Qing Europe

27 May 2013

Rome

A few weeks ago, The Economist ran a cover story with the title, “Let’s party like it’s 1793: Xi Jinping, the Chinese dream and a return to greatness”. The cover depicted Xi Jinping, the newly installed Chinese President and Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, clad in a Qing mantle emblazoned with the symbols of modern Chinese power—skyscrapers, airliners, high-speed trains, motorways, fighter jets, warships. Even the country’s sole, recently acquired aircraft carrier made it on to the hem.

The image recalled the great Qianlong emperor who, in 1793, thought his country strong enough to spurn a British delegation that sought to open China to European trade. It was also designed to capture the national mood of renewed self-confidence Jinping, China’s latest “emperor”, has sought to project in calling his countrymen to realize an ambiguous “Chinese dream”. Only now in 2013 is China returning to the central position in the world economy it lost in the nineteenth century.  

China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing seized the Chinese throne in 1644. When Lord Macartney, the leader of the British delegation, arrived in Peking, they were at the height of their power, a treaty with Russia and a series of campaigns against the Central Asian tribes having extended China’s  frontier thousands of miles into the heart of Eurasia. With perhaps a third of global GDP, China’s economy was by far the world’s biggest. As ruler of such a vast empire, it’s no wonder Qianlong felt entitled to turn down the overtures of tiny, distant Britain.

But it was a fateful mistake. For what the British couldn’t get through diplomacy, they came back thirty years later to take by force, the Opium Wars handing Britain a leading hand in China for the rest of the century. In 1911, impoverished and politically discredited, the Qing were overthrown in a revolution that ushered in the half-century of turmoil that would leave government in the hands of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. By 1960, China was wretchedly poor, left behind in a fast modernizing world.

Seen from Brussels, modern China’s growth rates are today an object of envy. But the country’s (in Chinese terms) recent past also contains salutary lessons for the European Union. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe is what China was at the start of the nineteenth—the world’s largest economy, as well as its biggest exporter and source of FDI. And, like the Qing Empire in 1793, today’s EU has never been bigger, enlargements in 1995, 2004 and 2007 having taken its borders far from its original Western European core. Croatia is set to join. Yet a distinctive, late Qing rot has already set in, symbolized above all in the euro crisis and the recession gripping much of the continent.

Today, the EU is China’s most important trading partner: China relies on the EU to sustain its modernization much as an industrializing Europe did on China during the nineteenth century. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Beijing taking advantage of the EU’s present atrophy the same way European governments once did China’s. But unless Europe returns to prosperity, the Qing’s plummet from the commanding heights of the world economy and their empire’s transformation into a plaything in the hands of newer, leaner and more dynamic powers foreshadows the declining global influence that awaits a Europe merely marking time. Alarmed by China’s return to greatness, Japan’s Shinzo Abe is presently engaged in trying to waken his country from its own late Qing slumber. Would Europe’s leaders were similarly roused.