Real Clear Politics Former Singapore Foreign Minister: Thucydides Trap Doesn't Apply To China Posted By Tim Hains On Date November 25, 2024

 Real Clear Politics 

Former Singapore Foreign Minister: Thucydides Trap Doesn't Apply To China

Posted By Tim Hains

On Date November 25, 2024

George Yeo, the former foreign minister of Singapore, spoke last month about why China's unique character suggests they do not have any desire to be a colonial power at the Cambridge Union.

"America worries that China will one day displace it as global hegemony," he said. "If China were like the old Soviet Union, then such a fear is warranted, then the lessons of the Peloponnesian War, the 'Thucydides Trap,' becomes relevant. But China is in fact of a different nature."

"The Americans are mistaken if they think that when the Chinese economy grows, its behavior will be like that of a Western imperial power, or like yourself. This cannot be established mathematically, so it has to be established by practice. It may take some time, maybe 20-30 years, before the Americans are finally convinced that this is the nature of China. This is not Russia, this is not Britain, this is not France, this is not Germany."

GEORGE YEO: There's going to be a fairly long period of tension oscillating between sometimes a cold peace to a cold war -- proxy conflicts -- could be in Southeast Asia, could be in Myanmar could be elsewhere. But America worries that China will one day displace it as global hegemony.

If China were like the old Soviet Union, then such a fear is warranted, then the lessons of the Peloponnesian War, the "Thucydides Trap," becomes relevant. But China is in fact of a different nature.

And while understanding the Greeks gives one an important window into the evolution of Western society, the understanding of East Asian society requires a different window, and it is a window into the rise and fall of China. China is unique because it is unusually homogeneous. For a population of 1.4 billion, it is 92 93% Han.

For a population over twice that of Europe, the Chinese have one literature, one written language, and one set of heroes. Here in Europe, every few hundred kilometers, a different history, a different terroir, different heroes, a different sense of itself. In China, yes, there are regional differences. Yes, the spoken language is often not mutually intelligible, but the high language which is written, and the histories, which are well written, the heroes are all common.

So it's an unusually homogeneous society. And this homogeneity is not a happenstance, it's not the result of the whim of a leader or a set of policies. It is in the DNA of the culture and civilization.

In reality, the Chinese prefer living in a society that is mostly Chinese, and every time there's a crisis, they will impose controls. Like during COVID, the Chinese may complain but they will comply. But the non-Chinese will not be able to take it and they leave. And to some extent, China welcomes them to leave. Then it can batten the hatches, pull up the drawbridges, shut the gates, and preserve itself.

You know, dynasty after dynasty rebuilt the Great Wall, the Great Wall that we see, which is on Instagram, that's only a fossil, because that Great Wall was always a living system, not just bricks, but a whole system of control which went beyond the Great Wall, outside and inside. If you are in the watch tower and you are asleep and did not warn people further down the wall or inside the wall, you'd be executed because it was something life and death.

When times are calm, when there's no threat, then the door, the gates are flung open and people move in and out freely. But if there is danger, the controls are put in place, the surveillance network is activated far beyond and deep within, including the deployment of reserve forces.

We saw this during COVID. They locked up the population in compartments, into cells, and then one by one resolved the problem within.

The internet, the Western media, would have us believe that China did badly during COVID. China in fact did extremely well during COVID. As any epidemiologist knows in an epidemic, be the last to open up. Don't be the first. So China had the fewest deaths per million.

And because within the country, they had closed loop production, the rest of us were at home avoiding one another, working (or pretending to work) on our terminals, still collecting our salaries, and every day waiting for the delivery man to bring in parcels, and sometimes wondering who ordered what within the family. Who made the stuff inside the parcels? They all came from China. All the ships went to China to collect manufacturers, they left food, they returned empty.

Now, I was in logistics for a number of years. Freight rate across the Pacific is usually between $1-2000. It kept on going up. When you reach $5000, the instruction to the ships was don't wait for the containers to be unloaded, leave the containers there, ship comes back -- because each container costs only about $2000. And that was then described as a supply chain crisis.

During those few years, China's merchandise trade surplus do all records. In 2020, China's merchandise trade surplus was $530 billion (US). In 2021, it reached $670 billion. In 2022, when all we read about was the pain felt by Shanghainese as a result of the sudden lockdown, the trade surplus went up to $850 billion. And last year it was about the same.

When they finally opened up, and they had a car show in Shanghai, Western and Japanese car manufacturers were shocked because while they were marking time at home, China pressed on, and today their EVs dominate the world market. They are by far the biggest maker of cars in the world, and I think has become the biggest exporter of cars in the world -- certainly of electric vehicles.

My point is Chinese homogeneity, in certain situations, is a great strength.

But when that highly centralized, internally synchronized system breaks down, when that huge machine gets stuck, it's discomfiture goes on for a very long time, and this is the reason for the long cycles of Chinese history.

A key reason for this in my view, which I talk about in my book, is paper. The Chinese had a monopoly on paper for many centuries. Paper allows more data storage and allows more data processing than parchment or papyrus, or palm frond, or whatever. The Chinese had paper in vast amounts for centuries, and kept it a secret. When you can capture and process so much data, you can organize more human beings. The more processing capability in data, the more human beings you can organize. And because of this technology, a monopoly, Chinese society created a centralized system which no other ethnic group in the world was able to. And that gives China a particular character.

When the Chinese say, "We have no imperial desires because this is not in our nature," it is true. Because if you conquer, say like the British did India or other parts of the world, you now have to organize people not like yourself, and whom and whose cultures you're not always able to digest. But in the case of the Chinese, if they stick among Chinese people, it's much easier.

Which is why the Americans are mistaken if they think that when the Chinese economy grows, that its behavior will be like that of a Western imperial power, or like yourself. This cannot be established mathematically, so it has to be established by practice. It may take some time, maybe 20-30 years, before the Americans are finally convinced that this is the nature of China. This is not Russia, this is not Britain, this is not France, this is not Germany.