Abstract
The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East
Christopher Harding. London: Allen Lane, 2024. £30.00. 464 pp.
The United States–South Korea Alliance: Why It May Fail and Why It Must Not
Scott A. Snyder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. £30.00/$35.00. 336 pp.
Living U.S.–China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War
David M. Lampton. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024. £30.00/$36.00. 440 pp.
Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption
Jeremy Garlick. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. £21.99. 232 pp.
The Emergence of China’s Smart State
Rogier Creemers, Straton Papagianneas and Adam Knight, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. £85.00/$110.00. 260 pp.
The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East
Christopher Harding. London: Allen Lane, 2024. £30.00. 464 pp.
This is an ambitious yet timely project to identify continuities and discontinuities in the interactions between two ancient civilisations in the East – China and India – with so-called Greco-Roman civilisation, broadly known today as the ‘West’, across several millennia. Christopher Harding seems able to manage the subject with flying colours, and his analysis illuminates features of East–West interaction in the present day.
Harding writes that from the early modern era, Asia attracted Western fascination as a place of ‘wealth and wonder’, and as a source of ‘fresh wisdom for the West’. The ‘light of Asia’, he says, ‘appeared, for a time, to shine especially brightly in China’. Europeans such as Voltaire and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were ‘thrilled to discover an ancient and successful society, built and maintained on learning and merit’ rather than feudal and clerical privilege (p. 3). Early Portuguese visitors to China, who were ‘not especially welcome’ (p. 69), found a ‘learned place’ that was ‘peaceable, and well-fed’, with ‘impressive’ architecture and ‘sophisticated’ arts and crafts (pp. 71–2). There was little cause for Europeans, who were classified as ‘outer barbarians’ by the Chinese world view, to feel superior (p. 69).
Westerners have been more confident in their encounters with Indian civilisation, which, unlike China’s, was known for its poverty and a chaotic cultural identity comprising many religions and languages – a consequence of India having been conquered on numerous occasions by foreign powers, starting with Alexander the Great. China had some experience with foreign conquest too, notably by the Mongols and Manchus, but the alien rulers had quickly become assimilated to Chinese culture and ways of governance. Thus, there was, from the beginning, a major difference in the interactions between the Western world and the two Asian civilisations. Indo-Western relations started in ancient times and involved direct military conquest, while Sino-Western relations involved minimal direct contact until the 1840s (the first Opium War ). Interactions with India were more of a one-way street, with Western culture often prevailing, while there was greater resistance to Western influence in China. Both patterns have lasted to our times.
Two fantasies dominate contemporary Western thinking about Asia. One is that India will overtake China, a prospect seen as welcome in the West because India is ‘one of us’, the world’s ‘most populous democracy’. The second is that China will eventually converge with Western systems of governance. Neither vision seems realisable.
Nevertheless, India is still being enthusiastically courted by contemporary Greco-Romans, who have invented the geopolitical concept of ‘Indo-Pacific’ to highlight its importance. Yet India is not part of the Greco-Roman world. It is resisting the Western-led international order, known today as Pax Americana, in a variety of ways, such as buying Russian energy products in massive quantities.
The United States–South Korea Alliance: Why It May Fail and Why It Must Not
Scott A. Snyder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. £30.00/$35.00. 336 pp.
The United States and South Korea have enjoyed a cooperative alliance relation-ship for more than 70 years, but Scott Snyder warns that
it would be a mistake to ignore emerging domestic political vulnerabilities that threaten alliance cooperation resulting from a combination of narrow nationalism and deepening domestic political polarization in both countries that became visible during the Trump and Moon administrations. (pp. ix–x)
Snyder writes that the alliance’s vulnerability to ‘exclusive forms of self-interested nationalism’ was on full display in Donald Trump’s ‘“America-First” extortionist demands’ for increased financial contributions by South Korea to maintain the presence of US troops on the Korean Peninsula (p. 4). Trump portrayed South Korea as a rich free-rider that had ‘conned’ the United States into defending it:
When top U.S. military commanders stationed in the country showed Trump the revamped and gleaming Camp Humphreys, a U.S. military base … that was expanded with an almost $10 billion investment from South Korea, Trump used it as evidence that South Korea should and could pay even more for the presence of U.S. forces in South Korea rather than as evidence of South Korean commitment to the alliance. (p. 4)
Snyder offers a good analysis of the ways in which domestic political conditions might undermine the US–South Korean alliance. Unfortunately, his book was published before Kim Jong-un decided to repudiate the goal of reunification with South Korea, thus undercutting one of the leading causes of the South Korean opposition.
Living U.S.–China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War
David M. Lampton. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024. £30.00/$36.00. 440 pp.
In Living U.S.–China Relations, author David (Mike) Lampton uses an auto-biographical approach to explain the tumultuous trajectory of US–China relations during his lifetime. Now nearly 80 years old, Lampton belongs to a tight-knit intellectual circle dedicated to furthering the work of the late John Wilson Lewis, a leading China-policy guru at Stanford University, and the late A. Doak Barnett, the child of American missionaries in China who also made a career of studying the country. This group is known for eschewing the traditional Western approach to Sinology, preferring to emphasise ‘practical matters’ in dealing with China rather than seeking to understand the country more deeply. Some of Lewis’s students went on to gain important policy-making positions in Washington, mostly in Democratic administrations. As a group, they have taken pride in promoting good US–China ties and contributing to US policy.
The group’s collective understanding of China’s history, language, culture and traditional governing philosophy, however, has produced judgements about China that are often wishful in character. Group members may have grasped that their policy legacy is being threatened, but they don’t seem to understand why.
Lampton laments that ‘developments in the U.S.–China relationship are converging in a fashion that is setting off alarm bells … Friction between America and China is increasing, unlike anything we have seen in a half century’ (p. xiii). The fact that this is occurring during a Democratic administration, the natural habitat of Lampton and his group, is raising painful questions about their favoured theories of convergence and positive engagement with China. Lampton acknowledges that the pendulum is swinging ‘from Cold War to Cold War’, but fails to see how decades of promoting false optimism on both sides of the Pacific have contributed to this outcome.
Indeed, it seems off the mark to refer to growing distrust between the US and China as a new cold war – we should be so lucky! Today’s US–China relations more closely resemble the great-power tensions of 1914 than US–Soviet relations during the Cold War, given the lack of any stabilising mechanism for dangerous issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea. Lampton is correct to say that ‘for U.S. foreign policy to be strong and realistic, it must be founded on knowledge, empathy, and accurately assessed capabilities and weaknesses’ (p. 313), but in the main his book reads as a swan song for a bygone golden era that will not come back.
Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption
Jeremy Garlick. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. £21.99. 232 pp.
Jeremy Garlick argues forcefully that the Chinese economic miracle is widely misunderstood in the West, not just because there is a lack of knowledge about what works in the Chinese system, but also because cultural hubris encourages Westerners to conclude that the Chinese economic miracle is either Western-made, or the product of some mistake or misjudgement. Hence, the West cannot accept that the Chinese system may have inherent advantages over its Western counterpart in many fundamental respects.
Despite containing scathing criticism of the Western approach to China, Advantage China is not a left-wing screed, but rather a serious case study of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In seeking to explain why and how China has an advantage over the West in the Global South, Garlick makes three main arguments. These are, firstly, that the West should draw lessons from China’s experience dealing with global-development issues in a way that differs substantially from Western approaches; secondly, that the West’s reluctance to recognise the advantages China possesses in its dealings with the Global South is reducing Western competitiveness; and thirdly, that the West’s lack of competitiveness in the Global South is drastically enhancing China’s influence in many areas of geopolitical concern to the West.
Westerners tend to focus on what they see as the negative aspects of the BRI, citing ‘debt traps’, the support of autocratic regimes and environmental damage (p. 67). But the question of debt-building, perhaps the criticism most often levelled by the West against the BRI, is not a uniquely Chinese problem. The Western world has been grappling with the debt problem since the mid-twentieth century, with little success. Neither the IMF nor the Paris Club have managed to restructure the debt problems of the Global South, despite decades of trying. The Paris Club in particular is run by representatives of the creditors, its mechanism lacks transparency and the debtor countries have no input into its decision-making.
Another comparative disadvantage of the West lies in its lack of competitiveness in infrastructure-building, either at home or overseas. China offers expertise, technological innovation and cost-effectiveness, and Garlick argues that its strengths in infrastructure construction ‘are the key to whatever success the BRI has enjoyed so far’ (p. 69). The principle of non-interference in the affairs of other countries gives China another advantage. This principle is vehemently attacked in the West as protecting dictatorial governments, but it is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which mandates respect for member states’ national sovereignty. The Western habit of interventionism, especially the United States’ penchant for regime change, represents a violation of the UN Charter. Moreover, the US often destroys regimes with no follow-up plan for reconstruction and development. This approach lacks appeal in the Global South.
The author concludes that, although the West and China both stand to benefit from better cooperation in the search for solutions to development problems in the Global South, ‘given the entrenched geopolitical rivalries and lack of mutual understanding this seems highly unlikely’ (p. 7).
The Emergence of China’s Smart State
Rogier Creemers, Straton Papagianneas and Adam Knight, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. £85.00/$110.00. 260 pp.
This edited volume offers a comprehensive study of China’s cyber strategy and policymaking, a topic that has received scant attention to date. In chapter one (‘The Cyberspace Administration of China: A Portrait’), the authors note that China’s ambition is to become ‘a technological leader with greater international competitiveness and self-sufficiency, universal high-bandwidth connectivity and a powerful digital economy’. At the same time, it maintains the ‘most elaborate content censorship system in the world’ and is ‘imposing ever stricter regulations surrounding data protection and cybersecurity’ (p. 10).
The central institution regulating these policies is the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The CAC discharges many responsibilities, such as maintaining the so-called Great Firewall, disseminating propaganda and disinformation as required by government policy, and overseeing cyber security. However, the CAC is not a traditional government agency. Jamie Horsley and Rogier Creemers describe it as an ‘opaque, seemingly dual Party–state institution … As such, it is solely accountable to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] Central Committee, not the State Council, China’s central government’ (p. 19). The CAC’s ‘institutional parent’ is the Party Central Cybersecurity and Informatisation Commission, which is chaired by the CCP’s general secretary, Xi Jinping.
The authors offer several case studies to illustrate the role played by the CAC in building a smart state. One is the notorious Social Credit System (SCS). This system tends to be viewed in the West through the lens of ‘authoritarian resilience’ and human rights (p. 36), but this kind of analysis can be simplistic and static. As one of the government’s flagship ‘smart’ projects (another being Smart Court Reform), the SCS has ‘relied heavily on a decentralised model of decision making and localised piloting’ (p. 41). As such, local administrations found themselves interpreting and applying the system in ways that sometimes violated Chinese law. Recognising this, the Chinese government announced changes intended to create an SCS that ‘sits within China’s legal system, not in parallel to it’ (p. 45). Between July 2020 and March 2022, five new legislative updates were published by state bodies, and progress has also been made toward the creation of a Social Credit Law. Cases like these demonstrate the dynamism of Chinese cyber policy and the importance the government places on its goal of developing ‘world-class indigenous technologies, top-notch information services, flourishing online culture, solid network infrastructure, and a powerful digital economy’ (p. 1).