It certainly is an interesting essay.

re' - "Why should countries like South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, or Indonesia maintain security ties with the United States, if Beijing is willing to offer beneficial economic ties and "protection?"

There's a 'joker in the pack' here. There is still considerable enmity towards Japan and not just by China. The US does not have a immediate neighbour with a similar history. Can this problem be overcome?

for anyone in the West to take seriously the morality of Chinese home rule. I suspect Mr Yan believes what he is writing and by Confucian standards the current Chinese regime is moral. After all traditionally the Chinese have believed that personal obligation to society and state over their personal freedom is moral behavior.

But there is an aspect of Chinese diplomacy that can have universal appeal. This is her policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. This is complete contrast to US policy of not just the right but a moral obligation to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations if they do not abide by our standards of democracy, free trade and free market capitalism. If China can just maintain that course and forgo military entanglements ("security arrangements") I suspect that she will continue to gain respect and moral authority while the US will be seen as a dangerous and subversive force by the rest of the world.

As bad as America has it right now, if we're talking morality then China doesn't not have the upper hand by any means. Taiwan, Tibet, South China Sea, Spratly Islands, North Korea, Iran UN Security Council, Great Firewall....need I say more?

China seems to have territorial problems with most of its neighbors, so it would take a radical rethinking of their policies to engender trust in that region. Anything is possible with China's cash hoard, but we get back to their inexhaustible supply for resources, and it's very possible we could see a replay of 1930s Japan type scenario.

Neither state has the required "moral righteousness" for global leadership. This would be a good time for some other state to come up the middle and displace these two non-role-models. Too bad there are no candidates.

However, at least China has vision. That's more than you can say for anyone in Washington.

eom

"But there is an aspect of Chinese diplomacy that can have universal appeal. This is her policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other nations."

I think the Korans, Cambodians Vietnamese and Tibetans would beg to differ on that. The Chinese conflict with Vietnam was their attempt to intervene on behalf of Pol Pot!

Nobody in East Asia wants Chinese assistance because you can never get them out afterwards

Morality is the foundation of political leadership and political leadership is the essence of national power.

The US suffers from what one might call a surfeit of democracy resulting in a lack of political leadership that has permitted plutocrats insensibly to take over the state, and in the process morality has withered to the point there is no longer egg to give rise to chicken, nor chicken to yield egg.

Yan Xuetong is too wise to be provocative and too cultured to be disdainful.

The Confucian ideal was so thoroughly rooted out in the Cultural Revolution that I don't know where China is supposed to any of these mythical morally informed leaders, assuming they could even rise through the ranks of the Communist Party and reach positions of real power without giving up that very morality.

How can any other country trust the Chinese leadership when all they want is to take the minerals and run? Can any government whose idea of "R&D" is the widespread theft of intellectual property on the largest scale ever known be called "moral?"

I'm sorry, but the idea that "central attribute of political power" is "morally informed leadership" (AKA the Mandate of Heaven) is best demonstrated in Chinese pseudo-historical fantasies like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, not in reality. If idea were actually true, then China today would have as much political power as Somalia.

I don't know that any country in the world today would have much political power if the morality of their leaders was the source of it.

Your eyes see the ground, Yan Xuetong’s the horizon.

for observing the most important article by professor Yan Xuetong.

For quite some time now, and up to these days, U.S. politicians have kept on demonstrating an absolutely absurd ability in making the wrong decisions, and avoiding the right ones. If the U.S. goes on in this way, China need not do anything at all, to end up as the clear winner some time later in this century.

And what position will the E.U. take?

Nixon-Kissinger’s 1972 China embrace has come back to haunt U. S.

China was a pariah country in the world just like today’s North Korea until Nixon’s 1972 visit. All the West European and East Asian countries stayed away from China following the US lead until 1972 and embraced China after Nixon’s visit. While US would not give MFN status to Soviet Union (remember Jackson-Vanik amendment?) unless Russia shed Communism, it had no problem giving it to China’s Communist dictators with a capitalist mask. Trade with China expanded by leaps and bounds during 12 years of Republican rule beginning in 1981. After campaigning against butchers of Beijing in 1992 elections, even Bill Clinton became enthusiastic supporter of trade with China once he took lessons in foreign policy from Nixon in early 1993 during a special Whitehouse-arranged meeting. US also promoted China to a super power status by accepting it as a permanent UNSC member.

Had it not been for that Nixon embrace in 1972, China’s rise to super power status would have been far slower with all the US, West European and East Asian markets closed to cheap Chinese products. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s technological progress would have been far slower in the absence of West’s technology transfers. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s military progress would have been far slower in the absence of huge forex reserves that China accumulated from the massive exports of cheap Chinese products and China used those forex reserves to acquire latest military technology.

Thus US embrace in 1972 if anything, has strengthened Communist Party’s hold on China by affording them to employ millions producing the goods that the world wants.

Now China has US by the tail - US businesses are hooked to huge profits that cheap Chinese products generate for them as a walk through any Walmart, Home Depot, Sears and Macy’s filled with Chinese goods prove and US government is hooked to huge investments that China makes in US treasuries from the sales of cheap Chinese products to US businesses.

Little could Mao or Deng have imagined that by wearing a capitalist mask, their followers will beat capitalists at their own game. Lenin used to say that ’capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them’. With West selling such proverbial ropes in the form of technology transfers, Chinese Communists have proven that Lenin saying quite prophetic.

It behooves China to erect the statue of anti-Communist Nixon right next to die-hard Communist Mao in Beijing for speeding up China’s rise to super power status.

The two main criticisms of the Chinese government by the American media is repeated here, in different wording. It is no more true than before:

- Morally informed leadership (improve your human rights records): except in the most extreme of cases (coming from a dictatorship), people do not admire or support the US or China because of their shiny white armor of morally informed leadership, but because of their economic success instead. Neither one may boast a good human rights record yet their money is always welcome.
Having studied in the US, Chinese students return home. Do they go because of the morally informed leadership? No, they go because of the economic opportunities.

- Play a bigger role in the world (share our security burdens): Remember how the Chinese are always reminded to "shoulder more responsibility", which means to make their policy more aligning with that of the US by turning its back to countries the US regards as their enemies (Pakistan, Iran)? This is the same line. Yet when Chine does shoulder more of the world's problems - large-scale cooperation in Africa - neo-colonialism is called by the hysterical Clinton, forgetting the ongoing occupations. Then again, when better security ties are being built (with Pakistan, which makes a lot of sense for China), the US cries foul play.

Bottom line: the propaganda remains the same regardless of the interpreter. You don't have to believe it just because a Chinese said so.

China is holding the better cards right now. They have economic leverage over the US that other regions of the world could only dream of. Try to imagine the US telling China what to do the way we try to boss the European Community around. They'd laugh us off and that would be the end of it.

The fact that the US has military superiority is nullified by several factors: 1. the US and China will not square off in a face-to-face conventional or nuclear war, and 2. China doesn't have to have a stronger military than the US to accomplish regional empire-building, they just have to be stronger than the other Asian nations, which they already are by a long shot.
By playing the capitalist game and beating us at it, and by being the world's largest nation, they enjoy all the advantages they need right now.

Also, Yan is correct about the moral issue: what's important here is whether the people of the US or China see THEIR OWN nation as having moral backbone. This is because the leaders of either country need their own citizens to see their government as legitimate, regardless of what they think of the other government. Right now, China is seen as moving up on the morality the scale (granted, it is "up" relative only to Mao and his immediate successors, but is still upward), while the US is seen as moving down on that scale (from their previous exalted status of "leader of the free world"). So that plays in their favor too.

Lastly, by shrewdly engaging in economic empire-building, and leaving the morality -trap for the west to fall into, they quietly encourage other nations to become economically dependent on them, so that alliances are clearly established well before the West comes in with their morality baloney. By the time the US wakes up and tries to cut economic partnerships with nations like Pakistan, or the other "Stans" along a theoretical Caspian sea oil pipeline, or key central African nations, it's too late - the Chinese have already sealed the deals with these countries while we were Schocking and Aweing everyone with our eye-popping stupidity.

The US is becoming a nation that is seen as not being able to control its own internal economy or politics, much less lead the free world, while the perception is that China is growing in both political savvy and economic strength. As such, they are holding the stronger cards now.

As Professor Yan said, "soft power" plays incredible importance in the competiton between countries. Aside from the moral gap in China, I think the top problem is the loss of public belief in religion , which is partly due to the indifference of government toward it.

I suspect Mr Yan believes what he is writing and by Confucian standards the current Chinese canoneos regime is moral. After all traditionally the Chinese have believed that personal obligation to society and state over their personal freedom is moral behavior. But there is an aspect of Chinese diplomacy that can have universal appeal.