China wants East Asian countries to be open to Chinese immigration and promote the use of Mandarin, Samuel P Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
China is on its way to becoming the dominant power in East Asia, he wrote in his book, published in 1996, the year before Hong Kong passed from Britain to China. And the process has been largely peaceful, he noted, apart from territorial disputes in the South China Sea, where — after the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 — the two countries again clashed off the Spratly Islands in 1988.
Huntington wrote:
With rare exceptions, such as possibly the South China Sea, Chinese hegemony in East Asia is unlikely to involve expansion of territorial control through the direct use of military force. It is likely to mean, however, that China will expect other East Asian countries, in varying degrees, to do some or all of the following:
- support Chinese territorial integrity, Chinese control of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan into China;
- acquiesce in Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea and possibly Mongolia;
- generally support China in conflicts with the West over economics, human rights, weapons proliferation, and other issues;
- accept Chinese military predominance in the region and refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons or conventional forces that could challenge that predominance;
- adopt trade and investment policies compatible with Chinese interests and conducive to Chinese economic development;
- defer to Chinese leadership in dealing with regional problems;
- be generally open to immigration from China;
- prohibit or suppress anti-China and anti-Chinese movements within their societies;
- respect the rights of Chinese within their societies, including their right to maintain close relations with their kin and provinces of origin in China;
- abstain from military alliances or anti-China coalitions with other powers;
- promote the use of Mandarin as a supplement to and eventually a replacement for English as the Language of Wider Communication in East Asia.
Huntington added:
Analysts compare the emergence of China to the rise of Wilhelmine Germany as the dominant power in Europe in the late nineteenth century. The emergence of new great powers is always highly destabilizing, and if it occurs, China's emergence as a major power will dwarf any comparable phenomena during the last half of the second millennium. "The size of China's displacement of the world," Lee Kuan Yew observed in 1994, "is such that the world must find a new balance in 30 or 40 years. It's not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man."
Huntington described how Lee Kuan Yew returned to his Chinese roots and embraced Confucianism, as I mentioned in a post last week. Later, I hope to write more on what Huntington had to say about China and East Asia. He was a very keen observer.
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