Concepts of International Relations: Impartiality or Equality?
Just as there are no
great cathedrals in China, there are no Blenheim Palaces.
Aristocratic political grandees like the Duke of Marlborough, who
built Blenheim, did not come into being. Europe entered the modern
age a welter of political diversity—independent princes and dukes
and counts, cities that governed themselves, the Roman Catholic
Church, which claimed an authority outside of state purview, and
Protestant groups, which aspired to building their own
self-governing civil societies. By contrast, when it entered the
modern period, China had for well over one thousand years a fully
formed imperial bureaucracy recruited by competitive examination,
permeating and regulating all aspects of the economy and
society.
The Chinese approach
to world order was thus vastly different from the system that took
hold in the West. The modern Western conception of international
relations emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
the medieval structure of Europe dissolved into a group of states
of approximately equal strength, and the Catholic Church split into
various denominations. Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice
than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its
will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain
universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of
states became the basis of international law and
diplomacy.
China, by contrast,
was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the
basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered
societies of comparable culture or magnitude. That the Chinese
Empire should tower over its geographical sphere was taken
virtually as a law of nature, an expression of the Mandate of
Heaven. For Chinese Emperors, the mandate did not necessarily imply
an adversarial relationship with neighboring peoples; preferably it
did not. Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing
a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of
universalism to spread its values around the world. It confined
itself to controlling the barbarians immediately at its doorstep.
It strove for tributary states like Korea to recognize China’s
special status, and in return, it conferred benefits such as
trading rights. As for the remote barbarians such as Europeans,
about whom they knew little, the Chinese maintained a friendly, if
condescending, aloofness. They had little interest in converting
them to Chinese ways. The founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty
expressed this view in 1372: “Countries of the western ocean are
rightly called distant regions. They come [to us] across the seas.
And it is difficult for them to calculate the year and month [of
arrival]. Regardless of their numbers, we treat them [on the
principle of] ‘those who come modestly are sent off
generously.’”20
The Chinese Emperors
felt it was impractical to contemplate influencing countries that
nature had given the misfortune of locating at such a great
distance from China. In the Chinese version of exceptionalism,
China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.
Neighboring peoples, the Chinese believed, benefited from contact
with China and civilization so long as they acknowledged the
suzerainty of the Chinese government. Those who did not were
barbarian. Subservience to the Emperor and observance of imperial
rituals was the core of culture.21 When the empire was strong, this cultural
sphere expanded: All Under Heaven was a multinational entity
comprising the ethnic Han Chinese majority and numerous non-Han
Chinese ethnic groups.
In official Chinese
records, foreign envoys did not come to the imperial court to
engage in negotiations or affairs of state; they “came to be
transformed” by the Emperor’s civilizing influence. The Emperor did
not hold “summit meetings” with other heads of state; instead,
audiences with him represented the “tender cherishing of men from
afar,” who brought tribute to recognize his overlordship. When the
Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not
diplomats, but “Heavenly Envoys” from the Celestial
Court.
The organization of
the Chinese government reflected the hierarchical approach to world
order. China handled ties with tribute-paying states such as Korea,
Thailand, and Vietnam through the Ministry of Rituals, implying
that diplomacy with these peoples was but one aspect of the larger
metaphysical task of administering the Great Harmony. With less
Sinicized mounted tribes to the north and west, China came to rely
on a “Court of Dependencies,” analogous to a colonial office, whose
mission was to invest vassal princes with titles and maintain peace
on the frontier.22
Only under the
pressure of Western incursions in the nineteenth century did China
establish something analogous to a foreign ministry to manage
diplomacy as an independent function of government, in 1861 after
the defeat in two wars with the Western powers. It was considered a
temporary necessity, to be abolished once the immediate crisis
subsided. The new ministry was deliberately located in an old and
undistinguished building previously used by the Department of Iron
Coins, to convey, in the words of the leading Qing Dynasty
statesman, Prince Gong, “the hidden meaning that it cannot have a
standing equal to that of other traditional government offices,
thus preserving the distinction between China and foreign
countries.”23
European-style ideas
of interstate politics and diplomacy were not unknown in the
Chinese experience; rather, they existed as a kind of
countertradition taking place within China in times of disunity.
But as if by some unwritten law, these periods of division ended
with the reunification of All Under Heaven, and the reassertion of
Chinese centrality by a new dynasty.
In its imperial role,
China offered surrounding foreign peoples impartiality, not
equality: it would treat them humanely and compassionately in
proportion to their attainment of Chinese culture and their
observance of rituals connoting submission to China.
What was most
remarkable about the Chinese approach to international affairs was
less its monumental formal pretensions than its underlying
strategic acumen and longevity. For during most of Chinese history,
the numerous “lesser” peoples along China’s long and shifting
frontiers were often better armed and more mobile than the Chinese.
To China’s north and west were seminomadic peoples—the Manchus,
Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and eventually the expansionist Russian
Empire—whose mounted cavalry could launch raids across its extended
frontiers on China’s agricultural heartland with relative impunity.
Retaliatory expeditions faced inhospitable terrain and extended
supply lines. To China’s south and east were peoples who, though
nominally subordinate in the Chinese cosmology, possessed
significant martial traditions and national identities. The most
tenacious of them, the Vietnamese, had fiercely resisted Chinese
claims of superiority and could claim to have bested China in
battle.
China was in no
position to conquer all of its neighbors. Its population consisted
mainly of farmers bound to their ancestral plots. Its mandarin
elite earned their positions not through displays of martial valor
but by way of mastery of the Confucian classics and refined arts
such as calligraphy and poetry. Individually, neighboring peoples
could pose formidable threats; with any degree of unity, they would
be overwhelming. The historian Owen Lattimore wrote, “Barbarian
invasion therefore hung over China as a permanent threat. . . . Any
barbarian nation that could guard its own rear and flanks against
the other barbarians could set out confidently to invade
China.”24 China’s vaunted centrality and material
wealth would turn on itself and into an invitation for invasion
from all sides.
The Great Wall, so
prominent in Western iconography of China, was a reflection of this
basic vulnerability, though rarely a successful solution to it.
Instead, Chinese statesmen relied on a rich array of diplomatic and
economic instruments to draw potentially hostile foreigners into
relationships the Chinese could manage. The highest aspiration was
less to conquer (though China occasionally mounted major military
campaigns) than to deter invasion and prevent the formation of
barbarian coalitions.
Through trade
incentives and skillful use of political theater, China coaxed
neighboring peoples into observing the norms of Chinese centrality
while projecting an image of awesome majesty to deter potential
invaders from testing China’s strength. Its goal was not to conquer
and subjugate the barbarians but to “rule [them] with a loose rein”
(ji mi). For those who would not obey,
China would exploit divisions among them, famously “using
barbarians to check barbarians” and, when necessary, “using
barbarians to attack barbarians.”25 For as a Ming Dynasty official wrote of
the potentially threatening tribes on China’s northeastern
frontier:
[I]f the tribes are divided among themselves they [will remain] weak and [it will be] easy to hold them in subjection; if the tribes are separated they shun each other and readily obey. We favor one or other [of their chieftains] and permit them to fight each other. This is a principle of political action which asserts: “Wars between the ‘barbarians’ are auspicious for China.”26
The goal of this
system was essentially defensive: to prevent the formation of
coalitions on China’s borders. The principles of barbarian
management became so ingrained in Chinese official thought that
when the European “barbarians” arrived on China’s shores in force
in the nineteenth century, Chinese officials described their
challenge with the same phrases used by their dynastic
predecessors: they would “use barbarians against barbarians” until
they could be soothed and subdued. And they applied a traditional
strategy to answer the initial British attack. They invited other
European countries in for the purpose of first stimulating and then
manipulating their rivalry.
In pursuit of these
aims, the Chinese court was remarkably pragmatic about the means it
employed. The Chinese bribed the barbarians, or used Han
demographic superiority to dilute them; when defeated, they
submitted to them, as in the beginning of the Yuan and Qing
Dynasties, as a prelude to Sinicizing them. The Chinese court
regularly practiced what in other contexts would be considered
appeasement, albeit through an elaborate filter of protocol that
allowed the Chinese elites to claim it was an assertion of
benevolent superiority. Thus a Han Dynasty minister described the
“five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu
tribes to China’s northwestern frontier:
To give them . . . elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach . . . and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.27
In periods of
strength, the diplomacy of the Middle Kingdom was an ideological
rationalization for imperial power. During periods of decline, it
served to mask weakness and helped China manipulate contending
forces.
In comparison to more
recent regional contenders for power, China was a satisfied empire
with limited territorial ambition. As a scholar during the Han
Dynasty (A.D. 25–220) put it, “the emperor does not govern the
barbarians. Those who come to him will not be rejected, and those
who leave will not be pursued.”28 The objective was a compliant, divided
periphery, rather than one directly under Chinese
control.
The most remarkable
expression of China’s fundamental pragmatism was its reaction to
conquerors. When foreign dynasts prevailed in battle, the Chinese
bureaucratic elite would offer their services and appeal to their
conquerors on the premise that so vast and unique a land as they
had just overrun could be ruled only by use of Chinese methods,
Chinese language, and the existing Chinese bureaucracy. With each
generation, the conquerors would find themselves increasingly
assimilated into the order they had sought to dominate. Eventually
their own home territories—the launching points for their
invasions—would come to be regarded as part of China itself. They
would find themselves pursuing traditional Chinese national
interests, with the project of conquest effectively turned on its
head.29