The Contest of the Century (31 page)

Winning a Nobel Prize had long been a Chinese obsession. Delegations were sent to Sweden to investigate what the judges were looking
for. Conferences were held and a national literature prize established to seed local talent. The push to win a Nobel Prize “had become a
cause of a psychological disorder, a token whose value and authority as imagined in China was inflated out of all proportions to its real importance,” the China scholar Julia Lovell wrote in a 2006 essay. In a way, the Nobel obsession demonstrated the way China has got things the wrong way round, a bureaucratic-led push for recognition taking the place of actual creativity. As they did most years, in 2010 the main Chinese news Web sites ran special pages for the Nobel awards, including long profiles of the winners for medicine, chemistry, and economics, as their names were announced. When the award of the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo was unveiled, however, the special Web pages quickly disappeared. Official China craved a Nobel Prize: just not
that
prize. Some disgruntled Chinese took matters into their own hands. A group of academics founded the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize, which was awarded the day before the Nobel ceremony in Oslo and was designed to demonstrate displeasure with the Norwegian committee’s decision to honor Liu. According to Qiao Damo, a poet who was one of the prize organizers: “We thought it better to have a prize that suits Eastern values of peace, which are different from Norway and the West”—a sentiment somewhat undermined by the fact that Qiao was also on the short list of winners. The prize brochure put it slightly differently: “Norway is only a small country. With over one billion people, [China] should have a great voice on the issue of world peace.” In the end, the event had a farcical air. The aging Taiwanese politician who was given the award, Lien Chan, declined to attend because he did not take it seriously. His place was taken by a surprised-looking six-year-old girl who stepped up to collect the cash award.

Validation of a sort eventually came when the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature went to the Chinese author Mo Yan. Television programs were interrupted to announce the news, and the
People’s Daily
gushed the next day that the prize was “a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation—but even more so, it is a new starting point.” Mo is a particularly unusual talent, an internationally respected writer whose work is full of social criticism but who is also a vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers Association. It is a testament to his skills, both literary
and political, that he has managed to walk this tightrope. But it has not always been easy. His reputation at home was damaged when he took part in the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, another one of those events which exposed the limitations of China’s soft-power push. As the guest of honor that year, Beijing saw the festival as an opportunity to promote Chinese literature and spent $7.5 million on the event, sending two thousand publishers to Frankfurt to promote the country’s authors. Mo gave a speech to the opening session, which was attended by then vice president Xi Jinping. Yet, from the start, the festival was marred by behind-the-scenes fighting between Chinese officials and the organizers over what would be discussed at the events. At a symposium before the festival, the German hosts asked dissident writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling to speak, but then withdrew the invitations after Beijing objected, only to reinstate them following a protest by German journalists. In the end, when the two writers stood to speak, the official Chinese delegation walked out. Mo was among that group.

A similar furor erupted at the closing ceremony, when Dai and Bei said they had initially been invited to speak, only to be barred again after another protest from Beijing. The result was a huge own-goal, with much more attention paid to Chinese political interference than to any of the writers actually present. As long as Beijing tries to control the definition of Chinese culture and to decide who will speak on its behalf, China will continue to punch well below its weight. “I had no choice,” Mo said in an interview a year later with a Chinese magazine, when asked to explain why he had walked out on other writers. “A lot of people are now saying about me,
‘Mo Yan is a state writer.’ It’s true, insofar as… I get a salary from the Ministry of Culture, and get my social and health insurance from them too.” He added: “That’s the reality in China. Overseas, people all have their own insurance, but without a position, I can’t afford to get sick in China.”

It was a Chinese liberal intellectual and diplomat, Hu Shi, who in the 1930s provided the best answer to those afraid of Chinese soft power. He was writing in another era of intense debates in China about how to modernize its society and whether it should follow a Western path. If there was anything really valuable in traditional Chinese culture, Hu Shi told his compatriots, then it would easily survive the entry of
Western ideas into the country. “If our culture really contains priceless treasures that are able to withstand the power of the cleansing foreign attack, this indestructible part of our culture will naturally emerge even more fully after scientific culture washes over it,” Hu wrote. The threat to America’s soft power does not come from China, but from its own seeming inability to solve basic issues of governance. The U.S. should worry less about the attractiveness of China and more about getting its own house in order.

A few months before he left office in 2012, Hu Jintao gave another speech about soft power, this time with much harder edges. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu warned. Gone was the confident vision of a proud culture winning its due in the world, replaced instead by an insecure, enemies-under-the-bed nervousness. Hu added: “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.” The speech was an appropriate bookend for the hidden agenda behind the soft-power push. As a result of its slow-burning legitimacy crisis, the Communist Party has reached for any number of new props to replace its socialist ideals, from economic managerialism to nationalism. Confucius, the Olympics, and Nobel Prizes are all part of the same search for legitimacy. China is not really selling itself to the world: the party is trying to justify itself to the Chinese people.

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND THE UN

W
HEN BARACK OBAMA MADE
his first-ever trip to China in November 2009, he got to meet most of the country’s top leaders, with one very notable exception. That same week, Zhou Yongkang decided it was the right moment to take a large Chinese delegation to Sudan. A member of the all-powerful nine-man Communist Party Standing Committee, Zhou had the day job of running China’s vast security apparatus. It was he who orchestrated the arrest of Liu Xiaobo. But Zhou [pronounced
Jo
] also occasionally dabbled in foreign policy. When the ailing Kim Jong-il unveiled his twenty-something son Kim Jong-un as his successor during a mass rally in Pyongyang in 2010, Zhou was standing right next to him on the platform. Zhou has also been one of the linchpins of China’s close ties with Sudan. During his trip to Khartoum, Zhou met with Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, who, partly as a result of U.S. pressure, had been charged four months earlier by the International Criminal Court in the Hague with genocide and crimes against humanity.

Back in Beijing, Obama was enduring a frustrating visit, every stage of which was carefully stage-managed by the government to limit open contact with ordinary Chinese people. At a joint “press conference” in
the Great Hall of the People, there were no actual questions allowed from either the American or the Chinese media. Instead, the two presidents read out short statements and walked away in silence, looking as if they had just been to couples counseling. On the same evening, Bashir, who now faces an international arrest warrant, held a banquet for Zhou and the Chinese delegation in Khartoum. “As an old friend of the Sudanese president,” Zhou said in an after-dinner speech, “I got a full sense of the profound changes that have taken place in Sudan under your leadership as soon as I stepped on Sudanese soil.”

It is not hard to see why some in Washington might feel China is becoming the cheerleader for the world’s more authoritarian and anti-Western regimes. In the last few years, Beijing has gone out of its way to protect the Kim regime in North Korea, despite its increasingly dangerous behavior. China provided a financial lifeline to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and helped reduce international pressure on the Syrian regime as the country’s civil war escalated. China has even become an important backer of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, helping protect him from censure in the United Nations and elsewhere. When Mugabe celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday in February 2010, the Chinese Embassy in Harare put on a party for the president to mark the occasion, with more than a hundred guests invited. Mugabe was presented with a large cake, made from eight different layers. A group of Chinese diplomats sang the Zimbabwean national anthem for him in the Shona language. It was the first time Mugabe had visited an embassy in the capital in the three decades he has been in power.

Among all these relationships, however, the Sudanese connection has been the most controversial. Over the last two decades, China has invested $7 billion in the oil industry in Sudan, making it both the main customer and the biggest investor in Africa’s largest nation. With the possible exception of North Korea, Sudan is the nearest thing China has to a client state. Shortly after Omar al-Bashir took power in a coup in 1989, he found himself the subject of international sanctions as a result of his links to terrorism. (During the 1990s, Sudan provided a home for Osama bin Laden for several years.) As Western oil companies pulled out of the country, China stepped into the vacuum. China’s oil companies were in the first throes of their “go out” strategy, where Beijing encouraged
selected companies to operate overseas, and Sudan provided the perfect opportunity, a country with ample reserves not already tied up by China’s Western rivals. Within a few years, the Chinese companies accounted for more than 70 percent of Sudan’s entire exports. As it happens, one of the executives at the helm of the oil industry who helped set up the Sudan investments was Zhou Yongkang, the security boss who in the 1990s ran China National Petroleum Corporation, the largest oil group. Relations between the two countries started to go well beyond oil. In its bid to curry favor with Khartoum, China trained Sudanese helicopter pilots and became one of the government’s main suppliers of arms. Twice during the Darfur conflict, a UN panel of experts noted that Chinese weapons were being transferred to Darfur by the Khartoum government. When Hu Jintao visited Sudan in 2007, at the height of the international furor over Darfur, he offered an interest-free loan to build a new presidential palace.

At the same time, China has also become the political protector of the Sudanese regime. During the very worst years of the slaughter in Darfur, in 2003 and 2004, China provided crucial political support using its position on the United Nations Security Council to block or water down measures aimed at the regime in Khartoum. At the UN, Darfur was a hugely divisive issue. The conflict exposed the stark difference between the way the U.S. and European nations now understand the world, and the way China does. For many in Washington, the events in Darfur were “genocide,” a grotesque series of crimes by the government against its own citizens, which made some sort of outside intervention a moral imperative. Beijing argued that the violence was an internal affair of Sudan and that heavy outside intervention in the country would only destabilize it even further. The rest of the world had no right to override Sudan’s sovereignty. China effectively put up a large sign saying: “Keep out.”

——

If the twentieth
century saw fierce ideological battles between fascism and liberal democracy and between capitalism and communism, then one of the central dividing lines in this century will be the issue of state sovereignty. As China has become more powerful over the last decade,
Washington and Beijing have started to compete over the basic rules at the heart of the international system, about the duties and responsibilities of what is sometimes called “the international community.” In part, it is a battle for the soul of the United Nations, where many of these disputes are played out, but it is also a bigger discussion about the role of human rights in international affairs. In one corner, the U.S. and Europe urge greater outside intervention in states that are conducting massive abuses against their citizens; in the other corner, China and Russia defend a belief that absolute sovereign rights are the bedrock for a stable international system. Sudan was a warm-up act for this clash between two very different philosophical views about the way the world should work. Beijing would like to use its new influence to set the tone for how international politics will be organized and to check what it sees as Western moralizing and meddling.