|
|
Pin Pai Zhong Guo
By Joshua Cooper Ramo
September 2006
2
BRAND CHINA
Joshua Cooper Ramo
First published in 2006 by
The Foreign Policy Centre
Suite 14, 2nd Floor
23-28 Penn Street
London N1 5DL
UNITED KINGDOM
Email: info@fpc.org.uk
© Foreign Policy Centre 2006
All rights reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1-905833-07-8
ISBN-10: 1-905833-07-5
3
About the Author
Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Partner in the office of John L. Thornton, Senior Advisor to
Goldman Sachs and professor at Tsinghua University. Ramo’s advisory work focuses on political,
economic and business areas with a particular emphasis on China. Formerly, Ramo was Editor at
Large at Time Inc. He joined Time magazine in 1996, and went on to become the magazine’s
youngest Assistant Managing Editor and Foreign Editor, overseeing Time’s international
coverage. Ramo was also an international affairs analyst for CNN.
Ramo is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a
co-founder of the U.S.–China Young Leaders Forum and a member of the World Economic
Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow. Joshua also holds two US national point-to-point air speed
records and is an avid aerobatics pilot. He divides his time between Beijing and the United
States.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the assistance of a number of people with this report. They include Andrew
Small, Thomas Rafferty, Sam Vincent and Alex Bigham.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this report are not necessarily those of The Foreign Policy Centre.
4
Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: China’s Image Emergency 9
Chapter 2: The Uses of National Image: Maximum Power at Minimum Cost 13
Chapter 3: The Risks of a Poor Image and The Uses of Reputational Capital (名胜资本) 18
Chapter 4: Brand China (淡色中国): An Approach to National Image 24
Chapter 5: The Way Forward 27
5
Introduction
Letters to a Queen, Peaceful Earthquake and other Mis-adventures in Nation Branding
By the time he was named Commissioner of Canton in 1838, Lin Zexu (1785-1850) had already
enjoyed a spectacular career, the sort of bureaucratic rise that in many countries and in many
eras has elevated brilliant men to positions of power and influence. Born and raised amid the
mountains and gentle tea culture of coastal Fujian, Lin had the sort of plastic and curious mind
that fitted the demands of late-Qing imperial court politics. He was blessed with a brilliant
memory, a willingness to throw himself into the very hardest problems of government and a
fingertip feel for court politics. And Lin was effective: His colleagues called him “Clear Sky”, a
nickname that hinted at his ability to clear clouds from the murkiest of bureaucratic squalls. He
was an accomplished poet – the sort of Chinese “renaissance man” common in the Qing-era, a
time when emperors like Kangxi found strength and legitimacy in a love of beauty and justice.
(Traces of this model of governance remain: Current Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, for instance,
writes poetry; People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan is an opera fan.) Wen Jiabao,
speaking at his first press conference as Premier in 2003, mentioned old Lin by way of
introducing himself to the Chinese people. “Ever since I took office,” he said, “I have been
whispering two lines of Lin Zexu to myself: ‘I would do whatever it takes to serve my country,
even at the cost of my own life and regardless of misfortune to myself.’”1 The message was clear:
for Chinese officials there should be no boundary between personal and political life.
In the spring of 1838 the 53-year old Lin received an urgent summons to Beijing. He was wanted
on imperial business at the highest level. Dao Guang, who ruled China from 1820 to 1850, was
determined to eliminate the trade in opium. In the half-century since the drug had arrived in China
on British trading ships, it had strangled the intellectual and cultural life of the Qing dynasty. As if
watching his empire rot around him wasn’t enough, Dao Guang had seen the drug kill one of his
sons and seduce through greed or addiction many of the country’s most powerful minds. He was
determined to wipe it out and determined that “Clear Sky” was the man for the job. Lin, with his
imperial orders in hand, quickly travelled down to Canton, the port where foreign ships exchanged
their Indian-grown opium for black and green tea destined respectively for Europe and the United
States. After a few months of research and careful planning, Lin began his anti-drug campaign by
publishing a broadside that remains, historically at least, probably the most important thing he
ever wrote: A Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria.
The arrogance of the title in Western eyes – “Who would dare advise Queen Victoria?” British
traders asked at the time – masks an impressive and carefully reasoned piece of writing. Lin’s
Letter of Advice, which appeared on the walls of Canton on September 29th, 1839, offered a short
summary of the state of opium trading as he saw it and asks the Queen to try to control a trade
that is destroying China. “Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for
sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it,” he writes in a typical
passage. “Certainly your honourable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused.”2 Though
early 19th century China still considered itself the centre of the world, Lin’s letter hardly radiates
the arrogance of such worldview. Lin comes off as neither nationalist nor isolationist. Rather, he
appears to be a man who has thought through the problem of stopping opium flow, decided on
the policy of, among other things, stifling opium traders, and now wishes to explain it as clearly as
possible – and even to kindly suggest ways for England to become what 21st century scholars
might have called a more responsible player in the international system. “We have further learned
that in London, the capital of your honourable rule, and in Scotland, Ireland, and other places,
originally no opium has been produced,” he writes, laying a gentle hand on the English empire’s
hypocrisy, before suggesting that the British turn to producing less destructive crops such as
millet and barley.
1 Wen Jiabao press conference transcript March 18, 2003
2 Lin Zexu, “Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria,” in From Ssuyu Teng and John Fairbank, China's Response to the West,
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), repr. in Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History, Volume II,
(New York: HarperCollins CollegePublishers, 1995), pp. 266-69
6
No one knows if Queen Victoria actually saw Lin Zexu’s letter3. In any event, she did not take his
advice. Months later, British warships steamed up the river near Canton and began the Opium
War and more than a century of internal Chinese chaos. Between the first shots from the Royal
Saxon on November 3, 1839 and the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949,
China was invaded by nine different nations; it was stripped of anything resembling an effective
central government and shattered by internal conflicts. Tens of millions of Chinese died.
Everything that has happened since the Opium War, including some of the most prominent
elements of the last three decades of reform and development, has some intellectual and
emotional root in that defeat. China’s obsession with technology, its relentless drive to global
integration, its focus on supporting international law, all share some connection with the national
experience that began with Lin Zexu’s letter.
The traditional reading of the “lesson” of the Opium War by Chinese is that their nation needs to
be strong and, crucially, open to other nations’ technology and ideas. “Ships, guns and a water
force are absolutely indispensable,” Lin himself wrote to the Emperor in 1842. But there was
something else afoot at the start of the Opium Wars. Lin’s letter, read carefully and with a sense
of context, can be seen as a signal of a horrifying historical fault line: China’s image of herself and
the rest of the world’s image of her had ruptured like tectonic plates. To men like Lin, writing at
[下一页]
|