Peaceful rise
simply wasn’t credible. It ran counter to decades of Western images
about China and, as a result, felt more like propaganda than honest,
resonant insight into Beijing’s intentions. No one knew what China
was thinking or planning, most press coverage of China still made it
appear dangerous and unstable, and Westerners looked at the
country with views freighted by ignorance and bias. As a result,
6 See China's Peaceful Rise, Speeches of Zheng Bijian 1997-2005, Brookings
Institution Press 2005
7 See for instance Yan Xuetong’s widely discussed 有和平不一定有安全 (Having
“Peace” does not mean having “security”, Privately distributed and at
http://military.people.com.cn/GB/1078/4028621.html
8 Rumsfeld speech at http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2005/Jun/10-598697.html
9 Tonelson, Alan “Washington Dreams on About China”, Washington Times, October
7. 2005
11
promising a “peaceful rise”, seemed hard to credit. And because
China wasn’t trusted, talking about a “peaceful rise” had the effect of
further eroding trust in China. It was literally like trying to convince
people they were about to experience a peaceful earthquake. Not
only would no one believe you, they would think that at best you
were misinformed and at worst deliberately lying.
Zheng had stumbled into a paradox. What sort of strange physics of
international power meant that a given input produced exactly the
opposite output you expected? Zheng tinkered with the phrase, tried
buttressing it with new logic and even drew parallels back through
thousands of years of history to show China’s innately peaceful
nature. It didn’t work. China’s leaders quickly dropped the phrase,
retreating instead to “peaceful development,” a phrase that was a
direct descendent of Deng Xiaoping’s “peace and development”
(heping yu fazhan) and which stirred less opposition inside and
outside of China. Later President Hu introduced the more subtle and
more powerful idea of a “Harmonious World,” (hexie shijie).10 And
though Zheng continued to use his idea in responding to attacks on
China, the approach continued to backfire. Zheng could say
“peaceful” all he wanted; the world still heard “earthquake.” In the
end, what China thought about itself didn’t matter so much. What
mattered was what the world thought of China. Zheng’s problem was
a conundrum Lin Zexu would have appreciated, one that ran far
deeper than the translation of jueqi. Lin’s letter to Victoria, after all,
had also been intended to instruct, not serve as a precursor to war.
10 HJT United Nations Anniversary Speech, Sept. 2005,
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjdt/zyjh/t213091.htm
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Chapter 1: China’s Image Emergency
China’s greatest strategic threat today is its national image. The
country is not, in the short term, likely to be invaded. The country’s
most important strategic issues, challenges as diverse as sustaining
economic growth and the threat of Taiwanese independence, have
at their root a shared connection to China’s national image (guojia
xingxiang). Tactical challenges such as the quality of foreign direct
investment (FDI) that the country attracts, the willingness of other
nations to provide technological and educational aid, and the spread
of Chinese businesses into international markets all share a basis in
national image. Even the leadership’s desire to maintain internal
stability has ties to how the country is seen and how she sees
herself. For one of the few times in its history, this famously inward-
looking nation is vulnerable to how it is seen abroad. How China is
perceived by other nations – and the underlying reality that
perception reflects—will determine the future of Chinese
development and reform.
China’s problem is more complex than whether or not its national
image is “good” or “bad”, but hinges on a more difficult puzzle:
China’s image of herself and other nations’ views of her are out of
alignment. This is no surprise. In the last twenty-five years China has
changed faster than any nation in history. Economic growth has lifted
hundreds of millions out of poverty, the spread of market-based
economics has
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