The West risks becoming isolated with an obsolete world outlook

Thirteen years ago the influential Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall endorsed the Asia 2025 report, one in which the idea of Sino-American synergy was not even considered. "A stable and powerful China will be constantly challenging the status quo in East Asia, an unstable and relatively weak China could be dangerous because its leaders might try to bolster their power with foreign military adventurism," it said.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001, the US modified the orientation of its foreign policy for a decade, but six months after the last US troops withdrew from Iraq, and as its troops prepare to withdraw from the Afghan quagmire, Marshall's assessment on China resurfaces and provides the fundamental rationale for Barack Obama's grand "pivot to Asia".

If Marshall's reasoning was taken seriously by the vast majority of US analysts when Chinese GDP represented only 10 percent of US domestic product, how much more resonance it must have now as the value of the Chinese economy has become half the value of its US counterpart.

However, by assuming that the main challenges to US national security are the result of external factors and not domestic inadequacies, the US "return to Asia" may illustrate what Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, calls "the new American militarism" but does not necessarily serve the long-term interest of the Western world. A diversion from what really matters, the solidity of internal conditions, is a regrettable corollary of this policy. "It is not alone by the rapidity, or extent of conquest, that we should estimate the greatness of Rome," wrote Edward Gibbon in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "But the firm edifice of Roman power was raised and preserved by the wisdom of ages ... the general principle of government was wise, simple and beneficent."

The global financial crisis caused by Wall Street's hubris and a national credit addiction has accelerated China's relative rise, and a decade before its economy really surpasses US GDP, the most recent survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project concludes that China is already perceived as the world's leading economy.

According to the institute, based in Washington, views on the economic balance of power have indeed shifted dramatically over the past four years. In 2008, before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, 45 percent of respondents said the US was the world's economic superpower, while 22 percent mentioned China. These days 36 percent refer to the US, but 42 percent believe China is in the top position.

Despite pervasive China-bashing, gross misrepresentation of Chinese society and the gap between the US and Chinese instruments of soft power, it is remarkable that in global public perception the US does not lead the world any more, at least in economic affairs. More generally, China demonstrates a unique ability to navigate a world of paradoxes where multipolarity is concomitant with interdependence. In this unprecedented environment, the relevance of the American spectacular "return to Asia" can be questioned but this doctrine certainly underlines the striking contrast between a polarizing US outlook in which Beijing is framed as a power to contain and a 21st century China that operates beyond an East-West exclusive opposition.

Before US president Harry Truman orchestrated the containment of the Soviet Union, George Kennan famously wrote in his 1946 Long Telegram that Stalinist Moscow "still lives in antagonistic capitalist encirclement with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence". If the US "pivot to Asia" hypothesizes that Beijing could opt for an antagonistic posture, it miscalculates Beijing's intentions since the core and the utmost subtlety of Beijing's global strategy is precisely to remain non-confrontational.

Moreover, China's socio-economic progress should not be seen as a threatening development to be circumscribed. As long as it is synonymous with stability and prosperity, the Chinese reemergence does not weaken the US' Asian allies but offers them additional sources of growth.

Last year, while the value of Sino-Japanese trade reached $342 billion (273 billion euros), the value of China-ASEAN commercial exchanges rose to $362 billion. China's economic links with Central Asia are increasing and the value of its trade with Russia and India will approach $100 billion by 2015.

The uncertainties in the global economy and the persisting turbulence in the eurozone have pushed Northeast Asia toward a collective rebalancing and diversification, but this significant redefinition of commercial and financial flows was not a scheme targeting any adversary; it was simply a reaction to the West's economic deficiencies.

China, Japan and South Korea have agreed to promote the use of their foreign exchange reserves to invest in each other's government bonds. The three countries, which account for 70 percent of Asian GDP, are also moving toward setting up a trilateral free trade zone. Beijing and Seoul have already announced the launch of FTA talks that are expected to be completed before the end of 2014. China and Japan have started direct trading of their currencies in a policy that boosts the trade ties between Asia's two biggest economies.

The new Northeast Asian dynamics also redesign the Southeast Asian landscape. Along with the 10 ASEAN members, China, Japan and South Korea agreed on at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila in May to expand a regional liquidity safety net by doubling the Chiang Mai initiative multilateralization agreement to $240 billion.

The highly indebted US - more than 100 percent of its GDP and on track to add three times more debt than the eurozone over the next five years - chooses to create the conditions for the bipolarization of the Asia-Pacific region 20 years after the end of the Cold War, but instead of a "pivot to Asia", the US should have conceived a refocus on the US economy, the real long-term threat to its national security, and beyond, a rethinking with European leaders of Atlantic relations.

Fundamentally, while contemporary China has learned to coexist with the West and continues to use it as a catalyst for the renewal of its ancient civilization, the West has not yet fully accepted the reality of a sui generis Chinese modernity that marks the limit of its global expansion.

By sticking to the notion that "either you are like us or you are against us" while the Chinese traditional wisdom has prepared the Middle Kingdom to avoid such a dualistic mindset, the West risks becoming isolated with such an obsolete world outlook.

In a Chinese context, management, governance and, more generally, the vision of international relations are deeply influenced by the Tao of Centrality, a philosophy and a practice whose aim is to balance the opposites and to mediate between contradictory forces. The intelligence of centrality, zhong, presupposes contrary forces but as it targets equilibrium and harmony, it transcends the logic of exclusive opposition. The grandeur of the Tao of Centrality would not be in a victory of the East against the West but in their mutual nourishment.

In a global village where the absolute domination of one power over the others has become impossible, and where interdependence has considerably increased the price of tensions, the Tao of Centrality is a source of powerful effectiveness.

People often attribute to Napoleon Bonaparte a statement he probably never made and which has become a cliche, and a misleading one at that: "When China awakes, the world will shake." But China is neither a revolutionary force nor a power intoxicated by some Nietzschean will to shape a new global order.

As, in the unambiguous words of the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at a security conference in Singapore a month ago, "all of the US military services are focused on implementing the president's guidance to make the Asia-Pacific a top priority", China concentrates on its domestic transformation and, gradually, peacefully, regains centrality.

Although the counterproductive "pivot to Asia" complicates Sino-Western relations, it is not too late for the West to consider the Chinese renaissance with wisdom. It would not only contribute to its revitalization but also take the global system into an unprecedented era of cooperation and prosperity.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, Beijing and Accra, and founder of the Euro-China Forum. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily 06/29/2012 page10)