A question about historical precedents for China’s rise landed in my reader mailbag last week. “What,” my correspondent asked, “is the better optic for looking at China today — Bismarckian/Wilhelmine Germany, or post-Meiji Japan? Or both?” Both! Forced to choose, though, I think Imperial Germany supplies more useful indices for plotting China’s trajectory. Someone should really write something making the comparison. Like 19th-century Germany, China is a land power situated amid weaker, nervous neighbors. To compound matters, it has set out to make itself a sea power. Managing its rise without uniting a hostile coalition could demand a virtuoso performance from Chinese diplomats.
The early reviews are less than stellar — at least from this reviewer.
This isn’t to say the Japanese precedent lacks merit altogether. The Meiji Restoration saw this secluded island nation burst forth from centuries of military rule, vowing to remake itself as an outwardly Western industrial power in order to fend off Western imperialism. It did so virtually overnight by historical standards.Within three decades after the Meiji emperor ordained that Japan would modernize, it had constructed a navy able to vanquish China’s. It stood on the brink of crushing the Russian Navy. Tokyo’s triumph in the Russo-Japanese War signified Asians’ first significant defeat of a European imperial power in centuries. It electrified regional audiences.
Meiji Japan, then, shows how quickly an authoritarian Asian nation with moxie, the makings of great power, and strong political leadership can marshal the necessary resources. Those who deprecate China’s rise — or prophesy that it will take Beijing many decades to consummate its economic and military development — ought to bear the Japanese example in mind. It has been done before, and at breakneck speed. Alfred Thayer Mahan pronounced Japan one of the two most changed societies of the late 19th century, alongside his own United States. Theodore Roosevelt saluted Japan for vaulting into the forefront of progressive civilization.
Fin de siècle Germany, on the other hand, is useful because it provides not just one but two yardsticks for China’s rise. During his long tenure, founding Chancellor Otto von Bismarck skillfully depicted the Reich as a satisfied great power with no further claims on its neighbors’ territory. But Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed the Iron Chancellor after ascending to the throne. Where Bismarck had gone out of his way to soothe anxieties among Germany’s neighbors, Wilhelm frayed nerves as though by conscious choice. Ultimately, of course, he marched Europe over the precipice into World War I. Such are the wages of vesting near-absolute power in the hands of one man — or a few men.
James Madison sagely counseled that enlightened statesmen aren’t always at the helm of state. Is China’s new leadership more like the Meiji emperor, Otto von Bismarck, or Kaiser Wilhelm II?
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J
The analogy between China and Willhelmine Germany has been written on extensively – particularly by Henry Kissinger "On China" in the epilogue, and also by Robert Kaplan briefly in "The Revenge of Geography".
Joe M.
China's rise can best be compared to the rise of Japan in the 1900's to 1945. There are many parallels and China seems to be following the Japanese script in setting a racist course of regional or even world domination as a national goal. In this respect they have learned little from the history of Japan from 1900 to 1945. In 1910, Japan took over Korea and operated it as a pupit state with Korean men being conscripted as forced labor and Korean women as "comfort women" for Japanese military forces. This was only the opening moves for Japan. Just before 12/7/1941, Japan had the most powerful navy in the Pacific region. China is now making vigorous efforts to achieve that status, but currently cannot be said to have acquired the naval power of Japan during Worl War II.
Chinese journalists speak very easily of nuclear war with the USA, having very little understanding of all that it entails. They seem to think that the larger population gives them an overwhelming advantage in every military aspect, while not realizing that Japan was able to dominate and expand its forces in China in spite of the population advantage that China had during the years of World War II.
In the event that China makes hostile moves against the USA, US forces should seek to destroy the Three Gorges Dam in the same manner as the destruction of German dams during World War II. The resulting multiple disasters created by a conventional warhead destroying that dam would heavily occupy the Chinese army in disaster recovery for a number of years. In addition, destroying the access roads to Beijing would bring about a massive famine in the population of that city due to the huge population and the inability to bring in sufficient food and fuel from the countryside. Most of the population of that city would have to evacuate, on foot if necessary, in order to survive. These goals could be accomplished by means of submarine launched cruise missiles originating from submerged US Navy submarines just off the coast of China. Also, the USA Navy submarines could completely shut down China's commercial shipping by guarding the ocean chokepoints through the island passages through the Philippines and Indonesia.
James Hollifield
@Joe,
Right. It is obvious that, if a war is started, China will be quickly defeated. They should be well aware of that as well. Therefore, the war will never start. They will never become a new Japan or a new Germany. They may use some scare tactics from time to time, at the most, like the fights between Republicans and Democrats. Everything will become just right at the last moment. And that's it. Everyone can rest now.
Still, many authors and commentators keep showing unwarranted fears on China.
Bankotsu
"but this objection remains irrelevant because what matters is not the technology but the will and ambition."
China has neither the will, resources or ambition to be a global hegemon like the U.S. It's ambition is multipolar world.
ACT
"but this objection remains irrelevant because what matters is not the technology but the will and ambition."
China has neither the will, resources or ambition to be a global hegemon like the U.S. It's ambition is multipolar world.
then you are blindly ignoring millennia of your own history, as well as the very reasons for the modernizations that your culture has undertaken since the latter half of the 19th century. You are also intentionally blinding yourself to the true purpose of what you repeatedly name "sovereign territory". If the PRC was aiming for a multipolar world, it would make efforts at true cooperation with surrounding nations, such as designating those disputed territories neutral territory and taking cases before the ICJ; it would end its propaganda campaign against Japan; it would end the modernization of its military, for there are no nations that truly wish it ill within its periphery, nor within the world at large. This is not what we have seen, however. Instead, we have seen a nation whose leaders and populace seem to be high off the idea that somehow it is their destiny and theirs alone to lead mankind, that anything they name theirs must be so and in regards to that objective they go to the very brink of military force in order to force their will upon others; they continue a relentless propaganda campaign of demonization against a nation that has not made war for nearly 70 years, continually provoking it despite the multiple apologies made, and they arm themselves to throw out the only guarantor of regional security because–rather than desiring greater stability and peace–the PRC and its leaders see said nation as the one and only obstacle to the return of the "flower at the center of the world" to her proper position within the cosmos.