The problem of...
A month after returning from China, this series finally reaches its conclusion. Thanks for your patience. Previous notes: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
The aim of this series has been ‘to orient’ our thinking through and with China, and by doing so, trying to move beyond binary frames that view the country as threat, as enemy, as other. There are a range of emotions, incentives and structures that can encourage such a simplifying approach. Yet it is also a reflection of genuine concerns and problems, and it is important not to lose sight of these developments that increase the sense of threat. These changes are readily felt in the region.
Writing from Japan, the immediate news is the fatal stabbing of a 10 year old Japanese boy in Shenzhen on the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden incident, following a similar case at a school bus stop in Suzhou in July, in which a Japanese school boy and mother were stabbed and a Chinese woman killed protecting them. These attacks have occurred in the context of anti-Japanese sentiment being shared through social media: problems with digital platforms promoting hate are certainly not limited to the West. Following the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in China the ‘social media response was sprinkled with glee and anti-Abe vitriol’, and last year following the release of treated radioactive wastewater from Fukushima there was another wave of online hostility. This reflects and extends strong anti-Japanese sentiment in the country, grounded in the experience of the brutal imperialism of Japan and the failure of reconciliation in East Asia. Meanwhile, Chinese remain the largest immigrant group in Japan, making up close to a quarter of the total. From 2022-23, there was a 13% increase in Chinese relocating to Japan, and in 2024, already approximately 4.6 million Chinese tourists have visited, with around 745,000 of them coming in August alone. Conflict, coexistence, cooperation, community, all sitting together uncomfortably, these are the ties that bind and chafe.
In reckoning with the complexities and contradictions of China we encounter the complexities and contradictions of the uneven and combined conditions we collectively inhabit. ‘Enforced cosmopolitanism’ means we are unavoidably part of a ‘shared community of fate’, the question is not whether to ‘de-link’ or ‘de-risk’, but whether we are willing to acknowledge these connections and interdependencies. With that in mind, these notes have sought to explicate some of these relations and dilemmas by considering the fraught and capturing dynamics of digital media, the ‘shock and awe’ of the emergence of a manufacturing superpower, a post-modern world reckoning with the most far-reaching manifestation of a modernist vision of technology as a means of production and control, and the lifeworlds of meaning and practice that are being lost along the way.
In tracking such developments we must emphatically recall where conflict and enmity leads, in the words of Simone Weil:
force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
Invoking Weil, James Boyd White calls for us to resist ‘the empire of force’. This becomes a vital and pressing task in the perversity of the present moment, when there are simultaneously more and more examples of force failing to protect and secure, combining with an increasing desire to attack and and willingness to escalate. A world in which children are stabbed, schools are bombed, mass atrocities are committed by militaries, populations are starved by choice, a million people are killed and injured, and more than 117 million people are forcibly displaced, this is not a world we should accept, but it is the world we inhabit now. Those tilting towards conflict and confrontation, pushing against limits and boundaries, disregarding fundamental rules and norms that regulate how we try to live together, they are helping to bring forward far worse realities. We continue to fail to take war seriously.
It is important to emphasise the stakes, as if one accepts the wager of polycrisis, then it suggests we still have all the longstanding problems of geopolitical competition, which are combining with a changing climate, the breaching of planetary boundaries and a range of other systemic risks that come from our connected coexistence. From this perspective, debates about polarity are of marginal importance, what matters is China matters, it is a brute empirical reality that must be recognised and reckoned with. The size and capacity of the country means the course it takes is deeply consequential for us all. To choose not to engage with the country, to not look for detail, to not explore its complexity, is to drastically reduce one’s capacity to understand the current conjuncture. As the line goes, ‘war is too important to be left to the generals’, to which must be added, ‘China is too important to be left to the specialists’.
In a recent review of Perry Link’s, I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, Ian Johnson observes:
This remarkable biography prompted me to reflect on how the outside world thinks about China. Although it is widely regarded as a powerful rival to free societies around the world, people seem uninterested in exploring it. We are bombarded with policy analyses—on important topics, to be sure, but impossible to formulate intelligently without understanding the country’s deeper trends.
A similar judgement has informed this series of notes. Indeed, it has also been a kind of autocritique, acknowledging how uncurious I had been about China and how that had limited my thinking.
As a way of finishing, in 1920 the philosopher Bertrand Russell spent a year in China as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Beijing, and travelled around the country giving lectures. On returning to the UK, he published The Problem of China in 1922, which concluded with the following judgement:
The aim to be pursued is of importance, not only to China, but to the world. Out of the renaissance spirit now existing in China, it is possible, if foreign nations can be prevented from working havoc, to develop a new civilization better than any that the world has yet known. This is the aim which Young China should set before itself: the preservation of the urbanity and courtesy, the candour and the pacific temper, which are characteristic of the Chinese nation, together with a knowledge of Western science and an application of it to the practical problems of China. Of such practical problems there are two kinds: one due to the internal condition of China, and the other to its international situation. In the former class come education, democracy, the diminution of poverty, hygiene and sanitation, and the prevention of famines. In the latter class come the establishment of a strong government, the development of industrialism, the revision of treaties and the recovery of the Treaty Ports (as to which Japan may serve as a model), and finally, the creation of an army sufficiently strong to defend the country against Japan. Both classes of problems demand Western science. But they do not demand the adoption of the Western philosophy of life.
If the Chinese were to adopt the Western philosophy of life, they would, as soon as they had made themselves safe against foreign aggression, embark upon aggression on their own account. They would repeat the campaigns of the Han and Tang dynasties in Central Asia, and perhaps emulate Kublai by the invasion of Japan. They would exploit their material resources with a view to producing a few bloated plutocrats at home and millions dying of hunger abroad. Such are the results which the West achieves by the application of science. If China were led astray by the lure of brutal power, she might repel her enemies outwardly, but would have yielded to them inwardly. It is not unlikely that the great military nations of the modern world will bring about their own destruction by their inability to abstain from war, which will become, with every year that passes, more scientific and more devastating. If China joins in this madness, China will perish like the rest. But if Chinese reformers can have the moderation to stop when they have made China capable of self-defence, and to abstain from the further step of foreign conquest; if, when they have become safe at home, they can turn aside from the materialistic activities imposed by the Powers, and devote their freedom to science and art and the inauguration of a better economic system—then China will have played the part in the world for which she is fitted, and will have given to mankind as a whole new hope in the moment of greatest need. It is this hope that I wish to see inspiring Young China. This hope is realizable; and because it is realizable, China deserves a foremost place in the esteem of every lover of mankind.
Thank you for your patience and engagement with this attempt to orient thought. These imperfect notes will continue struggling with ‘the trap the world has become’. More to follow. Any questions, feedback etc: info.hobson@gmail.com or christopher.hobson@anu.edu.au