【英文】中国崛起的新见解和观察（177页）

英文研究报告 2021年10月15日 07:07 管理员

No serious person doubts that as the twenty-fifirst century unfolds, China will exercise an increasingly dominant role in global affairs. That is why this book deserves the attention of any liberally minded individual or group that is thinking about the future, whether near-term or long-term. What is more uncertain is whether during this century, China will overtake America as the world’s pre-eminent economic, political, and military power, and meantime how it will choose to exercise its position in global politics. This series of essays represents a serious and thoughtful attempt to address these questions, by a range of very experienced and knowledgeable colleagues with a broadly liberal frame of reference and a largely European vantage point. There is a range of perspectives among them, for no-one can know with any certainty what the future holds, and you will also see differences of emphasis on the economy, politics, technology, human rights, the environment, and security. Given those differences you may expect some variation in how they believe liberals should think about relating to an increasingly powerful and ambitious China, especially if it continues to be governed for the foreseeable future by the Chinese Communist Party - and as far as that expectation is concerned, there is little dissent.

During the Blair/Mandelson era of British politics a rather superfificial economic liberalism assumed that if the Chinese Communist Party could be persuaded of the benefifits of the market economy, the outcome would be a more socially and politically liberal China. They were not alone in this expectation. It informed the approach of many of the diplomatic and foreign policy communities in the West. However, this perspective was guided more by wishful thinking than insight, and the truth was much more complex. For the United Kingdom, in particular, there were two consequences of adopting this mistaken view. The fifirst was that soft power resources were withdrawn from other regions, such as Latin America, in favour of China, with the expectation that this would benefifit Britain in its relations with Beijing – it did not. The second result was that the focus on economic drivers obscured the fact that China’s foreign policy was also informed by other powerful psychological drivers, especially the ‘century of humiliation’ as it is known in China. While most British liberals view China through the prism of the current human rights challenges faced by the Uighurs and the people of Hong Kong, and have long forgotten about Britain’s role in the Opium Wars that led to it possessing Hong Kong in the fifirst place, those historic defeats remain a key element in how China views the United Kingdom.