A self-absorbed giant

Dearth of Chinese lessons for the rest of the world

Several days ago, at a conference in Guangxi Province in Southern China, I had a conversation with the editor of the Chinese company that published translations of two of my books. He was very happy with how my Global Inequality did in China (which, to be realistic, probably means a sale of a few thousand copies) because, as he said, “the audience in China is interested only in China. They do not want to read books about other countries and the rest of the world.” And indeed, he added, Chinese authors write almost exclusively about China.

Like many comments, when made by somebody who is more knowledgeable about the topic than us—but express exactly what we might have thought for a long time—it struck me: it is something that I and, I am sure, many other people have noticed.

Let’s go over the most recent crop of books, of various ideological persuasions, on China that have become very popular in the United States: Chen Jian (with Odd Arne Westen), The Great Transformation; From Revolution to reform*, Yusheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of the East*, Tongson Boi, Against Political Equality*, Lin Chun, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China*, Yuen Yuen Ang, China’s Gilded Age*, Ho-fung Hung, The China Boom: Why China will not rule the world*, Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Jian Chen: Zhou Enlai: A Life. I listed here some books that I have reviewed on my Substack (noted with asterisks) and a few others. What is easily observable is that in all cases authors are Chinese or of Chinese origin. There are, at the same time, hundreds of books written by American authors (of non-Chinese background) on China. But what seems to be missing—and was in effect implied in the comment of my publisher—is books by Chinese authors on America or the West or Africa or any other part of the world. I do not know the Chinese publishing well enough: there must obviously be such books—but I do know the English-language publishing scene, and I do not see such books there. Is it that American publishers do not want to publish them or is it that no Chinese historian has cared to write a biography of (say) Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton the way that Ezra Vogel has published a biography of Deng Xiaoping or Joseph Torigian biography of Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping’s father)?; why did not Jiang Zemin write a book On America the way the Kissinger wrote On China? (The only such book that seems to be mentioned in American circles is the book by the current Politburo member Wang Huning written after his one-year stay in the United States in 1980s, America Against America.)

I do not think that the main reasons for this are political but cultural. People in academia have all witnessed a dramatic increase In the number of papers written on China’s economics, politics and international relations in many journals. I must have refereed at least five such papers within the past twelve months. They are written by people of various backgrounds, including of course by many Chinese, but what is again noticeable when one reads CV of such Chinese authors is that they –with a few exceptions—write papers only on China. I do not think that if one were to do an empirical investigation of similar concentration on own country, my anecdotal impression would be overturned.

Then as before, the question is, why? In principle, there are, I think, two possibilities. Chinese authors (as my publisher said), do not care much about the rest of the world. This may be a remnant of a couple of millennia of history when China’s interaction with the rest of the world was limited to the reception of formal tributes and some trade. Not much interest was evinced regarding the others (most famously not even in the grand voyage undertaken in the middle of the 15^th century). Or, it could also be due to the lack of confidence of discussing others because of insufficient knowledge (which in turn may be due to insufficient interest). But that second hypothesis cannot really hold in the case of numerous Chinese-origin authors who have lived for decades in America and elsewhere and know these countries probably better than most of the “native” citizens.

To come to my key point: this self-concentration limits China’s ideological influence in the rest of the world and its soft power. The latter has definitely increased with China’s economic success, but in that area the country still “punches way below its (economic) weight.” Compare the explosive rise in Chinese-made electric vehicles with the increase of China’s soft power: do we see a similar trend there? Yes, indeed some improvements, reflected in new visa-free policies towards European countries and thus more tourists, greater number of foreign students in China, so-called Chinamaxxing among some groups of the young in America, success of Chinese films (e.g. by Jia Zhangke; my favorite is the last scene from “Caught by the Tides”) and soap-operas. But all of that is very modest for a country that produces almost one-quarter of world output. It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)

Paradoxically, China might have had more soft power when it followed self-destructive policies of Maoist Cultural Revolution. Although Maoism was never well defined nor was it a global ideology, it had followers across the world from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Naxalites in India to Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the New Left in Europe. The point is not that these followers were “nice guys”; the point is that China’s ideological power (even if that power was nor exercised for the good) might have been greater then than now.

I have written of the same problem in the context of China’s influence on economic policies of other countries, and on sharing the “recipes for growth”. China’s tremendous success had not resulted in a blueprint that could be followed from Afghanistan to Zambia on how to become rich in four decades. The lack of interest in the rest of the world, and the inability (of perhaps, impossibility) to summarize or translate the lessons of China’s success into policies needed for economic growth in general, and therefore elsewhere, will, I think, continue to hamper and severely limit the soft power of China in the years to come.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that a part of the problem is caused by an insanely competitive educational system. If you are a Chinese postdoc in economics & need academic points and a job, you will naturally gravitate towards the areas where you have absolute and comparative advantage such that your papers will be published in the top 5 or top 10 journals. Thus you would choose China-centered topics. Many Chinese researchers do so and it is visible that the strategy works as they publish in top journals. However, this in turn makes Chinese students and researchers less interested in the rest of the world (where they do not enjoy comparative advantage), and ultimately and paradoxically undercuts Chinese global soft power.