MIN ZHOU: Good afternoon and good morning.
MIN ZHOU: Welcome to this webinar, China and the Asian World: A Contemporary History. This event is jointly hosted by the Asia Pacific Center, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Center for the Study of International Migration at UCLA.
MIN ZHOU: Our lecture today is presented in conjunction with the UCLA Fall Course Asian Community: Intra-Asian migration, Diaspora-Homeland Interaction,
MIN ZHOU: And identity formation. And I would like to thank the EurAsia Foundation from Asia for their generous support for this course and for the webinar series.
MIN ZHOU: My name is Min Zhou, I'm Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies, the Walter and Shelley Wang endowed chair in US-China relations and communications, and the director of the Asia Pacific Center at UCLA.
MIN ZHOU: The UCLA Asia Pacific Center promotes greater knowledge and understanding of Asia and the Pacific region, on campus and in the community through innovative research, teaching public programs, and international collaboration.
MIN ZHOU: We focus on inter-Asian and transpacific connections from historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives, and encourage interdisciplinary work on cross-border
MIN ZHOU: And supranational issues on language and culture, politics, economy and society, and the sustainability in the ongoing processes of globalization.
MIN ZHOU: Our center runs the program on Central Asia, the Taiwan studies program, and the Hong Kong studies program. And we are also an academic partner of the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative.
MIN ZHOU: Today's seminar will be recorded and we will make it available on our Center's website. Please use your Q&A function on the bottom of your screen to submit your questions. So during the Q&A time after Professor Duara's talk, we will select your questions for
MIN ZHOU: Our speaker.
MIN ZHOU: Now it's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Prasenjit Duara, our speaker today. Dr. Duara is the Oscar Tang, is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University.
MIN ZHOU: Born and educated in India, he received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was the Professor and Chairman of history at the University of Chicago from 1991 to 2008,
MIN ZHOU: And Raffles Professor and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore from 2008 to 2015. He was the president of the American Association for Asian Studies.
MIN ZHOU: Dr. Duara's specialty areas are in Chinese history, working more broadly on Asia in the 20th century, and on historical thought and historiography, as well as studies of nationalism, imperialism and the origins of modern historical consciousness.
MIN ZHOU: He has published numerous works in this areas. His books include the award-winning book Culture, Power and the State: Rural North North China,
MIN ZHOU: 1900-1942. This book was published by Stanford University Press, and won two major awards, the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.
MIN ZHOU: His other important books include: Rescuing History from the Nation, published by University of Chicago, Sovereignty and Authenticity:
MIN ZHOU: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, published by Rowman and Littlefield, and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Tradition and a Sustainable Future published by Cambridge University Press.
MIN ZHOU: He has presented over 175 keynotes and lectures globally, and his work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and European languages. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo in 2017.
MIN ZHOU: It's a great pleasure and a great honor to have Professor Duara to speak in my class and in our speaker series. Professor Duara, please go ahead.
MIN ZHOU: Okay, you may share your screen.
Prasenjit Duara: I will.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay, I hope.
MIN ZHOU: Not yet.
Prasenjit Duara: I hope you can see my screen now. Can you mean, can you give a thumbs up if you can, yeah.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay.
Prasenjit Duara: Yeah, so thank you very much to Min Zhou, and to her very able staff Brooke and Aaron for keeping in contact with me way in advance and keeping in touch about this
Prasenjit Duara: presentation to the class and to the general public, which I'm happy to do, although this has worked this paper has been presented before I should confess.
Prasenjit Duara: And let me
Prasenjit Duara: So let me get on with it because I know the time is limited. So what I set out with what I'm trying to do in this paper. The goal is to assess
Prasenjit Duara: The historical significance of the Chinese world order, especially from the period of the Qing dynasty in 1644 to 1911, in relation to later global forms of imperial domination. Right. So how do we understand
Prasenjit Duara: And particularly, as I will be talking about the new model of the Chinese world order that may be appearing in the world today. Um,
Prasenjit Duara: I also, I know that that the class is reading my essay I believe on Asia Redux, which looked at regionalism based on the southeast Asia and ASEAN region.
Prasenjit Duara: And
Prasenjit Duara: I, and that was published in 2010. And over the last 10 years in a way, this paper is a way of rethinking that idea of the, the Asian world as conceived by
Prasenjit Duara: ASEAN in Asia Redux. ASEAN was, I argue, then a relatively successful, created a relatively successful regional mesh to talk about Asia.
Prasenjit Duara: But that is not so evident now I think, with the changing global role of China. So we have to. So I will return at the end to what is happening in Southeast Asia.
Prasenjit Duara: Now just to lay out some basic points about the talk I wanted, I will argue that the Qing Imperial Order was very different from what later develops in the world. Develops by the 17th century in the Westphalian-Vatellian system in the 18th century
Prasenjit Duara: As a European based world order, and then subsequently in the 20th century, and after post war in the Panchsheela, which is the group of
Prasenjit Duara: Asian, nonaligned Asian nations and the Cold War orders. So the Qing Imperial Order was not a system of theoretically equal states, which is what the Westphalian order claim to be.
Prasenjit Duara: But it was a paternalistic hierarchical order based on the notion of tribute, and various other forms of hierarchical
Prasenjit Duara: Service. Now, the Westphalian order the Western system from the 17th, 18th centuries, professed a theoretical equality amongst states that were recognized as states.
Prasenjit Duara: So particular territorial models of states, but in fact, practically, they were highly intrusive in each other's affairs. They were also territorially competitive
Prasenjit Duara: And dominating. So basically, the Westphalian order saw certain agreements amongst sovereign states, whereas plunder and imperialism functioned for the rest of the world. The combination of these two produced, I would argue, the two world wars of the 20th century.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, as far as Panchasheela is concerned, the nonaligned states,
Prasenjit Duara: Was a, we can think of it as, in a way, a Westphalian system for the post-colonial order. That is to say that there is
Prasenjit Duara: The, it followed the ideas of theoretical
Prasenjit Duara: equality among sovereign states, it followed the idea of non-interference in each other's affairs in theory at least,
Prasenjit Duara: And but most importantly, there was no overseas imperialism, because of course the rest of the world was organized as nation states. So you had to accept everybody has
Prasenjit Duara: Theoretically equal unless you were a not a, not a nation state, but by the 16th, most of the world had been organized as such, of course we know there's still problems there.
Prasenjit Duara: But, as in Westphalia, there was the front face and the back face where there is intrusiveness, territorial and resource competition between these states.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay, so that was the general background I wanted to give. And here is a picture of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Panchasheela movement with Zhou Enlai meeting with the organizers in Bandung in
Prasenjit Duara: Indonesia, and then this has been taken up again and this was in the second picture here is in 1990 or 2005, 50 years after Bandung. And in Tehran as well, Iran is of course taken up the the Panchasheela did not,
Prasenjit Duara: non-alignment did not seem to have a long history. We can't go into that right now. So let me try and then understand Western imperialism.
Prasenjit Duara: Between what I call, say between the 19th and 20th century between what I call Old and New Imperialism. Now New Imperialism as well use the word used in various different ways. I have a specific
Prasenjit Duara: Way of thinking about it. I call it the imperialism of nation states. Okay, so in the late 19th century, the Westphalian imperialism of Britain and France
Prasenjit Duara: Was characterized itself as being part of the civilizing mission, that they were conquering the world because of course they were also civilizing it. And I think the
Prasenjit Duara: The Caribbean author V.S. Naipaul who won a Nobel Prize, sums up the cultural experience expression of this old imperialism of the 19th century
Prasenjit Duara: Very well. He says, and I quote here, “The Europeans wanted golden slaves, like everybody else. But at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves
Prasenjit Duara: As people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people and at the peak of their powers,
Prasenjit Duara: They could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.” So this is from his novel A Bend in the River.
Prasenjit Duara: So this, this condition, however, of getting that gold and the slaves and the statues became increasingly infeasible by the early 20th century. In part, this was a result
Prasenjit Duara: Of the critique of the civilizing mission, which was undertaken, which became very generalized both in the colonial world, semi colonial world as in China, as well as in the West.
Prasenjit Duara: As a sort of representing not a civilizing mission, but the barbarism of World War One where so many millions of people died.
Prasenjit Duara: It was also encouraged the critique of the civilizing mission by Woodrow Wilson's ideas of self-determination and the Russian Revolution, which was not only a revolution of the proletariat, but also
Prasenjit Duara: A revolution of oppressed nationalities. So, it was also based on the principle of nationalities. So that's one side of it, the ideological critique of
Prasenjit Duara: The old imperialism. The other side was the emergence of these latecomer imperialists, you know the 19th century had been dominated pretty much by the British, and to a lesser extent, the French.
Prasenjit Duara: But then, by then, the industrial revolution has spread to the Germans, the Russians, the Americans, the Japanese, and they were ready they wanted more of global resources, and
Prasenjit Duara: And their arrival known as latecomer imperialist
Prasenjit Duara: Changed the reality and ideology of imperialism. So this is what I call the New Imperialism, or the imperialism of the nation state. Now, what is this imperialism?
Prasenjit Duara: Each of these powers sought to create an imperialist regional bloc. These were not necessarily territorially connected but and, for instance, the Japanese Empire and the US empire, and so on were also across
Prasenjit Duara: Seas, but they did see them as an integrated energy with the Metropole. So you have the German idea of the Lebensraum which was continental.
Prasenjit Duara: You have the US idea of the Monroe Doctrine, which included the Caribbean societies and so on.
Prasenjit Duara: I would also include in here, the Soviet bloc after the Soviet revolution, and particularly after World War Two but even before, where you had
Prasenjit Duara: Where you had a regional block. And of course, not least the Japanese pan-Asianism, which sought to create
Prasenjit Duara: An integrated regional block. Now what is what was important about these regional blocs and distinguish them from the earlier mode.
Prasenjit Duara: These new imperial powers actually sought to utilize a national model of integration to dominate these societies. Now what does it mean.
Prasenjit Duara: First thing it means is that unlike the older forms of imperialism which distinguish between a superior metropolitan self, the colonizer and an inferior other, the colonized.
Prasenjit Duara: These societies and said, these new powers claim that they were all basically the same. And they were part of the same national project, although of course they were going to be leaders of this project. So this difference between
Prasenjit Duara: Difference and similarity, as it were.
Prasenjit Duara: So it was nonetheless the inter-War period between the first and the second World War, the Imperial block formation is a new stage
Prasenjit Duara: For imperial advantage. Right. So what did they do. One of the things that they all did was try to create a common currency.
Prasenjit Duara: Tried to create common standards within the region, create common laws, institutions, and politically they set up client or puppet regimes.
Prasenjit Duara: But these were also very modern formations, for instance, I have studied Manchukuo, which was a Japanese puppet state.
Prasenjit Duara: They had very modern institutions they had mobilized between parties and associations and we so these were sort of modern type colonies, very different.
Prasenjit Duara: But the domination of the national imperialist power was conducted to control of banking infrastructure and ultimately military power. This is very important.
Prasenjit Duara: It was in the background but but was very much there. At the same time there's a kind of soft power rhetoric of brotherhood, you know, the Soviets talked very much about Brotherhood's
Prasenjit Duara: And one of the big problems was that the People's Republic was treated as a younger brother by the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China. And that became very galling after a while.
Prasenjit Duara: There the Europeans, the British in particular created these systems of self-governance which are very limited.
Prasenjit Duara: And the Americans created the idea of tutelary democracy, which is that we coach you into democracies.
Prasenjit Duara: But these were all sort of, a lot of it was rhetoric, some of it was institutionalized. So I'm not just saying that it's a front for it. There was a reality. The new reality.
Prasenjit Duara: The Japanese also created the idea of common history of Asians against Western imperialism, and there was ideas of common blood and common culture, new forms of loyalty.
Prasenjit Duara: But behind all this, and these were sometimes quite real. I mean, they were meant and many of the people who represented these ideas actually meant it.
Prasenjit Duara: But at the same time, there was the reality of extraction, racism, and domination, which, however, moved more to the background than to the foreground.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay.
Prasenjit Duara: I have argued that national imperialism, the imperialism of nation state, finds its apogee, its highest power in the, its highest expression in the Cold War period after World War Two.
Prasenjit Duara: So what did we have in the Cold War period. We had two superpowers, which had client states.
Prasenjit Duara: And their relationship resembled pretty much the pre-war idea of the imperialism of nation states, there were differences, of course, the rhetoric of development and developmentalism was much more,
Prasenjit Duara: Was much greater. But there were certain very important similarities there was military power continue to remain in the hands of the national imperialists,
Prasenjit Duara: And economic controls were in the background, but very real mobilization of the population in these subordinate states was conducted to the creation of many similar institutions and practices, for instance, the US talked about the free world and
Prasenjit Duara: Mobilizing against the socialist block and vice versa. And what is allowed, was that elite allies of these superpowers
Prasenjit Duara: In the subordinate states develop close interest with the Metropolitan to various organization like Chambers of Commerce, like clubs, like Communist Party ties
Prasenjit Duara: Or other business dealings and other societies. And so, and they were also massive cultural transformations, aided by cultural industries like Hollywood was a very important instrument.
Prasenjit Duara: You had communist youth groups and exchanges between the communist societies, you had publishing industries and other mechanism. But also I would say that these superpowers created a projects of development
Prasenjit Duara: And facilitated progress ideologies. Ideologies that we were going to make progress under their leadership
Prasenjit Duara: Which were considered elements of soft power. Now, we won't go into those development projects, but I call them, they were they were Enlightenment designs of superpowers.
Prasenjit Duara: And these Enlightenment designs, although some of them may have been useful for creating
Prasenjit Duara: Infrastructure or creating a modern development, but they were often shot through with paternalism, national interests and covert racist prejudices
Prasenjit Duara: That constantly produced contradictions and tensions. So, and you see this all the way from Vietnam to Marcos's Philippines, from Prague to Afghanistan, where the Soviets really lost their their their status, their power, their role.
Prasenjit Duara: It. So it was this configuration of national imperialism that led to resistance to both the Soviet Union, contributing significantly to its decline, as well as the United States in many parts of the world.
Prasenjit Duara: So what we can. What I'm trying to do is think of national imperialism, which I call NI as occupying a space between the old 19th century or high imperialism
Prasenjit Duara: And what Joseph Nye called, which I will be contesting a little bit, the idea of soft power. So let's move on to that. So here is a picture for those of you who are not familiar with what the Cold War was like.
Prasenjit Duara: And you can see the red states were of course, communist states and the non-communist states, happened to be mostly under the blue ones under US domination in Asia, of course, Latin America, Africa, and so on, had and West Asia, the Middle East, had a lot of very similar types of
Prasenjit Duara: Color coding of maps.
Prasenjit Duara: Now let's look at national imperialism and soft power. Right if we think of soft power as a successor to the superpower domination of the Cold War.
Prasenjit Duara: Now high imperialism is the spread of dominance over others with, as I've said the ideology of difference between colonizer and colonized.
Prasenjit Duara: Soft power focuses on contemporary competition between a national influence in a globalized space. In this idealized view of soft power, in this idealized view of all three of the whole spectrum,
Prasenjit Duara: National imperialism has elements of high imperialism. Right, there is national imperialism has continued economic and military control,
Prasenjit Duara: It has enlightenment paternalism, not perhaps as racist as civilizing mission, but some of it.
Prasenjit Duara: Uh, but it also conducts a, it also has certain elements of soft power. The rhetoric and institutions of equality and elite allegiance.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, Joseph Nye's concept of soft power I find a little bit vague. I mean, he defines it in many different ways. At one place, though,
Prasenjit Duara: He defines it as soft power as getting other countries to want the outcomes that a particular country wants, and he says that that is the the most superpower wants right. So you need to co-opt people rather than coerce them to your goal.
Prasenjit Duara: This is actually the most the strictest definition that he has among many other statements by Nye and others about soft bar because what they are used that
Prasenjit Duara: They also suggest that soft power is merely a society's desire of a stronger powers, cultural and political institution. We certainly see this with
Prasenjit Duara: A lot of cultural institutions with the US, and the latter's ability, that is the superpowers ability to entice and attract others to it.
Prasenjit Duara: While there may be a causal relationship between these two factors but desiring or admiring the goodies of another country.
Prasenjit Duara: Does not mean agreeing to that countries wishes or wanting their political outcomes, which is what Nye suggest is a kind of a natural progression.
Prasenjit Duara: In fact, if you look at nationalism, that is what it is about. Nationalism's enemy the imperial power or the other national power
Prasenjit Duara: Has a lot of things that they would be nationalist wants to get, but that doesn't mean that they're going to accept what the imperialist wants, which is to control you. Right, so
Prasenjit Duara: Historically, opting the people to want your outcomes often takes place post factum that is after the hard intervention of some kind or the other has been made.
Prasenjit Duara: And soft power is largely used to accommodate key allies. And I'm thinking of all the countries in the world whose elites send their children, including you and me maybe to the United States and, you know, that's the kind of
Prasenjit Duara: A lot of the advantage that comes from having this kind of power. And
Prasenjit Duara: But the real question of soft power, I think, is a is a good question, which it, but I would like to redefine it as
Prasenjit Duara: If it is possible to agree to a superpower's decisions without the hard power of military or financial and economic pressure,
Prasenjit Duara: Is it possible to build trust on the basis of fair exchange and reciprocity? If so, that is what I would consider soft power.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay, now let's turn to the Imperial Chinese world order because the idea of soft power is very important, I think, also for the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, which I will talk about soon. But let's look a little bit at the Imperial Chinese world order.
Prasenjit Duara: Now this world order from, I'm just looking at the Qing period, although mostly at the Qing period, although of course it goes back a long way. Certainly
Prasenjit Duara: Since the Tong period, but I think of the Chinese world order as a more of a, it's less a system, as in the Westphalian system of nation states.
Prasenjit Duara: Than a kind of a language game. It is a provisional and changing order of recognize statuses. Language game according to the philosophy of it time are not well bounded systems
Prasenjit Duara: constituted by a single principle or a doctrine set of sovereignty, but they are open ended. Right.
Prasenjit Duara: The East Asian tributary order is a complex language game that incorporated various modes of ritual and other performative procedures,
Prasenjit Duara: With provisional diverse and changing roles for the players.
Prasenjit Duara: So in the Wittgenstein, in Wittgenstein's thinking, there is no common essence to games. And you know there are winners and losers, but the rules of the game
Prasenjit Duara: Are changed in different places. But we recognize a game as a game because what he called, what he called family resemblance of overlapping rules and practices.
Prasenjit Duara: So, and we see this very clearly for instance, with the Qing emperor. The Qing Emperor actually was a Qing Emperor for as this was served as the Son of Heaven for Chinese people, but for
Prasenjit Duara: The tribute players, the players, he often adopted different kinds of roles right. And for the neighboring states of parts of Mongolia and particularly Tibet,
Prasenjit Duara: He was not so much the Son of Heaven as he was the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. It was a Buddhist community, and there he served the role of Mañjuśrī
Prasenjit Duara: As their, as their bodhisattva, and but he also performed the role of a patron of, say, the Dalai Lama, and he descends half way to meet his spiritual mentor the Dalai Lama.
Prasenjit Duara: The Tibetans and Qing dynasty were then engaging in overlapping language games. So, you know, this was a relationship that could not be expressed in a single principle and so on. There was
Prasenjit Duara: Different things involved. And so this becomes problematic in the epistemic concept of sovereign states as the only kind of valid way of having political exchange.
Prasenjit Duara: So, and besides his role was different as Mañjuśrī then as the Son of Heaven, and the emperor's actions in these roles but also different from his role
Prasenjit Duara: Inciting signings certain Western treaties, like the Treaty of Nations, which was closer to a Westphalian treaty with the Russians in 1689.
Prasenjit Duara: So this kind of language game, of flexibility of roles, of changing statuses and so on permitted actually advantages to various party
Prasenjit Duara: In terms of economic interests and political rhetoric. Politically, the Imperial State needed to legitimate its institutional structures domestically, by using the cosmological rhetoric of rule over a universal realm. Right. And so, you would be whatever you conceived of as your a pro.
Prasenjit Duara: In the Imperial Chinese rhetoric, tribute, which was paid by the neighboring states also paid by the provinces, but tribute was an expression of a group subordination to an Imperial State
Prasenjit Duara: In return for imperial bestowal of a gift. So it was an exchange of reciprocity, but, thereby expressing also the rhetorical superiority of the person to whom you
Prasenjit Duara: paid tribute. But increasingly, in the Ming, and particularly in the Qing period, this tribute order becomes more and more about economics, about trade.
Prasenjit Duara: So let's get to that. So here is a, some pictures of the tribute order, we can see also people from various different cultures
Prasenjit Duara: And including Europeans and Japanese and well, the Japanese didn't pay tribute. They use the other modalities to have exchanges.
Prasenjit Duara: But you see from many different countries here and you see that, you know, they've also tribute ideas of giraffes and so on being paid as tribute.
Prasenjit Duara: The economics of tribute. Now, you know, as I said there, that this was a changing order so even when the Song, the Song were often had to pay tribute in the, between the 10th and 11th century to the northern nomadic
Prasenjit Duara: Apologies, like that of the Khitan and the Tanggut, because they were militarily superior to the Song.
Prasenjit Duara: But the Song's superior economic power ensured that the great amounts of silver, and silk that they paid to these what they considered barbarian states,
Prasenjit Duara: Was actually exceeded by the silver and cash they gave in return for their merchandise exports to these states.
Prasenjit Duara: So, so basically what happened it's it's a bit like the contemporary world, when in fact a president
Prasenjit Duara: Goes to another country. He is nowadays, accompanied by a whole set of CEOs of companies who signed trade deals and so on. This is a bit like what was going on then.
Prasenjit Duara: So, you know, when a tribute system came except the president wasn't going, they were coming to the emperor, they came in with a whole bunch of things and one of the things that they got for
Prasenjit Duara: paying tribute was, in fact, the right to conduct trade. A license to conduct trade. So this could be also used for the Chinese advantage of course not only the other way.
Prasenjit Duara: And we know that during the Ming period, the Ming and Moghul India became the global sink for silver from the New World, which became the primary, which was extracted, of course, by the European traders and later mercantile companies.
Prasenjit Duara: They became the primary medium of exchange, both the silver became the medium of exchange, both internal to China as well as regionally and globally. Right.
Prasenjit Duara: The entire tribute trade zones became loosely integrated to the use of silver as a medium of settling China's trade surplus. I have some details here, but we do need to get go into that right now.
Prasenjit Duara: So, and during the Ming-Qing period commercial transactions were based on the price structure in China.
Prasenjit Duara: Which became intertwined and co-dependent with the tributary trade. Right. And the key to it, of course, was a huge demand for Chinese goods outside China
Prasenjit Duara: And the differences in price inside and outside China, which gave a lot of leverage and opportunity. Now these economic opportunities were for a long time, sufficient to keep
Prasenjit Duara: All the major players quite happy, including the British East India Company, which became quite invested in the tributary mode, although they tried to shake it up from time to time, but this stop being accepted by, especially with the opium trade and so on, which I'm sure you've studied.
Prasenjit Duara: Once the British nation state takes over the, the role that the East India Company played with regard to trade, with defending the trade with China.
Prasenjit Duara: Now this is not to say that military violence was absent. I mean, so far, I depicted as very much
Prasenjit Duara: A matter of trade and tribute, but we do have military violence. The Ming naval expeditions led by an Admiral Zheng He, which I'm sure a lot of you have studied, forced tribute,
Prasenjit Duara: Captured slaves, and even a king in Sri Lanka of Ceylon, what was called Ceylon.
Prasenjit Duara: In a bid to demonstrate the power of the Chinese emperor. So there was these were these huge Zheng He armadas and although often they're thought of as peace missions, they were not. They they were intended very much to scare
Prasenjit Duara: These people, these neighbors, these Asian neighbors, all the way up to East Africa
Prasenjit Duara: To continue to accept at least the theoretical sovereignty and the tribute superiority of the Chinese emperor. Not sovereignty, suzerainty oh, superiority.
Prasenjit Duara: So, but we know that the Zheng He expeditions didn't last for more than 25 years or so, and
Prasenjit Duara: These military and the military authority over the sea route was not maintained beyond the brief window in the 15th century and nor did China control the land roots from Central Asia, which continued to be controlled by other nomadic groups and central Asians.
Prasenjit Duara: But the military, I would say that the role of military was significant in managing the border states who often harassed and checking the tribute trade
Prasenjit Duara: At its periphery. You know, the Koreans did it in the early 11th century, and so on. But by the 19th and of course the nomadic groups were always there, but by the 18th and 19th century it was Burma in the southwest that was becoming very
Prasenjit Duara: Very aggressive and ascendant, and often conducted raids and it was very hard to to actually
Prasenjit Duara: Deal with the Burmese because once the Chinese to go to Burma, they would be suffer from malaria, and that was a distinct advantage that the Burmese had. So
Prasenjit Duara: This was so what I would say is that the military was used, largely as a punitive and stabilizing measures because it was also expensive. It was, you know, with a lot of costs as we've seen, to maintain a kind of equilibrium in border relations and maintain that tribute continue to flow.
Prasenjit Duara: So, arguably, the flexibility of the tribute order then enabled the interlacing of cultural and economic goals for various players without significant use of military violence.
Prasenjit Duara: Now we we we come to the Belt and Road, which is also called. was also called OBOR One Belt, One Road. So sometimes I refer to it as OBOR and sometimes as BRI. So can OBOR reproduce such a win-win condition? I think the tribute order was a relatively win-win,
Prasenjit Duara: Not in all cases, but in a lot of ways. Is it possible to convey a sense of fair exchange of providing desirable goods and values
Prasenjit Duara: Without the threat of overwhelming military and finishing financial power. This is, of course, how I define soft power. Can it express, can China express a kind of a new traditional soft power.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay, now the Belt and Road or OBOR, is of course an enormous development in the last eight years or so, seven years, although it had begun kind of earlier.
Prasenjit Duara: And we have to, of course, accept that China is by no means the same as it was
Prasenjit Duara: In the even in the 19th century right. There are the new conditions of capitalism, of nationalism, and statism, which changes everything a great deal.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, one of the things with the Belt and Road which I'm sure you know a little bit about, so I'm not going to go into that in a big detail but already it is said that over a trillion dollars is being spent across the world by China to enhance its, its role, its influence and
Prasenjit Duara: It is attractive to many countries because many of these developing countries and some European countries too
Prasenjit Duara: Cannot get capital for their various infrastructure projects. So it's much, much of the capital is for infrastructure, and not just physical infrastructure, but as we see also digital infrastructure. And especially for places in Central Asia and Africa and different parts of Asia
Prasenjit Duara: They have been attracted to this capital. So there's they're also very attracted to what the Chinese call the digital Silk Road, because as you know
Prasenjit Duara: The Chinese have the most advanced perhaps today in the world in in their digital technology, in their GPS systems, which is called Beidou which is apparently superior to
Prasenjit Duara: Google and others.
Prasenjit Duara: At the in artificial intelligence in 5G, all of these things which they are making available to these countries. So from all of those perspective, this is
Prasenjit Duara: Very good. Now, China also, of course, has its considerable interest in it. China is capital and labor surplus, and it seeks to invest that capital and also bring in some that labor to
Prasenjit Duara: To employ it in these overseas projects or the foreign projects. It has also tended to be, China's tended to be extractive and energy hungry abroad, and often China exports old coal mining technology and coal development technology, dirty technology, which has environmental consequences.
Prasenjit Duara: Some of the other negative dimensions are investments in mammoth logistical and infrastructural ventures
Prasenjit Duara: Have sometimes tended to bypass the interests of local communities and rather favor state elites. The migration of Chinese small businesses and immigrant communities which has accompanied the movement of capital has often produced
Prasenjit Duara: Societies
Prasenjit Duara: Be hand in glove with crony capitalists. But, you know, in a way, the Chinese have not been
Prasenjit Duara: Have have continued to follow certain Panchsheela ideas in this, so they they believe now although that has not been always been true and perhaps is not still
Prasenjit Duara: completely true that there, that they are believe in non interference. So they will deal with any constituted government in any country.
Prasenjit Duara: So a lot of Central Asian countries, several African countries, several South, Southeast Asian countries have relatively weak civil society. So, and they have crony capitalists who who are were running their governments, so they often
Prasenjit Duara: Make agreements that
Prasenjit Duara: Are not useful that are more useful to the elites than to the societies and there's very little resistance to these projects.
Prasenjit Duara: But where there is active civil society, and these people want to see these contracts, they can never see these contracts, they're not very transparent, but want to see make demands on what kinds of effects these projects will have on the environment, on the population and so on.
Prasenjit Duara: They do. They have been coming forward and trying to work with them. So
Prasenjit Duara: And of course, you know, we'll see that the Chinese also have to take a lot of risks because they have to tread very carefully across minefields of local conflicts, civil wars, extremism, separatists movements, terrorism,
Prasenjit Duara: And national movements. And they are very vulnerable now, in many parts of
Prasenjit Duara: Actually South Asia where they are. And I'll talk a little bit about the China Pakistan Economic Corridor which has become a huge topic of research and I can just scratch the surface.
Prasenjit Duara: So China and Pakistan have a very close, what what what they call a, what is it an evergreen, or ever ever ever ready friendship or something like that. And Fairweather or
Prasenjit Duara: Yeah evergreen partnership, so they and there are of course security reasons for it to being India's being seen as a kind of potential non-friend of China. So
Prasenjit Duara: But China has promised about $62 billion of investment in Pakistan's Belt and Road projects. One is called the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the CPEC.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, a lot of this has already been done and they are developing a huge port, which is now functional in whether in this area in this part of Pakistan this whole pink area, by the way, is Baluchistan and
Prasenjit Duara: But these these these have been, what China found what the Chinese leaders and the Chinese Belt and Road advocates found is that while Pakistan, maybe
Prasenjit Duara: Maybe an ally and so on, it is a deeply pluralistic society with all kinds of
Prasenjit Duara: political obstacles. Right, so you have
Prasenjit Duara: regional groups who are unhappy with each other, who are unhappy with the military, you have civilian versus military, you have terrorist groups you have independent fighters especially in Balochistan,
Prasenjit Duara: And in other parts in Sindh as well, this pinkish area here, and there have been many attempts on the lives of Chinese all across and there there is
Prasenjit Duara: And the point is that they also argue that these are financially very expensive projects, because although these projects are taken out on commercial terms
Prasenjit Duara: With an interest of 7% in many cases, some of it is concessionary but a lot of it is 7% and for whether, you actually amounts to 14% because whether
Prasenjit Duara: Because that Baluchistan area is so insecure that insurance rates for it add another 7%. So all of this has to be paid by Pakistan to China, including interest rates. Moreover, there are other other environmental concerns as well. So it used to be that
Prasenjit Duara: As late as 2013 or 2014 or 15, 1% of the energy
Prasenjit Duara: Needs of Palestine was produced from coal. Most of it was water and other petroleum and so on, but
Prasenjit Duara: But and this was not you know, it's Chinese capital that develop these huge mines in the Thar desert around here and
Prasenjit Duara: This led to in less than three or four years to close to 70% of Pakistan's energy coming from coal mine and using old coal technology from China and very polluting. And this has had
Prasenjit Duara: A very disastrous impact on the region environmentally. So you do have a lot of problems and having met with all these problems
Prasenjit Duara: It has been very important learning experience from China and although China has soured a little bit on its Belt and Road, it is, but it's almost as if it's expressing the idea that if you
Prasenjit Duara: If you can manage Pakistan, if you can manage your investments successful in Pakistan you can manage it anywhere in the world, is the kind of view that they are taking. So it's a stealing process.
Prasenjit Duara: Now in Southeast Asia, the consequences of China's neighborhood strategies have been felt most sharply in Southeast Asia.
Prasenjit Duara: As we saw, as you read, some of you in this, the students, that from the 1990s China had begun to cultivate very good relations with ASEAN.
Prasenjit Duara: China's relationship with integrating ASEAN, Asia, was dramatically enhanced during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, 98, when China did not devalue its currency and then it signed, it was one of the first buyers to sign a ASEAN
Prasenjit Duara: Agreement mutual friendship agreement and mutual agreement and cooperation treaty and since then, once ASEAN got these Chinese and other Japanese signatures,
Prasenjit Duara: Every country wanted to deal with trade with the ASEAN network. That was the machine that ASEAN created which was not a balancing act. It didn't balance these powers, but it, it was able to hold them together on a corporate deal I think.
Prasenjit Duara: But two decades since the ASEAN crisis, China is of course the larger import, largest importer and the largest trading partner of each Southeast Asian country.
Prasenjit Duara: And increase numbers of Chinese students and Chinese investments and so on are going to Southeast Asia.
Prasenjit Duara: But at the same time in recent years, China has lost much of the goodwill and trust that it built up in ASEAN. And the main factor of it in the public realm is of course the militarization of the South China Sea since 2012.
Prasenjit Duara: And increasingly, it feels like this is the old new Imperialism right of the United States Monroe doctrine, that this is our backyard in the Caribbean's and all of Latin America and
Prasenjit Duara: You know, we have special powers in there. But, you know, the situation is different now. And these countries are not necessarily willing to accept this, except for countries like Cambodia and one or two others last maybe, but
Prasenjit Duara: less conspicuous then the South China Sea is, but doing perhaps more serious damage to China in the hinterland of Southeast Asia is the Chinese construction of this gargantuan dams on the Mekong and the Salween rivers, that is the Lancang and the
Prasenjit Duara: The New River, as well as on the Brahmaputra in the Himalayas. Now, you know, we're
Prasenjit Duara: Going into the subject of big dams is a huge one. There are many books written on it. I have written a considerable amount. So we won't go into that.
Prasenjit Duara: But we can say that it takes an enormous toll on the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of communities, of millions of people because it changes
Prasenjit Duara: A great deal of the flow of water which is of course the stuff of life
Prasenjit Duara: And livelihoods. And there are massive civil society movements in Southeast Asia, which have been organized to resist and in parts until 2012, 2013
Prasenjit Duara: In Yunnan Province, which had a very highly developed civil society organizations that resisted many of these large dams and worked with ideas of smaller dams or less ambitious and displacing
Prasenjit Duara: Environment of economic projects.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, to conclude, I will talk about three dimensions of the Belt and Road, right that we need to pay attention to in the future. The first is infrastructure, debt and digital power.
Prasenjit Duara: China is not playing in the same world as 50 years ago when the US was able to combine its cultural soft power with military and economic infrastructure.
Prasenjit Duara: If China is not primarily interested in expanding its economic domination, but is more interested in fair exchange,
Prasenjit Duara: It will still face constraints and limits based on resistance on environmental effects, economic losses and debt.
Prasenjit Duara: So there are, for instance now, many countries that have been set to be there eight countries that are said to be if not, Sri Lanka is considered now,
Prasenjit Duara: To be pretty much in fully in in a debt trap, although it's not really, but it certainly has to give up its Hambantota port to Chinese on a long term lease, on a 99 year lease, what happened between Hong Kong and China, but of course they don't have that much sovereign
Prasenjit Duara: Political control over that over Hambantota, but you do have eight countries that are upset to be very dangerously
Prasenjit Duara: Vulnerable to falling into a huge debt trap because of PRI payouts. Now
Prasenjit Duara: But the point is, what can China do if they do default, right. Now, we've seen a starting from the perhaps from Argentina and the post war era, Argentina has defaulted four times and really hasn't had to do very much about it. You have the Greek
Prasenjit Duara: Developments in the early to 2010s, and everybody was talking about the Greek hacker to the point is that the landing pads had to take the hacker, they had to, you know, give up on their debts in a lot of cases.
Prasenjit Duara: Now, but still the Western powers still had certain controls over indebted countries because a lot of the finances and remittances and other dealings of these indebted countries was going to London and New York to the financial centers.
Prasenjit Duara: China doesn't quite have that yet, although it is building in Abu Dhabi, in Singapore and so on and even Lahore, but
Prasenjit Duara: It is, it doesn't have that kind of pressure control. So it may have to eat a lot of the debt. Take a lot of this, and especially now with COVID, a lot of these products are suspended
Prasenjit Duara: Especially in Africa and to some extent in Pakistan and and Central Asia as well.
Prasenjit Duara: So you have the situation where it's not necessarily going to be beneficial or very productive for China. And we have seen a considerable weakening on the rhetoric of
Prasenjit Duara: BRI in China, and we have the case I'm not going to talk about Sri Lanka. But there are other dimensions also. The second is digital control right. We know that did to digital control to the digital Silk Road. The thing is that whoever controls a digital
Prasenjit Duara: line of communication or network of communication also ultimately gets that information. And of course, China is also very well developed on its
Prasenjit Duara: surveillance technologies, which is which it has many takers for in countries, both whether are civil societies, but whether are not and
Prasenjit Duara: This is I'm in the US also takes a lot of the surveillance technology and just what, to what extent can it then apply it on its population and get away with it.
Prasenjit Duara: So I don't think I have time to go into this. I was in Sri Lanka, about two years ago and found very interesting expressions of Belt and Road
Prasenjit Duara: In Sri Lanka, one of the thing I will tell you is that this is an, in the Sri Lankan in the Colombo museum
Prasenjit Duara: Zheng He, the great friendship of Zheng He and Sri Lanka, was but you know I told you that it, Zheng He actually captured a Sri Lankan Prince
Prasenjit Duara: And brought him to Nanjing. Later on the in in the Ming Dynasty and later on they sent him back, but apparently they discovered in Nanjing
Prasenjit Duara: The descendant of this king, a princess here who was then touted out and brought forward to show the great old relationships that they had. And there's a long story behind this, but we won't go into that now. So let me conclude with two scenarios. Right.
Prasenjit Duara: One scenario of the future is that China will continue to walk on two legs. That is, on the one hand, it will continue to pursue soft power of cultural and economic diplomacy,
Prasenjit Duara: But then also continue its military expansionism as we see in the South China Sea, and more recently, we see in South Asia in the Himalayas with India with the Hong Kong,
Prasenjit Duara: Possibly with Taiwan and with other areas as well. So there is a there is that direction in there, but in the age of many deterrence to open warfare,
Prasenjit Duara: The military especially nuclear deterrence, the military component will probably also be found in proxy wars outsourced either to allies, mercenaries, rebels and terrorists on both sides.
Prasenjit Duara: The second scenario is that there will be more emphasis on
Prasenjit Duara: Soft power on economic diplomacy and digital diplomacy. But I also want to suggest that digital diplomacy could also be a very interesting kind of power, which we are increasingly begin to recognize where you don't have to use military power, you can use digital power to wipe out a whole
Prasenjit Duara: Military system.
Prasenjit Duara: And it's
Prasenjit Duara: Technological paces. So you know that's that's a kind of a new type of power, digital power is what we can
Prasenjit Duara: Call it right now where this is. Now we see that recently Chinese state owned companies are responding to demand from civil society where they are organized
Prasenjit Duara: And push back on agreements that were deemed unfair. This happened in Malaysia, it's happening in many parts of Africa, it's even happening in Pakistan, and there's some evidence in the Mekong and East African negotiation that civil society, especially on the Mekong
Prasenjit Duara: civil society groups, where it has been active with Chinese have participated and
Prasenjit Duara: Agreed to certain terms where such pressure is not organized as in Central Asia, Chinese companies can ignore local interests and that may be one of the more difficult situations that it finds itself in ultimately.
Prasenjit Duara: Whatever the vision of national poewr, Chinese soft power will have to incorporate more democratic participation in its ventures abroad.
Prasenjit Duara: It should also take the leadership in global climate change activism, not only by top-down technological approaches, but also by creating a framework for community participation. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much.
MIN ZHOU: Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Duara
MIN ZHOU: Yeah, for this excellent and enlightening informative lecture and walk us through history, and then talk about the contemporary and especially with the focus on China in the Asian world. And
MIN ZHOU: As a matter of fact, our class, this is very relevant to the understanding of our class. Our class is on Asian community and its support for the by the EurAsia Foundation in Asia,
MIN ZHOU: Based in Japan. And the foundations Vision Vision is to build the Asian community like an integrated EU and the vision is more on the humanitarian side so
MIN ZHOU: I actually have a lot of questions about the possibility of building the Asian community.
MIN ZHOU: Linking to what you talk about today. But, but I think with the interest of time, I would like to select some questions from the audience.
MIN ZHOU: So, I have, let me select questions in no particular order. There are a lot of questions.
MIN ZHOU: So here is one
Prasenjit Duara: Let me get a pen and paper so I can remember them.
MIN ZHOU: Okay, I will do it very slowly.
MIN ZHOU: So, so, and also if you click on the Q&A we can also
MIN ZHOU: See the text. So different from the tributary era when China was the only superpower in the region. After World War Two, America
MIN ZHOU: Literary restore the order in Asia through hub and strokes and now facing the competition of influence among the US, China, Japan and India
MIN ZHOU: Do you think that China will still be able to attract Southeast Asian countries to its orbit of influence through capital and soft power? So, what will be the best strategies for the countries in the region to respond hatch, to respond hatch and balance.
Prasenjit Duara: Balancing. Do you want me to respond that way I can try.
MIN ZHOU: Yeah, you could respond this question very quickly as matter of fact, there is a related question.
MIN ZHOU: Let me read it out. And this is one from my student and she asked about the dichotomy of
MIN ZHOU: A between old and new imperialism. And so she wonder whether it seems like racism and other system of domination are still at the core
MIN ZHOU: Characteristics of the New Imperialism and the contemporary world order. So, she asked you to clarify the distinction between old and new imperialism, and and shed light on how racism and domination may be informal and may operate in the background.
Prasenjit Duara: Yeah, I wonder if there is
Prasenjit Duara: Another Southeast Asia question but
Not
MIN ZHOU: Next question will be more on China. Yeah.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay, so let me get to these two. So the first one, Southeast Asia and China. What, I think, I think
Prasenjit Duara: China, of course, Southeast Asia is, well let me start with this that China wants to deal bilaterally with Southeast Asian countries, right. It likes to deal bilaterally with all countries.
Prasenjit Duara: And Southeast Asia, where it has some very important interests, security and otherwise, is of course and organized around ASEAN and, which has collectively much more bargaining power to deal with
Prasenjit Duara: China, then
Prasenjit Duara: It would if it was just individual countries, and that is the nature of the political nature of the struggle right now because, as you all know,
Prasenjit Duara: Laos is almost like a province of China and Cambodia has Hun Sen, who is has completely turned in his lot with China. So, this has a tremendous effect and Philippines is very unclear sometimes.
Prasenjit Duara: This has a very important impact and Myanmar also, more and more, dependent on China, although it has more independence, I think.
Prasenjit Duara: This has complicated the situation for ASEAN, but it has not solved the situation for China. So China, I think we'll have to continue
Prasenjit Duara: To sort of soften its terms, become more participatory in both the Mekong area, South China Sea, and it's Belt and Road projects and to some extent it started doing that in April 2019 when you had the next big
Prasenjit Duara: Five year I think BRI conference and several countries in Southeast Asia, including Myanmar and Thailand and
Prasenjit Duara: Malaysia were able to renegotiate their terms considerably to their advantage. So I think that, and it will have to increase in in the Mekong there's something very interesting.
Prasenjit Duara: The MeKong is one where the Chinese will also have to sit down with civil society organizations.
Prasenjit Duara: And here, this is, I find this a very important and promising project, because if it does so then it learns also what it has not had to learn so far, is how you have can deal with
Prasenjit Duara: Different societal groups and and account for their interests. So I think there is a potential, but there's also the potential of going the other way and
Prasenjit Duara: We know that Trump pretty much abandoned these parts of Asia, especially Southeast Asia, I think.
Prasenjit Duara: But of course the Biden administration remains to be seen how much he can do or what he can do but
Prasenjit Duara: It would be interesting. I what I feel would be very great is precisely the ASEAN meshing, how ASEAN brings in these different powers and uses them productively and cooperatively. So I think I would like to go back to that situation.
Prasenjit Duara: Okay. The other question was about
MIN ZHOU: Yeah, about that superiority and inferiority.
Prasenjit Duara: So, the important thing to recognize is that
Prasenjit Duara: The old imperialism racism was in the forefront. It was part of the, a valid ideology. It was part of the public ideology.
Prasenjit Duara: You know, Chinese would complain that Chinese, parks in Shanghai would have Chinese and dogs not allowed. I don't know if that was really the case.
Prasenjit Duara: But that kind of thing was very blatant, and of course we know in colonial societies like India, and so on. There was, there was a kind of a caste system, not only within the Indian caste system, but between the European rulers and the others. So
Prasenjit Duara: That was blatant. What happens with the New Imperialism of the interwar era and to the Cold War, is that it becomes more in the background. It is not allowed.
Prasenjit Duara: But it's often tied up with national sense of nationalist superiority that produces a kind of if not a racialism but a certain type of hierarchical sense of superiority.
Prasenjit Duara: And of course, we still see that and that can be also politically operational. It also can it happened with the Japanese even when they were racially similar it when the Japanese
Prasenjit Duara: You know, call them during the Second World War, or during the Pacific War when they saw them, the Yamato race as being intrinsically superior to all these other Asians who was sort of said to be younger brothers or whatever they were.
Prasenjit Duara: And this could also happen with Chinese. I mean we you know we have a lot of this kind of also especially in Africa, but in other parts as well.
Prasenjit Duara: That they could be informal, although not formal. So how do you deal with that. I think how one deals with this informal dimension and to some extent it is beginning to happen.
Prasenjit Duara: I think the whole contemporary US politics of Black Lives Matter and so on is the kind of pushback, that is
Prasenjit Duara: That we're encountering actually some real divisions about these kinds of issues all over the world, not just in the US. So, there is pushing the background out to the foreground, in order to attack it. So, I think that's what is happening and hopefully that'll happen.
MIN ZHOU: Well, thank you so much, because unfortunately our time is
Up.
MIN ZHOU: And I wish we have more time, but we have a lot of students who have classes, immediately after this event. So, I have
MIN ZHOU: Reluctantly have to conclude, and thank you so much for joining us. And again, this weapon is co-hosted by the Asia Pacific Center, the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for the Study of International Migration at UCLA.
MIN ZHOU: And we would invite you to subscribe to our center's email lists to learn more about our future events as they are announced, as a matter of fact, we are having another
MIN ZHOU: Event on Hong Kong. Hong Kong in the 1950s and that would be next Friday, December 11 at noon. So please watch out for the announcement. So, our webinar will be
MIN ZHOU: You know the video will be available on our centers website and thank you again for our speaker, Professor Duara, and also to the EurAsia foundation from Asia. I also thank our center staff.
MIN ZHOU: Aaron Miller, Elizabeth Leicester, and my TA Brooke for the support and then we thank our friends of the center and all participants for this great discussion, and good evening and I hope you can join us in our future event. Thank you so much.