China and the US are engaged in a power struggle, not a clash of civilisations
- While the US lays claim to ‘universal values’ and boasts of cultural openness, the China of today has been forged from a plethora of global influences
- Both Americans and Chinese prize freedom and human rights, regardless of their governments’ battles with each other
The renaissance in Europe and the subsequent Enlightenment ushered in a Western-dominated world order. More than 80 per cent of the world was under some form of Western control a century ago. Civilisation was equated with Western civilisation for centuries. China could not have modernised without some westernisation.
However, mainland China, whose revival of Confucianism only came with economic development, is less Confucian than South Korea and Taiwan, and less communitarian than Japan and Korea. So why has China been singled out in any alleged “clash”?
When Samuel Huntington wrote in the early 1990s about the clash of civilisations, building on US-Japan trade conflicts then, he anticipated that the coming US-China confrontation would be fundamentally about power.
China would not be willing to accept the US’ global hegemony, while the US would balk at China’s dominance in Asia. While the US-China conflict may be motivated primarily by national interests, American values may have something to do with it after all.
At the core of the “Asian-American cold wars”, as anticipated by Huntington, is an ascendant Asia increasingly unwilling to accept Western values – whose compliance is expected by the US. According to Huntington, the US’ ingrained culture makes it a nanny, if not a bully, in international affairs. However, the US has been acting more like a bully than a nanny lately.
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Bernard Lewis, who advanced “the clash of civilisations” concept before Huntington, attributed the root of the inevitable and long-standing conflicts between Christendom and Islam to their similarities.
Today’s China is a dynamically eclectic mix of East and West. China is realistic enough to know that respecting a mosaic of Asian civilisations is a more strategic way to counter Western “universalism” than jingoism.
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The conflicting values between the US and China are more between states than people. Chinese and Americans alike want freedom and human rights. Thus, such national differences are far from a “civilisational” clash – particularly between two fusion cultures. The two leading economic powers can serve their people better by allowing unfettered interactions with mutual respect and understanding.
Winston Mok, a private investor, was previously a private equity investor