Unrequited obsession
I enjoyed the lively debate on whether China is an enemy of the west, in which both Jonathan Eyal and Anatol Lieven made some excellent points (“The Duel,” October).
One thought occurred: the issue of how far a reversed version of the question makes sense in China today. It makes sense, but not as something that detains most ordinary people for long.
There is of course an increasing level of nationalism in China that makes the west its key target. However, if you ask middle-class Chinese people what their most pressing concerns are, they might include the difficulty of paying for mortgages (China has a very high property ownership rate); the high cost, financial and psychological, of intense educational aspiration for their children; and the economic damage caused by the pandemic. All these will sound very familiar to any westerner.
Other problem areas are more China-specific: a still-huge shadow banking sector where people’s savings regularly disappear without trace or compensation, and a pension system that has no overall national coordination but varies from province to province, and which one major think tank warns may be bankrupt in little more than a decade.
For women, there is a growing social pressure to sacrifice their career for traditional family values, one of the themes behind the recent hit coming-of-age series Nothing But Thirty, which glued many millions to their TV sets.
These fears may not all be equally justified. But they have something in common: they are driven by China’s debate with itself, rather than with the west.
Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and politics, Oxford
Your exchange between Eyal and Lieven was fascinating. Whether one talks of an “enemy” or simply a “rival,” the probability is, human nature being human nature, that if the Chinese achieve military equivalence on top of economic and technological superiority, they will seek to exploit it to win dominance.
To resist, the west needs first to do a better job of developing its own model, summarised as liberal democracy, and importantly to do a better job of explaining the merits of that model both to its own people and to the wider world. Second, targeted policies need to be worked out to handle the more immediate danger points, namely the Spratly Islands and Taiwan. Third, the west should engage with China to establish where co-operative effort is possible, for example over climate change and world health, and where each side considers that it must warn the other of red lines. Harold Walker, former British ambassador to the UAE, Ethiopia and Iraq