Xiang Lanxin paints a vivid picture of Europe’s coming “third engagement” with China, and puts forward some interesting and revealing ideas on how a genuinely closer relationship between the two partners is being achieved. I wouldn’t challenge either the likelihood or the value of this closer engagement, but I do have one reservation. It is that China today is in fact losing some of the political and social values that are supposed to be Europe’s core values.
The two previous major European engagements with China were first, through the Christian missionaries and secondly through imperialism. But it is still far from clear whether China has itself understood the importance of these engagements; the missionary engagement helped China to rediscover its identity as “a” rather than “the” country in the world, and to discover its own cultural differences with Europe. The second engagement, in the form of military imperialism, brought home to China the extent of its poor military skills and its technological backwardness. That is why the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been so vehement about making the country’s technological and economic development its top priority.
What about other European values? Two of the examples mentioned by Prof. Xiang could usefully be debated. To begin with, even if Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was right when he said that it is France that can best understand China and Chinese civilisation, how easily does China accept the three core ideas of the French Revolution; liberty, equality and fraternity? Far from embracing these concepts, the current political situation in the PRC has seen the government disassociating itself from all three concepts, notably through the filtering of information to be freely received by the general public through Google.
After more than two decades of the rapid economic development that followed Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, China is still experiencing huge income inequalities between its coastal provinces and its inner and western provinces. The price has been the laying-off of workers too numerous to count, most of them without adequate pension rights, and the cause has been the privatisation or outright closure of state-owned enterprises. With many people also denied access to public medical services, the social fabric between the general public and the government is beginning to wear very thin indeed, and is being torn further by the strains of corruption, naked market competition and the growing power that is exercised by provincial and local officials.
To appreciate the achievement of Chinese thinkers, intellectuals, scientists and even businessmen in shaping the culture and the economy of the world, it is certainly justifiable to quote Gu Hongming (1857-1928), a foreign-trained Chinese intellectual. Yet it might be more instructive to look to Gao Xingjian, the Chinese-trained French citizen who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2000, to see what Chinese intellectuals sometimes have to contend with. He was denied the right to return to China because of his criticism of the government, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are evidently still in short supply in China’s political system. Europe is definitely trying to engage with China in cultural, economic and even strategic terms. So perhaps the big question is whether China will respond by wholeheartedly trying to understand and accept European values.