Looking for the 'China Model’
By Kerry Brown |
chinawatch.cn |
Updated: 2019-02-21 10:30
For more than a decade now the world has been talking about the "China Model". From a paper issued in 2004 by Joshua Copper Ramo for the Foreign Policy Centre in London on what he called "the Beijing Consensus", standing in contradistinction to the better known (at the time) Washington Consensus, he described a different mode of operation and different dynamics for the Chinese philosophy of development.
In one form or another, that debate has continued over the intervening years. President Xi Jinping mentioned the ways in which the China development model might be a means for other countries to learn and copy what China is doing when he spoke at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017. It has been discussed in many other ways and many contexts, figuring as something that people either feel they understand, or feel they need to do so.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a core foreign policy idea since 2013, has many different angles. It is, after all, China’s signature geopolitical idea, widely seen, in part, as a response to the demands as the Chinese economy has enlarged over the last two decades to communicate more clearly what the country’s main mode of engagement with the outside world as it becomes a more central and important player might be. In many senses, therefore, this question of how the BRI embodies the notion mentioned above of a "Chinese model" is an important issue to properly understand. Is that the way the outside world best needs to embrace and relate to it? In BRI do we finally have, in one concept and one idea, what the “China model” is?
Before we think about this issue, we need to attend to the question of what a "model" is. In English, of course, the word denotes something prescriptive. In art, one is given a model to copy. In learning a subject, it’s the same idea. Something is presented which is then used as a framework to then try to duplicate or follow. Replication is a good thing.
In Chinese thinking, however, maybe the equivalent notion does not map the sort of cognitive space of the one used in English so closely. This is common, after all. Translators wrestle all the time with the way that different words in one language don’t precisely equate to those in another. The notion of "model" in Chinese (moshi) is an important one to reflect on. In the work of Sinologist Donald J. Munro in the 1970s and 1990s, he talked of the idea that teaching through Chinese history, and moral education, from the period of the earliest Confucianists onwards, involved the use of models. These were important to convey ways in which something could be done, but they also operated as dynamic spaces where, beyond broad parameters, people could develop and work on specific, and sometimes new, ways of solving problems and acquiring new techniques.
The notion of a learning model, which is offered more as a question than a set-concrete-answer offers one way of trying to get to grips with what at heart the BRI is. There is clearly no set pattern for how projects under the BRI are meant to be run. There is also an embedded notion of flexibility. This aspect of the BRI has so far caused frustration and puzzlement in some foreign audiences. It seems that the word "model" has made them expect something with much more concrete definition, laid down as an alternative to the current way of undertaking projects and developing economies. But of course, in terms of the way that it has been conveyed, the BRI clearly isn’t this kind of entity.
That lack of absolute clarity and definition might well be different, and at times unsettling. But this at least means that many people outside of China are finally grappling with what a larger role in their lives for China and Chinese ways of thinking actually is. The assumption that there was only one consensus, and one way of doing things, has clearly been contested by the increasingly prominence of China in the last four decades. But until the last few years, this has often seemed almost a peripheral and marginal issue – something that no one had to think about that seriously because it wasn’t really visibly affecting their day-to-day lives. As China has become a larger overseas investor, and a bigger geopolitical player, this situation has changed. We are now, to coin another phrase from China’s long intellectual history, in the period of the "great learning" -- where for once, we, meaning the outside world, are now needing to pay attention to and learn a bit more about how the Chinese see the world, and how it is similar, and different, to the usual traditions of thinking we are used to.
If the BRI is a massive space for learning, and for mutual engagement, that removes something of what has been criticized as its prescriptive aspect. This is, like most models in the Chinese pedagogical tradition, a dynamic one. There are, as the French philosopher and Sinologist Francoise Jullian pointed out in one of his books, no conclusions that need to be striven for, or neat, tight outcomes that have to be achieved. Instead, there is an acceptance of the looseness of process, and of the need to accept constant evolution and change, without reaching a final resting place.
This brings us to the most crucial thing about the BRI -- which is that it is at heart an immense learning opportunity – and that in learning about ways in which China thinks and understands the outside world, that does offer us all an opportunity to see the world in a different way and to re-evaluate some of our own ways of thinking. Inevitably, this has not, and will not be, a simple process. Changing attitudes and minds and seeing the world transform before one is never easy. But nor is it a process that can be ignored. For all the current challenges, China and the rest of the world cannot vanish before each other. They have to continue to work together, and find a framework to collaborate. In that context, the BRI offers at least one basis to start on this immense pedagogical project. And it offers a good way of reminding us all that in the second decade of the 21st century, we are all students now, and we all need to take opportunities to learn.
Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College. The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.
The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.
All rights reserved. Copying or sharing of any content for other than personal use is prohibited without prior written permission.
For more than a decade now the world has been talking about the "China Model". From a paper issued in 2004 by Joshua Copper Ramo for the Foreign Policy Centre in London on what he called "the Beijing Consensus", standing in contradistinction to the better known (at the time) Washington Consensus, he described a different mode of operation and different dynamics for the Chinese philosophy of development.
In one form or another, that debate has continued over the intervening years. President Xi Jinping mentioned the ways in which the China development model might be a means for other countries to learn and copy what China is doing when he spoke at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017. It has been discussed in many other ways and many contexts, figuring as something that people either feel they understand, or feel they need to do so.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a core foreign policy idea since 2013, has many different angles. It is, after all, China’s signature geopolitical idea, widely seen, in part, as a response to the demands as the Chinese economy has enlarged over the last two decades to communicate more clearly what the country’s main mode of engagement with the outside world as it becomes a more central and important player might be. In many senses, therefore, this question of how the BRI embodies the notion mentioned above of a "Chinese model" is an important issue to properly understand. Is that the way the outside world best needs to embrace and relate to it? In BRI do we finally have, in one concept and one idea, what the “China model” is?
Before we think about this issue, we need to attend to the question of what a "model" is. In English, of course, the word denotes something prescriptive. In art, one is given a model to copy. In learning a subject, it’s the same idea. Something is presented which is then used as a framework to then try to duplicate or follow. Replication is a good thing.
In Chinese thinking, however, maybe the equivalent notion does not map the sort of cognitive space of the one used in English so closely. This is common, after all. Translators wrestle all the time with the way that different words in one language don’t precisely equate to those in another. The notion of "model" in Chinese (moshi) is an important one to reflect on. In the work of Sinologist Donald J. Munro in the 1970s and 1990s, he talked of the idea that teaching through Chinese history, and moral education, from the period of the earliest Confucianists onwards, involved the use of models. These were important to convey ways in which something could be done, but they also operated as dynamic spaces where, beyond broad parameters, people could develop and work on specific, and sometimes new, ways of solving problems and acquiring new techniques.
The notion of a learning model, which is offered more as a question than a set-concrete-answer offers one way of trying to get to grips with what at heart the BRI is. There is clearly no set pattern for how projects under the BRI are meant to be run. There is also an embedded notion of flexibility. This aspect of the BRI has so far caused frustration and puzzlement in some foreign audiences. It seems that the word "model" has made them expect something with much more concrete definition, laid down as an alternative to the current way of undertaking projects and developing economies. But of course, in terms of the way that it has been conveyed, the BRI clearly isn’t this kind of entity.
That lack of absolute clarity and definition might well be different, and at times unsettling. But this at least means that many people outside of China are finally grappling with what a larger role in their lives for China and Chinese ways of thinking actually is. The assumption that there was only one consensus, and one way of doing things, has clearly been contested by the increasingly prominence of China in the last four decades. But until the last few years, this has often seemed almost a peripheral and marginal issue – something that no one had to think about that seriously because it wasn’t really visibly affecting their day-to-day lives. As China has become a larger overseas investor, and a bigger geopolitical player, this situation has changed. We are now, to coin another phrase from China’s long intellectual history, in the period of the "great learning" -- where for once, we, meaning the outside world, are now needing to pay attention to and learn a bit more about how the Chinese see the world, and how it is similar, and different, to the usual traditions of thinking we are used to.
If the BRI is a massive space for learning, and for mutual engagement, that removes something of what has been criticized as its prescriptive aspect. This is, like most models in the Chinese pedagogical tradition, a dynamic one. There are, as the French philosopher and Sinologist Francoise Jullian pointed out in one of his books, no conclusions that need to be striven for, or neat, tight outcomes that have to be achieved. Instead, there is an acceptance of the looseness of process, and of the need to accept constant evolution and change, without reaching a final resting place.
This brings us to the most crucial thing about the BRI -- which is that it is at heart an immense learning opportunity – and that in learning about ways in which China thinks and understands the outside world, that does offer us all an opportunity to see the world in a different way and to re-evaluate some of our own ways of thinking. Inevitably, this has not, and will not be, a simple process. Changing attitudes and minds and seeing the world transform before one is never easy. But nor is it a process that can be ignored. For all the current challenges, China and the rest of the world cannot vanish before each other. They have to continue to work together, and find a framework to collaborate. In that context, the BRI offers at least one basis to start on this immense pedagogical project. And it offers a good way of reminding us all that in the second decade of the 21st century, we are all students now, and we all need to take opportunities to learn.
Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College. The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.
The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.
All rights reserved. Copying or sharing of any content for other than personal use is prohibited without prior written permission.
