The Virtue of Learning Vices by Fareed Zakaria

May 30, 2005 U.S. Edition

The Virtue of Learning Vices

By Fareed Zakaria

It doesn't surprise me that China has just slapped tariffs on its own textile producers so that they don't flood the U.S. and European markets. (In all, it will increase tariffs by up to 400 percent on 74 goods.) When I was in China last week I was struck by how determined its officials are not to pick a fight with the United States while they focus single-mindedly on economic growth. In fact, many of them get nervous talking about China's rise to power. "It frightens me," said Wu Jianmin, a senior diplomat. "We are still a poor country, a developing country. I don't want people to think of us in... exaggerated terms." Xinghai Fang, the deputy CEO of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, spoke in the same vein: "Please remember, our per capita GDP is $1,200. America's is 25 to 30 times that. We have a long way to go."

Talk to Chinese businessmen and they sound a good bit bolder. They speak of the world's biggest market, the largest consumer base, the strongest growth trajectory. "There are so many people here that even if you get a small percentage of them as customers, it is massive in global terms," says Charles Zhang, the CEO of Sohu.com, one of China's two largest Web portals. That is the strange effect of China's size. It can be both a Third World country and a dominant global player at the same time. As a result, there is tension in China between a society bursting at the seams and a state trying to manage this process.

In foreign-policy terms, this tension manifested itself in an interesting debate over the concept of "peaceful rise." The term, suggesting that China hoped to move quietly up the global power ladder, was coined in 2002 by Zheng Bijian when he was deputy head of the Central Party School. When Zheng spoke, people listened, because his former boss was President Hu Jintao. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao both used the phrase in 2003 and 2004, giving it official sanction. But then it fell out of favor. Many Western analysts believed the problem was the first word in the phrase—"peaceful"—which could limit China's options on Taiwan. But that doesn't seem to be the case. China regards Taiwan as a domestic matter and believes it could use force as a last resort. "Lincoln fought a war to preserve the Union," Zheng told me, "but you can still say that the United States was rising peacefully."

In fact, people disliked the phrase's second word, "rise." (The Chinese word actually translates more accurately into "thrust" or "surge.") Many senior diplomats recoiled at the idea of going around the world talking up China's rise. In particular, they worried about critics in the United States who saw China's rise as a threat. They began arguing against it in the summer of 2003, at the party's leadership retreat at Beidaihe. As a result, the Chinese leadership now talks only about "peaceful development." "The concept is the same," said Zheng. "It's just a different phrase." True, but the shift reflected the attention China was placing on not ruffling any feathers as it steamed ahead.

And yet China's growth—its rise—is creating energy, ambition and, inevitably, fear among its neighbors. In addition, in the past year Beijing has made several crude assertions of power. In a delicately phrased set of warnings delivered in China, Singapore's senior statesman (and longtime friend of China's), Lee Kuan Yew, worried about the next generation. "China's youth must be made aware of the need to reassure the world that China's rise will not turn out to be a disruptive force," he said in a speech at Fudan University.

Lee implied that what has kept Chinese leaders humble since Deng Xiaoping is the bitter experience of Mao's mistakes—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which together resulted in the deaths of at least 20 million Chinese. "It is vital that the younger generation of Chinese who have only lived through a period of peace and growth and have no experience of China's tumultuous past are made aware of the mistakes China made as a result of hubris and excesses in ideology," Lee said.

When I asked Chinese officials how they intend to handle the danger of populist sentiments—seeming arrogant or bullying on Taiwan or Japan or the rest of Asia—they gave me the same answer: we are going to teach people how to express patriotic feelings and how they might demonstrate peaceably, and sternly remind them what is not permitted. This is where central planning fails. Lee Kuan Yew's understanding of the solution is deeper—and goodness knows he believes in planning and control.

You cannot solve the problem of popular energy and passion by telling people to behave themselves. You have to educate them honestly about the substance of the issues, including controversial stuff, whether that means talking about China's vices or Japan's virtues. Only then will the passions get tamed. Only then will confidence not morph into arrogance. To face the future confidently, China must be able to face its past truthfully.