Morality as Strategy in the West’s Approach to China   

After two hundred years of unchallenged Western supremacy—a brief hiatus in the many millennia of Chinese civilization—China has regained its historical status as one of the most powerful countries in the world. True, China faces grave demographic and economic challenges. But it has suffered worse before—numerous bloody wars, the Cultural Revolution, and other cataclysms—and it recovered each time. China may remain a major player on the world stage for a long while.  

Despite its increasingly militaristic tone, China has said it seeks not world domination but prosperity, well-being, and international stability. It has spoken of a “multipolar” world order, a concept that China, together with the U.S., used in the Cold War to check Soviet aggression in Asia. (How unfortunate that now a new Cold War may be developing between China and the U.S.) China naturally expects other nations to respect its interests, and historically its expectations have been high. Like other countries in history, China has thought of itself as the greatest civilization on earth—hence its name for itself, “the Middle Kingdom”: the country at the center of the world. 

That self-confidence has often led Chinese governments to undertake projects that have caused tremendous suffering to their people: the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, the severe treatment of the Uighurs and pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, and implementing a surveillance state of unprecedented scope. China’s leaders might defend their severe governing style as an attempt to solve what James Madison called “the mischiefs of faction” by “giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” But such a “remedy,” as Madison also said, is “worse than the disease”: it attacks the interior freedom of the human soul that we all need in order to embrace law and order. Too much state control leads to violent popular rebellions—like those that have plagued China throughout history. Moreover, as Confucius said in his Analects, to be truly good you must “move yourself to where rightness is” (emphasis added). We learn virtue by practicing free choice: “selecting what is good and following it.” 

Draconian policies at least indicate that Chinese leaders are human beings like the rest of us, laboring under what the Western tradition calls original sin: we all tend to substitute our own preferences for what true justice requires. Verbal commitments to multipolarity, etc. are insufficient for the same reason Madison said, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Materially powerful countries will begin to overreach if they are not balanced by other global powers, just as the three branches of American government check and balance each other. What kind of balance, then, can and should other countries, and Western countries in particular, provide for the revived great power of the East? 

Chess vs. Wei Chi 

Could the West balance China solely at the material level?  

Some have suggested that Western nations have a “superior capacity to innovate” that gives them an edge over China. Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr has argued that Western pluralism (especially its intellectual culture, which historically operated independently of government) has promoted technological development better than strongly centralized governments like China’s. But China may disprove these theories as it starts to match or outdo the West in advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.  

Could the West balance China by military deterrence? Probably not merely through better firepower, if China, with its enormous armed forces, continues to advance technologically. Could the West rely on its superior military experience? China has had little practice in modern warfare apart from largely defensive incursions, as into Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War. But then again, China has successfully outmaneuvered Western militaries before, even when China was at a material disadvantage. Nineteenth-century Europeans, with their vastly superior armies, established spheres of influence in China, but they were able to colonize fully only certain cities, like Hong Kong. China escaped total subjugation by any one European power because it decided to invite all of them in, “for the purpose of first stimulating and then manipulating their rivalry,” as Henry Kissinger put it. China patiently waited until the Europeans withdrew on their own, after they had destroyed each other in World War I.  

This was just one instance of China’s deployment of its millennia-old method of warfare that does not require superior arms—a method Westerners continually underestimate because it is so different from ours. As Kissinger explains, Western nations wage war as a game of chess, but the Chinese wage war as in their game wei chi (known also by its Japanese name, go). The goal of chess is total, decisive victory by taking the opponent’s most important piece, the king; the goal of wei chi is to achieve “relative advantage” over the enemy. One places one’s pieces (all of the same value) on the board slowly, one at a time, trying to occupy the majority of the field and to surround and capture the opponent’s pieces. One succeeds not by sudden strikes, but by patiently assessing and exploiting the opponent’s blind spots and weaknesses. One steps into empty spaces that at first seem inconsequential, but which later allow one to encircle the opponent or crowd him out, even if he has invaded one’s own territory. Victory comes not abruptly or forcefully, but by gradual fait accompli. In real war tactics are less material and more psychological, such as striking the enemy with a small force from many sides at once, to make him think he is surrounded by a larger opponent; or using nonmilitary means like propaganda. The goal is to demoralize the other side into (ideally) peaceful surrender. The communist Vietnamese, culturally similar to the Chinese, used such strategies with much success against the vastly stronger United States half a century ago. 

One might devise economic policy the same way. Rather than confronting Western economic positions directly (as America has recently done to China), China prefers to move into “empty spaces” to which other countries are paying less attention—like rare earth metals, Latin American markets, or the Panama Canal—and to dominate them slowly. China need not advance its interests by threatening massive human casualties; it can instead weave a network of influence; and if dependent countries cause trouble, they can be chastised back into compliance. 

On top of its proven savvy in geopolitics, China has many material and human resources—starting with its massive population—that outdo the same in any other country. It also has millennia of experience at centrally organizing these resources through an educated bureaucracy.  

In short, Western countries, even in concert, will find it difficult to balance China solely at the material level. If they are to help China create the multipolar, “win-win” global equilibrium China has said it wants, America and Europe will have to find their own “relative advantage” by filling other “empty spaces” on the board of global affairs. 

The Moral High Ground 

Those spaces, I submit, are on the moral “high ground” that, in the past, America and her allies held more consistently.  

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, other nations looked to the United States and Europe as champions of justice and freedom. The Western allies fought in World War II to save the world, including China, from the fascist regimes of the West and the East, which idolized collective society. The fascists sacrificed millions of Jews, Chinese, and other groups to their barbaric ends. America then led a longer, less conventional war to save China and the world from the Soviet Union.  

The Cold War ended well thanks in part to China’s (eventual) cooperation with the West; but a great deal—maybe more—of the credit goes to the moral example of the United States. Although America recognized the need to deploy power to check her opponent, she strove not to do evil that good might come about, in contrast to the cynical, Machiavellian Soviets. The ideals of America’s Declaration of Independence inspired people across nations and ideologies—even the Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh. Recognizing the importance of her own moral leadership, during the Cold War the United States tried to live her principles at home more consistently through the civil rights movement. America’s moral authority galvanized her allies, and the USSR’s victims, to persevere in resisting Soviet oppression. That same authority no doubt helped reformers in China’s Communist Party bring more freedom to China toward the Cold War’s end. 

Now, however, the West’s moral prestige has become undermined by its hypocrisy. 

If liberal American or European governments complain about China’s violations of the religious freedom of Uighurs, they themselves and those who elect them often don’t respect the same freedom of their fellow citizens. They might have condemned (unconvincingly) China’s long-time one-child policy (now ended), which was often accompanied by forced abortion; but thanks to those same politicians, America’s abortion regime remains one of the most permissive in the world, even after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Progressive Westerners equate freedom with license in the name of “well-being,” especially in the realm of sex; liberal Western governments have promoted radical sexual ideologies abroad, “bullying” weaker countries (as Chinese leaders have said of America) to embrace lifestyles that demean those that engage in them, and make it harder for stable families to form. China, despite having experienced significant loosening of sexual norms since the 1980s, still retains more traditional views of the family and sexuality. China’s conservatism on this point—or at least the fact that it does not push LGBT ideology—might be gaining it allies among poor countries (which tend to be sexually conservative), drawing them away from the Western coalition. 

Certain Western leaders on the right have not been blameless either, as they threaten to retreat from treaties with each other and engage in their own bullying in the name of national interests. Why should China respect the common good of the world if leading Western nations use the rhetoric of self-interest so coarsely? How can the West stay united to balance China if its members do not order their individual interests toward their common welfare?  

America and other Western nations will not be able to regain the advantage of moral leadership, and unity among themselves, if they do not recommit themselves to the West’s tradition of ordered liberty: the consistent respect for both individual freedom and the common good: the pursuit of happiness framed by justice and law. To rediscover that moral balance, the West will have to recommit itself to seeking true religion, the best means of protecting freedom and social order. Christianity, the traditional religion of the West, should naturally be impressive to China. When lived consistently (and not entangled with political agendas), Christianity’s spiritual principles arguably have given the West its scientific, political, and economic dynamism, while the West’s turn away from Christianity has weakened it. Christianity helped bring about in the West what China claims to desire globally: international moral-spiritual unity amid national political diversity—a truly “multipolar” order. And Christianity and its parent, Judaism, are perhaps the only living Western institutions whose longevity can gain the respect of the Chinese: Judaism has survived about as long as Chinese civilization (it also shares Confucianism’s emphasis on law and ritual), and Christianity—most evidently in the Catholic Church—is nearly as old as the unified Chinese state.  

Beyond Well-Being and Self-Interest 

The moral hypocrisy of America and her Western partners is bad for them, bad for China, and bad for the world. The West must do a better job pursuing justice, authentic human rights, and the rule of law and reason—not only because such ideals bring peace and order, but because they are true and good in themselves. The world becomes a darker place when the West fails to live up to its moral legacy; a world ordered solely toward material well-being and self-interest is at best depressing and at worst a dystopia.  

America and Europe’s best moral traditions (not decadent ones like Marxism) can help China harmonize modern material progress with China’s own deeply spiritual heritage—reflected in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—and its traditional veneration of the family. If China did this, it might do great good for the world by countering the West’s bad tendencies—toward excessive regard for freedom and self-interest—by emphasizing respect for rightful authorities, and ultimately for the will of Heaven.  

And yet no society, Eastern or Western, should treat order and stability in this world as an end in itself. Politics is subordinate to the eternal end of the person, which he attains by exercising his freedom. A social order that forgot this truth would be no order at all. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.