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Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau Institute at King’s College, London. A former British diplomat, he has lived and worked in China on and off since the mid 1990s. Over that time he has become a prolific writer on the country, authoring over 20 books on Chinese politics. His latest, China Incorporated: The Politics of a World where China is Number One, discusses the nature of Chinese power, including its darker sides, and both what the world wants from China and vice versa. We discussed the book and other issues in a recent interview: a lightly edited transcript follows.

Q: Your latest book comes across almost as a meditation on Chinese power. What are the main ideas that you were trying to get across?

A: The core argument is that the main problems between China and the West are not economic or political: I think they’re cultural and have been for a long time. We in the West don’t like to think of cultural differences being so huge, because many of us are universalists who believe at a fundamental level that we’re all human beings, and therefore that we can overcome cultural differences. 

With China, it is very different. That’s something that some Europeans have known from the time of the Enlightenment — philosophers like Leibniz and Voltaire wrote about China as different, even though it was a place they had never been to. This book is trying to think through what China’s ‘difference’ looks like when the country is also economically either number one or two in the world. 

My feeling is that even without its political differences, China being number one would be a huge challenge, because of those cultural issues. Their brand of politics is a bit of a red herring: It’s more about how unsettling it is for Europeans and Americans that there’s this power that comes along and says, we don’t contest your universal values, but we don’t really hold to them. That’s a different sort of challenge.

Do you think that that’s been at the root of the misconceptions that we’ve had over the last 20 or 30 years, that as China opened up economically, it would inevitably become more democratic?

Yes, it’s like a repeating story, that goes in cycles. Even a couple of hundred years ago, with the British, there was an attitude of ‘we’re going to make this place more like us’. And then there’s always a shocking moment when we realize, ‘oh no, it’s not going to work. These people are really different.’

With the reform and opening up after 1978, and then the intense engagement in the 1980s and 90s leading to China’s World Trade Organisation entry, there was an idea that we’re engaging with China because if they go along this path, it will become more pluralistic in its politics. Clearly that hasn’t happened so far, and it doesn’t look likely to happen anytime soon. 

This is a repeat of something we’ve already been through historically. Christian missionaries went to China with great excitement in the 19th century, but they didn’t really get anywhere. When we are intending to influence China, we never seem to do very well. But when we don’t intend to influence China, when we don’t foist things on them — such as changing their economic models — then big things can happen. We’ve certainly seen a lot of influence from Europeans and Americans on China in the last 40 years, but whether it was deliberate or not, that’s a different question. 

The question of what the Chinese people believe is an old one: It’s always been a bit of a mystery. Today that confusion manifests itself in the fact that the Chinese are people who practice a pretty capitalist looking system, with markets everywhere, but they’re communists, so how do we make sense of that? This question of what the Chinese believe has become very difficult to answer — when you’ve got leaders in the government saying that they’re delivering the primary stage of socialism, but they’re producing entrepreneurs, and private companies that seem to operate in a very corporate, capitalist way. 

How does your concept of how China contains multitudes square with what we’re seeing from the government under Xi Jinping, which seems to be all about him and his view of the world?

You have to ask who believes these things and why. The Xi Jinping view of the world is believed by an elite, and that’s not a big elite, just hundreds of people, really. These people have what you could characterize as a uniform, ‘Xi Jinping’ view of the world because they have to, because they are administratively in charge of this massive, complex project. The working assumption among the elite in China is that they have to look like they believe the same thing, and have to be disciplined.

They are also aware that they’re on a treacherous path as China approaches middle income status: for many countries becoming wealthier floored them, as corruption and other problems emerged. Under Xi Jinping, there’s this sort of gambit, which so far has paid off, that as long as we’ve got political unity, that’s what will deliver us to the other side of the river. 

What we all grapple with is that we hear voices in Chinese society which are very diverse. So it’s a very contradictory situation: we look at this place where there’s this absolutely uniform, elite voice. And then we see all this other evidence of a place with 1.4 billion people who are all very individualistic. That’s a hard thing to try and combine. But if we want to understand China, we have got to find a framework where those two sides can coexist, because I don’t think one or the other is the truth. They both have managed to exist within this hybrid structure. They’re not contradictory, but they’re not totally harmonious: at the moment, they coexist. 

You write that there were periods in your career as a diplomat in China and then an academic when you believed that the opening up of China economically would inevitably lead to greater liberalism in its politics. When you look back now, do you think you and many others got it all wrong, and if so, why? 

As a diplomat, and really until 2008, I did believe that there was a path that China had to go along where it would need to adopt a more pluralistic political system, and “democratize”.

If you remember, around 2007, there was a debate around having more intra party democracy. I remember looking at village elections, and the idea that these could be extended to townships, and then could even be extended to party positions at a higher level. So it wasn’t some fantasy. 

What happened was that in 2008, with the financial crisis, a lot more nervousness crept in; and then the Arab Spring, the color revolutions, all these things made a cautious leadership even more cautious. Without 2008 and the great economic crisis, Xi Jinping and his leadership doesn’t make much sense: That’s the basis for it. There was an acceptance in China that Western models were economically and politically a busted flush, and that they had to find their own way. I can understand why that happened. 

I think China now realizes that American weakness and divisions may be helpful because they get America out of its face, but they’re also a problem. That shows the entanglement.

And today, when I see how hard governance is in Russia, Turkey, Europe, America, it’s made me review why you would ask China to introduce reforms that might lead to the kind of divisions and problems that we’ve seen in the West. I’ve become much less certain that I know how China would be able to reform its system, and I understand better why they are very risk averse. That’s colored everything else I think about China really. I am struck by how in the West there’s this insistence that politically, China is just wrong. I think, okay, there’s things we can be critical about. But I’m really puzzled, particularly at the moment, about where on earth our confidence comes from in insisting on particular models that China should use.

Why are you skeptical that China, in turn, is going to use its power to impose its way of doing things on other countries?

Well, it’s very logical. The Chinese worldview is a Chinese worldview — you have to be Chinese to have it. I don’t feel like I’m Chinese, and I’m sure you don’t. It’s not what Chinese people want to foist on the world. I don’t think that they want the rest of the world to become Chinese. It’s a highly, culturally ingrained view, that is quite excluding. Our problem is that China wants to exclude; it’s not that it wants to include us. And so when I hear this stuff about Confucius Institutes changing people’s minds, or about China trying to influence the West, I find the whole debate extremely muddled. 

I’ve been to the Communist Party School. I’ve talked to Chinese officials for 30 years, and I’m triple inoculated against Xi Jinping Thought. I could not believe this stuff if I tried to force myself to. I don’t think that this stuff deeply gets into us, because it’s just not intimate. Chinese values, as we’ve just been talking about, are hard to understand, so how can we really internalize them? The problem is not that there’s this power that’s coming along with a very attractive, alternative set of values that people are going to flock to — not for the West anyway. The problem is that this power is coming along that is significant and matters economically and militarily: And it’s hard to relate to it. That’s a very different challenge. 

What then explains China’s media efforts around the world, that people like Josh Kurlantzick and Bethany Allen have been writing about? 

China’s frustrated, and it wants a voice and has been buying media in different places — more in the developing world than the developed world. They’ve had very mixed results, because it doesn’t get any easier outside Europe and the West: countries in Africa and the Middle East are no easier for Chinese values than anywhere else. 

The problem with their work is context. When you obsessively look at one example without giving it context, it looks huge. Take the UK: I reckon Australia has had a more pernicious influence in the UK, because of the Murdoch press. If we are going to get uneasy about foreign influence, we need to look at a lot of places, not just China: It’s just part of the spectrum. If we look at things in context, and on a more granular level, we can come up with a more sophisticated model. But at the moment, there are plenty of people who want to focus obsessively on China on its own, and that will always be slightly misrepresentative. 

So do you see China’s buildup of economic and military power over the last decade more as a defensive effort from its point of view?

It’s paradoxical, it’s a kind of defensive offensiveness. Here’s this weird power that has a massive military that never does anything. Actually, Britain and France have way more combat experience than China’s had in the last 40 years. This is really hard to work out for people. They look at this massive military and they see intention, but there’s nothing so far that they can take China to court on. 

One impact is that China psychologically weighs on people’s minds. If there’s a psychological war, China has really won, basically by doing nothing, it’s the old Daoist doctrine of ‘wu wei’, do nothing. They’ve used this really well, because in doing nothing, people have become nervous and are thinking, Well, this must mean something. But it might just mean doing nothing. 

It’s been interesting over the past year, with Ukraine, Russia, and then Gaza and Israel. China has done nothing. It might have to do something at some point. But in areas where you’d expect it to have an opportunity to use its power, it’s not really done that. My money is on China being a problem, not because it’s active, but because it’s inactive. Its inactivity unsettles people, they think it is going to do something in Taiwan. Well, I don’t know. The more I look at it, the more I think, if China were to militarily do something on Taiwan, the geopolitical and economic consequences would be disastrous for everyone, for China too. I’m really skeptical. 

The French academic Francois Jullien has a concept of haunting in his book on Chinese power. That’s a great description, and seems to be true at the moment. China haunts but it doesn’t act. We’re all looking at the South and East China Sea, and all these little skirmishes, very small incidents where normally, we wouldn’t pay much attention. But because China has done so little, it’s given massive meaning. 

Do you think it’s really fair to characterize China as doing nothing on Ukraine? 

It’s given moral support. But if you have a huge debt and a friend with loads of money claps you on the back and says, I’m with you, but they don’t give any financial support, what kind of friend are they? For Russia, I wonder whether they are super happy with what China has done. They have certainly stood by them. But that’s not the same as actually doing anything. 

If you’re taking a longer term view, China has seen an opportunity here, which is basically eroding the strength of the West. Because although the West has been supportive of Ukraine, it’s been a big distraction, it has had a big economic impact, it’s starting to look like it’s going to be a war of attrition. There could be big changes this year, if the American election goes Trump’s way. 

Of course, China has been slightly parasitical on American security in Asia. America has created this architecture that everyone else kind of cooperates in. And if it disappears, China has a problem. The instability of American politics over the last few years has probably made Chinese question what the future is going to hold and whether they will need to do more and how they do it, in ways which it never has had to do before. 

They’re still grappling for answers. The Belt and Road Initiative is an attempt to create economic commonality that helps people work together. But there’s going to need to be something much more security orientated. It’s an extremely important point that China doesn’t really have that. It’s not able to reassure its neighbors: India is not able to work in a deep security sense with China. Russia, North Korea — they all have pragmatic relations with China, but they’re definitely not comfortable in a world in which China is going to dictate the terms.

In a weird way America’s presence has been helpful in distracting from those deep differences. I think China now realizes that American weakness and divisions may be helpful because they get America out of its face, but they’re also a problem. That shows the entanglement. Xi Jinping’s recent visit to America shows deep down that these two cannot live without each other, even if they can’t live with each other. 

You can’t benefit from Pax Americana and at the same time, not expect America to have an interest in things like the future of Taiwan or the future of the South China Sea, I guess?

That’s the Chinese version of [former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s] ‘cakeism’. They’ve had their cake and eaten it. And that’s coming to an end. That’s one of the things that the Trump leadership accidentally did was to effectively say: you guys have got loads of benefit out of us and yet you are always moaning about us and saying we’re scumbags. So let’s just clear this up. If we’re going to be there, you’re going to have to give us something in return, like more access and better trade deals, otherwise we’re just going to clear off. Despite all the other issues about Trump, that wasn’t an idiotic point. And it has changed things: Biden has largely kept to that.

The problem for everyone is that were America to just say, we’re out of this game, what would happen afterwards would have global implications, because China having a security role more deeply in the region would create all sorts of issues, particularly over Taiwan, which would become global. 

It seems like you think now is a good time for us to be rethinking what we actually want from China. In what direction should that thinking go?

What we’ve got to do is have a real strategy. And I don’t think we’ve ever really had that. We’ve had big ambitions, big aspirations, for engagement with China to become politically like us, or to be economically involved with China to help us become richer ourselves. We’ve got to go for something more hybrid and complicated, and move beyond these big narratives that dominate a lot of China discussions — China as a ‘threat’ or China as an ‘opportunity’. Maybe it’s neither, it’s just a place we have to deal with; we have to be very realistic and pragmatic. 

The future is going to be a golden age of diplomatic management. The recent Biden-Xi meeting is a representation of that. It was about saying we have these specific issues on the environment, or AI and so on. We cannot ignore each other, we’ve got to focus on particular issues and responsibilities, and a shared idea of what the threat and the problem is. If we stray beyond that to more holistic, larger things, like values, it’s just not going to get us anywhere. 

So in the next 10 years, at least, we’re going to be in this game of perpetual management and hoping that we don’t let things escalate. That could work as long as we don’t have adventurism on issues like Taiwan. The Taiwan issue is not going to get critical as long as a Taiwanese president, or an American president, doesn’t leap up and say, we don’t recognise the one China principle or policy, we recognise an independent Taiwan. Then we would have big problems. 

Where a lot of this does come to a head is over China’s repressive policies in Xinjiang, an area where there seems to be very little scope for common ground or mutual understanding. 

Xinjiang has been a very big challenge. First of all, the incarceration of so many people in Xinjiang in the last four or five years is a huge problem and has had massive consequences. The problem in the West is that we have not really nailed what the issue is for us. It’s either been crimes against humanity, which is the language that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and others use. And then you’ve got claims of genocide: I feel uncomfortable with that language. I find it instrumentalized, and that the people that have used it most have got a view of China as an existential threat. It doesn’t really help to use that kind of language about an issue which is serious, but which is only going to be solved if the Chinese government actually recognizes that there are these issues. 

We can’t also completely dismiss the concerns of the Chinese government about security. I’m not saying that the issues in Xinjiang are really as serious as they say: I don’t know, I haven’t been there for many years. In Britain, it’s regarded as a massive security issue that we have boats with migrants coming across from France: every country has very big obsessions about particular things that others might not think merit that. 

Xinjiang has been a massive problem for trying to create a dialogue with China, because on this issue, China doesn’t want to talk and doesn’t want to listen: And we just want China to do what we tell it to do. I have to say, I have no answers, I don’t think anyone can have any answers. The one thing you can say is that the Chinese government’s policies, until recently, were inhuman and, in financial terms, they weren’t sustainable. 

I’m not denigrating the work that colleagues in the West do on Xinjiang. A lot of people have worked on and been very concerned about this issue — as well as on Tibet and other issues. But I don’t think we’ve found a way to talk constructively to the Chinese government about these issues in a way in which it says, ‘Okay, what you guys are saying is useful.’ 

…you can’t ignore what China is. It’s the way it is. I don’t know how the outside world can change this place: the only way we can do that is to continue talking to each other.

Think about the issue of Northern Ireland: for many years, the British government didn’t want anyone to get involved. But before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, they did have Americans and others getting involved. And that was a big turning point. It was helpful because people started talking about a common framework. With Xinjiang, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But if ever there’s a role for the outside world, it’ll be through that kind of process. It won’t come through yelling at China and telling them that it’s evil and bad and that this is a crime of genocide: That will just close them down.

If you take a slightly more sympathetic approach towards China on some issues, as I think it’s fair to say that you do, the vitriol can be huge. Can you talk about what your own experience of this has been?

There’s different sorts of groups. The ones that are easiest to deal with are the ones that have the biggest opinions and know least. There’s a lot of people suddenly who are talking about China, and they haven’t got experience, they obviously don’t understand a great deal. You have to deal with that, but I don’t think that’s significant. 

What I’ve found most difficult in the last few years is that there are people who really do know the place, and their opinions have changed for one reason or another. I feel like I’m in a street where I’m going one way and everyone else is going the other way. So people who used to be very open minded on China and had really worked there, they’ve become more negative. And I have felt more sympathetic, in a weird way. I don’t do it just to be a contrarian, I just feel the more I think about what China is trying to do, the more I realize it’s impossible to imagine an easy path for this place to take. I completely sympathize with the position that even Chinese leaders are in, it’s really, really difficult. 

I don’t know what to make of the fact that quite a number of really good experts on China are always angry about what is happening under Xi Jinping. I wonder whether I’m the one in the wrong here. But I’m still not at that point where I can say this turn in Chinese politics is something that is so alienating that I can’t deal with it. 

But of course, it’s been challenging in the last few years. All I know is that you can’t ignore what China is. It’s the way it is. I don’t know how the outside world can change this place. The only way we can do that is to continue talking to each other. That’s a very boring thing. But that’s what I represent in what I do in London and elsewhere. For some people, even that is unacceptable.

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