THE MYTH OF CHINESE EXCEPTIONALISM
At a joint press conference in March with China’s Premier Li Keqiang in Canberra, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reflected, “China’s history, 3,000 years of civilisation, is so remarkable”. Without waiting for a second, Li interrupted him, holding up five fingers of his right hand. “5,000!” he said. “5,000 years?” Turnbull corrected himself, as the journalists laughed. “There you go! So remarkable!”
The episode highlights how seriously the rulers of China’s Communist Party (CPC) consider China’s “5,000 years of history”. In the new book, Becoming China, Jeanne-Marie Gescher, who has spent over 25 years in China as a strategic advisor to a number of organisations—from the British Embassy to corporates and NGOs—makes an ambitious and valiant attempt to cover this broad sweep of 5,000 years.
Gescher acknowledges she is not a historian: most of her writing is derived from Western and Chinese scholarship. As such, she doesn’t offer any new or striking insights, and admits that her objective is to “convey the mechanism of the present era, and the landscape of the past, to provide a perspective” to understand today’s China.
For a reader entirely unfamiliar with China or its history, Gescher’s 784 pages aren’t a bad first-time introduction. The writer demonstrates her mastery of the breadth of Chinese philosophical and historical traditions, ably covering a vast period of history right till Xi Jinping’s rise to power.
But for those familiar with China— or seeking a deeper understanding of what underpins its rise—the work is filled with generalisations and tropes that can grate. In one instance, the author writes “they [the Chinese] seem to accept the top-down idea of order so much more readily than the West”. To push her “5,000 year continuum” thesis, the writer employs narrative devices that stretch credulity. For instance, everything in China is “heavenly”—the CPC is the “heavenly party” and Xi Jinping is the “son of heaven”— and apparently every decision for Chinese politicians—for instance, Xi seeking a tough rural posting to burnish his credentials—is made by either “approaching ghosts and spirits” or “by looking at the weiqi board”.
Her hope for the book is “whether we agree or disagree with China’s ideas, we will be able to hear and understand them, as much for our sake as theirs”. One cannot find argument with that sentiment. The problem is her thesis goes far beyond. That the history of the Chinese people is unique or exceptional is a political argument, not a historical one. It is one that many China-watchers are perhaps guilty of, in part because other old civilisations, whether in India or Egypt, simply don’t enter into their field of vision.
What Gescher describes as a ‘5,000 year pursuit of utopia’ is, in a sense, at the heart of the CPC’s argument to sustain its one-party rule, framing itself as the rightful inheritor of this supposed continuum of history (no matter the contradiction of the party’s own troubled relationship with China’s traditions, most explicit during the Cultural Revolution).
A corollary to this exceptionalism is that ideas like liberal democracy— or, for that matter, universal human rights—don’t apply to China or its people. Needless to say, in China, this is about more than history: perpetuating this exceptionalism has political consequences. “Destiny is forged,” Gescher writes poetically, “at the point at which the soap opera of millions of small lives collide with grand event”. In this grand rendering of China’s history, the small lives don’t seem to matter.
What Gescher calls a ‘5,000 year pursuit of utopia’ is, in a sense, at the heart of the CPC’s argument to sustain its one-party rule