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The decline of the dollar, meanwhile, will coincide with the rise of the renminbi. As yet, the role of the renminbi is fundamentally constrained by the absence of convertibility. But over the next five to ten years that will begin to change, and by 2020 the renminbi is likely to be fully convertible, enabling it to be bought and sold like the dollar. By then, if not earlier, most, if not all, of East Asia, perhaps including Japan, will be part of a renminbi currency system. Given that China is likely to be the main trading partner of every East Asian nation, it will be natural for trade to be conducted in the renminbi, for the value of their currencies to be fixed against it rather than the dollar, which is largely the case now, and for the renminbi to be used as the reserve currency of choice. As the dollar continues to weaken with the relative decline of the US economy and the emergence of developing countries like China and India, it will steadily lose its global pre-eminence, to be replaced by a basket of currencies, with power initially being shared by the dollar and the euro, and perhaps the yen. [1276] When the renminbi is made fully convertible, it is likely to become one of the three major reserve currencies, along with the dollar and the euro, and in time will replace the dollar as the world’s major currency. This is a likely scenario within the next fifty years, more probably twenty to thirty years, perhaps even less. [1277]
As I discussed in the last chapter, the present international financial institutions could well, in time, be superseded by new ones. Of course, it is possible that the IMF and the World Bank will be transformed into something very different, with, for example, China and India eventually usurping the role of the US, but a new institutional architecture may be more likely, operating alongside a progressively marginalized IMF and World Bank in which US influence remains predominant. Both the IMF and the World Bank enjoy rather less power and influence than was the case even a decade ago, and this process may well continue. [1278]
CHINA’S BEHAVIOUR AS A GREAT POWER
In their heyday the major European nations sought to impose their designs on the rest of the world. Expansion by means of colonialism was at the heart of the European project, wedded to an aggressive mentality that stemmed from Europe ’s own seemingly perpetual habit of intra-European wars. Not surprisingly, the United States inherited important parts of this legacy, though its very different geopolitical circumstances, ensconced as it was in its own continent, also bred a powerful insularity. The United States, which was founded on the missionary zeal of the Pilgrim Fathers and their contemporaries, and later articulated in a constitution that embodied an evangelizing and universalistic credo, was possessed of a belief in its manifest destiny and that its spiritual purpose was to enlighten the rest of the world. [1279] This history of manifest destiny (an expansionist ideology that dates from the original settlers), the destruction of the Amerindians, and the restless desire to expand westwards, helps us to understand the behaviour of the United States as a global superpower. What, then, of China, whose origins and history could hardly be more different?
There are two factors that have to be considered. The first, associated with the so-called realist school of international relations, lays emphasis on the importance of interests and therefore stresses how great powers tend to behave in a similar fashion in the same circumstances. [1280] ‘Rising powers,’ as Robert Kagan argues, ‘have in common an expanding sense of interests and entitlement.’ [1281] Accordingly China will, in this view, tend to behave like any other global superpower, including the United States. The second factor, in contrast, emphasizes how great powers are shaped by their own histories and circumstances and therefore behave in distinct ways. As in the case of the United States, these two different elements — the one convergent and the other divergent — will combine to shape China ’s behaviour as a superpower. The convergent pressure is obviously a familiar one, but the divergent tendency, a product of Chinese particularism, is less knowable and more elusive.
The historian William A. Callahan argues, in this context, that there are four different narratives present within Chinese civilization. [1282] The first is what he describes as zhongguo, or China as a territorial state. The obvious metaphor for this is the Great Wall — the desire to keep barbarians out — linked to the nativist sentiment, a constantly recurring theme in Chinese history, as evident in the Boxer Rebellion and continuing resentment towards foreign influences, notably American and Japanese. This view appeals to a defensive and inward-looking sense of Chineseness. It might crudely be described as China ’s equivalent of American insularity. The second is da zhongguo, a metaphor of conquest. This has been intrinsic to the expansion ary dynamic of the Chinese empire, as we saw in Chapter 8. In the conquest narrative, Chinese civilization is constantly enlarging and a
It is important to bear in mind the difference historically between Western and Chinese patterns of behaviour. The former have long sought to project their power overseas to far-flung parts of the world, commencing with the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish; the Chinese, in contrast, have no tradition of expansion other than continental-based territorial incremental-ism. The Europeans, perhaps conditioned by the maritime experience of the Mediterranean, were, from the late fifteenth century, seeking to expand across the oceans. China, in contrast, has always seen itself as a land-based continental power and has never regarded itself or sought to become a maritime power with overseas ambitions. The very different purposes of the voyages of Zheng He on the one hand and the great European explorers on the other are an illustration of this. To this day, the Chinese have never sought to project themselves outside their own land mass. [1285] Even now, the Chinese have failed to develop a blue-water navy. This does not mean that the Chinese will not seek in future to project their power into distant oceans and continents, but there is no tradition of this. It is reasonable to assume that China, as a superpower, will in due course acquire such a capability but, unlike the West, it has hitherto not been part of the Chinese way of thinking and behaving.
[1276] Ibid.
[1277] Avinash D. Persaud, ‘The Dollar Standard: (Only the) Begi
[1278] Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 120.
[1279] Eric Hobsbawm, ‘ America ’s Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail’, Guardian, 25 June 2005.
[1280] Alastair Ian Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 258- 9.
[1281] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600-1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 304.
[1282] Callahan, Contingent States, pp. 28–44.
[1283] Yan Xuetong, ‘The Rise of China in Chinese Eyes’, Journal of Contemporary China , 10: 26 (2001), p. 34.
[1284] Callahan, Contingent States, p. 34.
[1285] Robert Ross, ‘The Geography of Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-first Century’, in Michael Brown et al., eds, The Rise of China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 189-90, 193.