淡色中国

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. 4 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 12 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