How history is being rewritten for China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Maximilian Mayer
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ‘belt and road initiative’ (BRI) spans three continents, entails around $1.4 trillion of promised infrastructure investments and is ten times bigger than the US Marshall Plan that helped rebuild western Europe after the Second World War. In the fifth year of its implementation, the BRI effectively has established an inspirational global agenda with huge financial and geopolitical repercussions. At the core of the BRI is China’s attempt to remodel its own identity and to reconstruct global history. Chinese political elites view their country as a morally superior model of civilization with its own unique economic development path. Given this rhetoric — but also due to pragmatic needs — the normative and cognitive dimensions of China’s new strategic narrative require more scrutiny. However, while the growing alarmist assessments have largely overlooked the role of identity, ideology and history in the BRI, it is arguably more challenging for China’s leadership than geopolitical competition.
China’s changing identity
As China remains a ‘partial power’, the Chinese elites’ outward-looking ideology is ever evolving — their unsettled spirit mirrored in the ideational consequences of the BRI discourses: who they are and who they ought to become is wide open. Domestically, the BRI reinforces the search for a ‘natural’ Chinese identity and fuels the following questions: Is China a Eurasian or a Pacific country, or both, and what does this mean strategically and culturally? Should China, under the helm of the Communist party, act as a sovereign nation-state or a civilization? These questions are further complicated by the fact that the country’s citizens remain quite inward-oriented and do not necessarily support a globally engaged China. Moreover, whether a society that has culturally been a land animal since a Ming emperor in 1525 burned the magnificent treasure fleet of Zheng He to ashes can develop a seafaring civilization supportive of a future maritime power is questionable.
So far, the historical narratives of BRI rhetoric indicate a return to a ‘primordial’, that is, original and natural, world order but under modern conditions. This includes the use of imagery of ancient Eurasian trade networks, which put China at the centre of a ‘community of human destiny: an envisioned hyper-interdependent globalized modernity coupled with a new type of moral order based on notions from ancient Chinese philosophy such as tianxia (all under heaven). Thus the identity under construction springs from the cultural and normative treasures of its long history as much as from its more recent successes of economic modernization. Yet, the inclusive aims of the notion of ‘community of human destiny’ notwithstanding, China’s historical statecraft causes suspicions. Not only do the corresponding tianxia discourses imply normative exceptionalism, but the side-lining of controversial aspects of history or the selection of one-sided representations can lead to unexpected controversies.
The mobilization of history
The historical facts, for instance, brought forward to support China’s stance in the South China Sea conflict hardly stand up to scrutiny and are divisive in the region. When President Donald Trump reported that President Xi had told him ‘Korea actually used to be a part of China’, a social media firestorm erupted in South Korea and commentators suggested Beijing would harbour ‘hegemonic ambitions’ and might intend to reduce South Korea to a tribute state.
Another contentious issue involves the term Silk Road. Chinese official descriptions of the Silk Road create the false impression that Chinese merchants and goods dominated historical trade activities. However, in central Asia, the state ideology of the Uzbek leadership favours a ‘Turk-centric’ reading of the Silk Road, which claims that Turkic merchants played a pre-eminent role long before the advent of the Han dynasty. Similarly, as Arab and Malayan ships dominated seaborne trade, the Ming and Qing shipwrecks that Chinese archaeologists rescued from the bottom of the South China Sea do not represent the mainstay of the historical maritime trade. Historians also point out that the traded goods were in fact spices, precious stones and other goods, while (Chinese) silk occupied a minority share.
The pitfalls of historicism
The manner in which China is interpreting its past is particularly crucial for a number of reasons. First, it partly shapes perceptions whether China’s growing power projection capabilities will make the country more aggressive. China’s leadership refers selectively to history as proof of the benevolence of contemporary initiatives. However, characterizing a figure like Admiral Zheng He based on his peaceful voyages is more problematic than admitted. In fact, the admiral heavily interfered with local politics at several sites where his fleet landed and, as Tansen Sen has shown, ‘seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 included the use of military force in what are present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and India to install friendly rulers and control strategic chokepoints of the Indian Ocean’.
Second, dealing with cultural diversity is one of the most pressing practical issues for the BRI. Given the controversial designs of historical reconstruction, Chinese historicism fails to embrace heterogeneity of the multiplex world. It will also exacerbate existing knowledge gaps of Chinese decision-makers and hamper the buildup of a sound area studies expertise. The domestic hegemony of mainstream Han culture means dealing with autonomous cultural diversity along the BRI — including dozens of multi-ethnic and multi-religious as well as majority Muslim countries — is highly problematic. The party leadership, for instance, came to see the cultural difference of Xinjiang’s Uyghur people as a major threat. The combination of domestic mono-culturalist ideology with a global particularism, pitched against the Europe–US model of multicultural societies at home and human rights universalism abroad, then, seems inherently prone to tensions and a difficult sell.
In conclusion, the challenges stemming from the BRI’s soft underbelly — identity, ideology and history — are thus formidable. From a global historical view, the ideational aspects of the BRI are embedded in the emergence of a ‘post-Western world’. From China’s perspective, they belong to their unfinished post-imperial search for its position vis-à-vis the world. The BRI reshapes how the current generation of Chinese leaders look at their relations to other countries, while the future development of the BRI heavily relies on the way Chinese elites see themselves as China consolidates a more global collective identity.
Maximilian Mayer is a senior researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society at the Technical University Munich, Germany, and a research fellow at Renmin University, China.
His recent article, ‘China’s historical statecraft and the return of history’, was published in the November 2018 issue of International Affairs.
Read the article online here.
