The wheel of history turns to China(2006-03-29 10:12:33)
The wheel of history turns to China
Telegraph Newspaper UK -
On Sunday afternoon, the family ended up at Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, by accident. We had decided to make the best of the slightly warmer (ie not sub-zero) temperatures and sunshine with a walk in the Western Hills.
As usual, by the time we had got out of the house and circumnavigated the third ring road it seemed sensible to opt for a less ambitious alternative. The Summer Palaces were to hand. And it was a timely visit, as it turned out today, for reasons I shall come to.
For those that don’t know – 99 per cent of readers in Britain, I would guess – the Summer Palaces are important parts of British history, albeit ones we have generally preferred to forget.
We, along with the French, burned down the Old Summer Palace in 1860 (in fact, I suppose you could say we turned it into the Old Summer Palace, since it was just the Summer Palace at the time).
We, and the other western powers, also smashed up the bit that was later rebuilt (now known just as the Summer Palace) after the Boxer Uprising in 1900. I won’t bother you with the full historical details. Suffice to say, we were Top Nation at the time; and these two events were part of a long drawn-out campaign to stop China being so damned introverted and accept that if western firms wanted to set up and do business here, they could.
Until the early 19th century, China, or at least its emperors, didn’t really think that the west had anything much to offer China. Five years after the Boxers, Shanghai’s first film studio opened. The Old Summer Palace, with its neo-Classical ruins, is not only a nice winter’s walk but a visible reminder of a less than glorious chapter in both country’s imperial histories.
Fast forward to today. China has issued estimated GDP figures for 2005, up 9.8 per cent, which, on top of a revision last month of its statistical base, means that when the official figures come out the size of China’s economy will have overtaken Britain’s.
It is hard not to see 2005 as the end of an era which began when the weedy Emperor Xianfeng, Lord of Ten Thousand Years (he died in 1861), fled the Summer Palace, and the British army, under Lord Elgin, entered Beijing.
So there is a wheel of history, and to many – more foreigners, I think sometimes than Chinese themselves – history is now in reverse. The west is in decline, symbolised by Britain’s retreat to its small island off the continent, Europe’s moribund economies, America’s huge debts and self-induced Middle Eastern nightmare.
China has reversed the humiliation of 1860; it is at the vanguard of a resurgent Asia, about to reoccupy the ground it held for much of recorded history, as the most powerful economy on earth and, once again, Top Nation. I wonder. The hard-headed economic truth is that the line from that compulsory opening up by Lord Elgin to today’s growth figures is straight, not circular.
“We have no need for the manufactures of outside barbarians,” the Emperor Qianlong famously said to Britain’s Lord Macartney in 1793, setting in train the events that led to 1860 and the rest. Now barbarian manufactures is what China is all about.
It started with British trading posts in Canton and Hong Kong and, as the US took Britain’s Top Nation place, ended up with America’s ally Taiwan funding all those new factories to make stuff for Walmart.
Most of China’s exports come from foreign-funded firms. Mao tried to put a stop to all this, but he couldn’t, and as far as fighting off imperialism is concerned, he probably made things worse. Now HSBC – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as was – masterminds an assault on the Chinese market from London.
Imagine what it would imply for the international economic order if the world’s second largest bank were still based in its old home, Shanghai? And in his desperation, of course, Mao destroyed virtually every trace of that 5,000-year-civilisation that the China Resurgent folks like to remind us of.
Does this mean that China is, after all, forever doomed to live on the west’s economic coat-tails? No, and it could be quite the reverse. The point of 1860, and HSBC, and China’s rise, is not that Britain, or China, or the US, or anyone else at the moment has the power to dictate how we live our lives. Globalisation is, for the moment, Top Nation.
Was the rise of America at the expense of Britain? I don’t think many would say so. In fact, it could be said that America, a British colony, is a sort of Britain metamorphosed into new shape. By putting into places British principles of democracy, the rule of law, and expansionist trade and industry that we were at the time ourselves unwilling to implement at home, we created a new empire that was bound to subsume the old one, reliant as it was on increasingly absurd military ventures like that of 1860.
By relocating its own economic principles, of mass production and popular culture, into China, the land of the teeming masses, America may have created a new incubus. As America did itself, China will exert its own values on youthful incubus: what will those values be, and what will the world look like when it is fully-grown?
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一位在北京工作的英国人感悟:历史的车轮转回中国
不久前的一个周日，一位在北京工作和生活的英国人，带着全家游览了颐和园和圆明园。他触景生情，有感而发，在英国《每日电讯报》上发表一篇感悟历史的文章；抒发了他对大英帝国从全盛时期走向衰败的创伤感，以及对历史的车轮转回中国的历史认同和对当今中国的不甚了解……文章颇有可读性，文章的标题就叫《历史的车轮转回中国》,要点如下：
星期天下午，我们一家人偶然去了趟圆明园。我们原本决定趁着气温略升（零度以上）、阳光略好的机会去西山散步的。
与往常一样，当我们出门行驶在三环路上的时候，选择一个不太遥远的目的地似乎就成了明智之举。颐和园和圆明园都很近。那天的游览非常及时，原因待会儿分解。
首先向不太了解的读者做一下介绍——我猜有99％的英国读者都不太了解——颐和园（西方人称“夏宫”）和圆明园（西方人称“旧夏宫”）在英国历史上占有的重要地位，尽管我们一般更愿意忘记那段历史。
1860年，我们英国人和法国人一道烧毁了圆明园（事实上，我觉得也可以说，是我们把夏宫烧成了旧夏宫，因为圆明园在当时就是夏宫）。1900年义和团运动之后，我们和其他西方列强又一次摧毁了后来得以重建的剩下的那一小部分园林（就是现在的夏宫颐和园）。简单地说，我国就是当时的霸主，而这两起事件只是一场旷日持久的运动的一部分，目的是结束中国过分自闭的状态，同时迫使中国同意如果西方人想在中国开公司做生意，他们就能这么做。
直到19世纪初，中国，至少说中国皇帝，并不真正认为西方有什么东西可以提供给中国。义和团运动结束5年后，上海第一家电影制片厂开业。现在，圆明园及其新古典主义的残垣断壁并不只提供了一个在明媚冬日里散步的场所，而且真真切切地提醒我们，两国的帝国史上都曾有一段不太光彩的章节。
让我们跳回到今天。中国刚刚公布了2005年国内生产总值的预测数字，增幅为9．8％。在上个月调整了统计基准点之后，这意味着当正式数据出台时，中国经济的规模将超越英国。
2005年很难不被看作是一个时代的终结：在这个时代开始之初，软弱的万岁爷咸丰皇帝逃离圆明园，而以埃尔金勋爵为首的英国军队长驱直入北京城。
所以存在着历史的轮回，而且对很多人来说，现在的历史正朝着相反的方向发展。西方正在衰落，标志是英国龟缩到大陆外的小岛上，欧洲经济疲软，美国负债累累，并且还忍受着自作自受的中东噩梦。
中国一洗1860年的耻辱。它现在是亚洲复兴的先锋，准备以全世界经济最发达国家、也是卷土重来的霸主的姿态收复原本自有史以来即占有的失地。我怀疑这一切是否会真的发生。按照无情的经济学原理，从埃尔金勋爵强行打开中国国门到今天的经济增长数字，所走过的轨迹是直的，而非环行的。
乾隆皇帝在1793年对英国特使马戛尔尼勋爵说过的这样一句名言，“天朝物产丰盈，无所不有，原不藉外夷货物，以通有无”。这就昭示了直至1860年及其后发生的一系列事件。而如今，中国生产的就是所谓的“外夷货物”。
刚开始只有英国在广东和香港设立的一些贸易站，最后当美国夺取了英国的霸主地位后，就出现了为沃尔玛生产产品的新合资工厂。中国大部分的出口产品都为外资公司生产。前身为香港汇丰银行的汇丰银行正在策划从伦敦进军中国市场。
设想一下，如果这家世界第二大银行的总部依然留在老家上海，那么这将对国际经济秩序产生怎样的影响？这是否意味着中国归根到底只能永远追随西方经济的影子？
答案是否定的，而且事实可能恰恰相反。1860年的历史、汇丰银行与中国崛起带给我们的启示并不说明英国、中国、美国或其他任何一国现在有能力主宰我们的生活方式。目前，全球化才是霸主。
美国的崛起是否以损害英国的利益为代价？我不认为许多人会说“是”。事实上我们可以这样说，作为英国殖民地的美国是从英国演变而来的一种新形态。通过推行当时不愿在本土实行的英国的民主原则、法治以及发展扩张性的贸易和工业，英国创造出一个必定会超越旧帝国的全新帝国，不过这个新帝国后来也愈加依赖于荒谬的军事冒险行动，就像1860年的英国一样。
美国将自身在规模化生产和流行文化方面所遵循的经济学原理搬到了人口众多的中国。因此，它也许已经创造出了新的梦魇。而中国也会像美国那样将自己的价值观施加于新出现的梦魇上：那会是些怎样的价值观呢？当这些新梦魇发展到最严重的时候，世界会是什么样子呢？
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