Has China Won? - by Kishore Mahbubani
ISBN: 9781541768130Date read: 2025-06-23
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
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Singapore diplomat’s insights into the China-USA relationship. Very pro-China with sound reasoning.
my notes
America and China represent the struggle between free and open societies and closed authoritarian systems.
If this statement is correct, all free and open societies should feel equally threatened by the Chinese Communist Party.
Of the world’s three largest democracies, two are Asian: India and Indonesia.
Neither the Indian nor Indonesian democracies feel threatened in any way by Chinese ideology.
Neither do most European democracies feel threatened.
Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not trying to challenge or threaten American ideology.
By treating the new China challenge as akin to the old Soviet strategy, America is making the classic strategic mistake of fighting tomorrow’s war with yesterday’s strategies.
CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party.
Chinese strategy was guided by the Chinese game Go, not Western chess.
In Western chess, the emphasis is on finding the fastest way to capture the king.
In Go, the goal is to slowly and patiently build up assets to tip the balance of the game in one’s favor.
The emphasis is on long-term strategy, not short-term gains.
For over 200 years, Western civilization vastly outperformed the rest of the world, allowing it to overturn the historical precedent.
From the year 1 to 1820, China and India were always the largest civilizations in terms of economic strength.
The past 200 years have therefore been an aberration.
One reason the West can no longer dominate the world is that the rest have learned so much from the West.
They have imbibed many Western best practices in economics, politics, science, and technology.
As a result, while many parts of Western civilization (especially Europe) seem exhausted, lacking drive and energy, other civilizations are just getting revved up.
While the world has had many ancient civilizations, the only ancient civilization to fall down four times and rise again is China.
The past thirty years under CCP rule have been the best thirty years that Chinese civilization has experienced since China was united by Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE.
In contrast to America’s stagnation, China’s culture, self-concept, and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace.
The most explosive period of China’s growth took place after it joined the WTO in 2001.
Its GDP exploded from US$1.2 trillion in 2000 to US$11.1 trillion in 2015.
Chinese firms enjoyed a better playing field outside China than the one China provided to foreign firms inside China.
Under the WTO’s agreements on intellectual property, developed countries are under ‘the obligation’ to provide incentives to their companies to transfer technology to less developed countries.
There is no credible calculation that suggests that U.S. GDP would be more than one percent higher even if China had acceded to every American economic request.
What led to a great country like China suffering a century of humiliation at the hands of smaller Western powers?
Why did the Chinese economy, which was on par with the rest of the world from the year 1 to 1820, fall so far behind?
A huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world.
As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed.
It didn’t need the rest of the world.
“If all we do in response to China’s ambition is to try to double-lock all our doors, I believe we will lock ourselves into mediocrity.”
China should understand well the point he’s making.
China locked itself into mediocrity when it cut itself off from the world
If China emerged as the most business-friendly great economic power, it would provide a huge boost to globalization.
In so doing, China would be strengthening the very force that has propelled China’s spectacular economic rise.
Now it is China, not America, that is taking the lead in building a new multilateral architecture, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
America opposed both these initiatives.
This didn’t stop many of its key friends and allies from joining them.
The UK, Germany, India, and Vietnam joined as founding members of AIIB, which is proving itself to be a better-governed institution than the IMF and the World Bank.
Its standard of corporate governance is higher and more transparent.
US pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to which six countries, namely America, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran, had agreed.
In walking away from the JCPOA, America is violating international law.
USA didn’t just walk away from the JCPOA.
It also announced that it would impose sanctions on any country that continued to trade with Iran on the basis of these agreements.
The “legal” route that the US administration took to punish countries for trading with Iran was by sanctioning their use of the US dollar in these cross-border payments.
This created a legal dilemma for the other five signatories of the Iran agreement.
Under international law, their companies were allowed to trade with Iran.
However, if the companies trading with Iran used the US dollar to do so, these companies would have had to pay massive fines in American courts.
To solve this legal dilemma, France, Germany, and the UK decided to set up the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), “a new channel for non-dollar trade with Iran to avert U.S. sanctions.”
In symbolic terms, INSTEX represented a huge shift in the international system.
For the first time, three major allies of America (France, Germany, and the UK) have created an alternative to the US dollar-based payment system.
It could one day serve as a model for two future potential adversaries of America (China and Russia) to set up an alternative global channel of payments that would bypass and undercut the global role of the US dollar.
Jenga, a block-stacking game.
Sometimes all it takes to bring down a complex construction is to remove one block.
Future historians will undoubtedly be puzzled by the strong conviction of American policymakers that a smaller and younger republic could decisively influence the political evolution of a state that was four times larger in population and with a history that was almost ten times longer.
The Chinese see their history through their own lenses.
Over the course of the past twenty-two hundred years, China has been divided and broken up more often than it has been united and cohesive.
Each time, central political control from the capital breaks down, disorder results, and the Chinese people suffer a host of deprivations, from starvation and famine to civil war and rampant violence.
In Chinese political culture, the biggest fear is of chaos.
Given these many long periods of suffering from chaos — including one as recent as the century of humiliation from the Opium War of 1842 to the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — when the Chinese people are given a choice between strong central control and the chaos of political competition, they have a reflexive tendency to choose strong central control.
In the Western mind, any undemocratic political system that deprives citizens the ability to choose or remove a leader is by definition evil.
Max Weber wrote:
It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil.
Often the opposite is true.
Relative to its peers around the world, the Chinese governing class generates more good governance (in terms of improving the well-being of its citizens) than virtually any other government today.
A democratically elected Chinese government would have been under great political pressure to do what USA did: withdraw from the Paris agreement and remove all constraints from China’s rapid economic development.
Instead, a nondemocratic CCP could do long-term calculations on what would be good for China and the world.
On this basis, China decided to stick with the Paris Agreement.
The more powerful China has become, the less it has intervened in the affairs of other states.
Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China is the only one that has not fought in any foreign wars, away from its borders, since World War II.
America, Russia, the UK, and France have done so.
The assumption in the West is that the Chinese people must feel oppressed.
However, the Chinese people don’t compare their condition with that of other societies.
Instead, they compare their lot with what they experienced in the past.
And all they can see is that they have experienced the largest explosion of personal freedoms ever experienced in their history.
When I first went to China in 1980, the Chinese people couldn’t choose where to live, what to wear, where to study, or what jobs to take.
134 million Chinese people each year freely choose to return home from their vacations.
The least advantaged in China have a far greater chance to improve their living conditions than their counterparts in America.
Is it wise to believe that there is only one road for all societies to travel on if they want to grow and progress?
India is an open society with a closed mind, whereas China is a closed society with an open mind.
When it comes to analyzing political systems, American analysts tend to veer toward a black-and-white view of the world: open or closed society, democratic or totalitarian society, liberal or authoritarian.
China has one of the most intelligent governments in the world.
The Chinese Communist Party recruits only the best graduates in China.
A Chinese nation-state was forged under the leadership of the Communist Party and the guidance of Marxism.
However, it had far more to do with Chinese nationalism, with the reassertion of China’s former glory and future modernization, than with the universal principles of communism.
Beijing is now one of only two cities in the world where the process of starting a business is completely free.
The population of all developed countries only makes up 1.1 billion whereas China has 1.3 to 1.4 billion.
The long history of China has taught the Chinese people a vital lesson: when the country has weak leaders, it falls apart.
Democracy is the rule of the mob — literally demos (mob) and kratos (rule).
If economic and political conditions in the African continent don’t improve in the twenty-first century, Europe can expect tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Africans to knock on its doors.
If Europe wants to preserve its own long-term interests, it should make the development of Africa, in partnership with China, an immediate priority.
It is currently in China’s national interest to see Japan remain an American ally.
If America walks away now from its commitment to defend Japan, Japan would have no choice but to strengthen its capability to defend itself.
China and Japan have had some two thousand years of relations, and the really troubled relations involved only half a century, from 1894 to 1945.
Japanese democracy is reassuringly calm and stable (reflecting the Japanese emphasis on harmony in interpersonal relations and its Confucian heritage).
Indian democracy is loud and rambunctious, reflecting the spirit of the argumentative Indian.
India has, as a matter of principle, refused to participate in the BRI because in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, China and Pakistan will build a road through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a region claimed by India in its border dispute with Pakistan.
Indians have the highest median household income in America at US$119,858 (2018).
The elite-to-elite connectivity between America and India is higher than that between America and any other country.
Southeast Asia is close to China geographically; its largest internal waterway is called the South China Sea.
But despite the geographic proximity, nine of the ten Southeast Asian states have an Indic cultural foundation.
The one Southeast Asian state that has a Sinic cultural base is Vietnam, which treasures its independence from China the most since it was occupied by China for almost a thousand years.
Chinese leaders find it easier than American leaders to deal with a diverse world, as they have no expectation that other societies should become like them.