This book is the third installment of a trilogy on civilizations inspired and edited by Peter Katzenstein. Taken together, the three books constitute a tour de force in advancing our understanding of world affairs. Katzenstein is determined to bridge the civilizational divides associated with the work of another political science giant, Samuel P. Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 [Summer 1993]: 22–49). The first volume, Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives, 2010, established the cornerstone of this bridge. Civilizations are plural, not primordial; they reflect multiple actors, standards, traditions, and practices. They do not cohere and clash; they encounter and intermingle. The first volume examined six civilizations—United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and Islam. The second volume, Anglo-America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East, 2012, explored in greater detail the Anglo-American civilization. This third volume examines Sinicization, or the Sino-centric civilization of China and its related neighbors.
In the opening chapter, Katzenstein identifies what he calls “the rhyme of Chinese history” (p. 6). China's rise will bring neither a “return” to China's imperialist past, as realists expect, nor a “rupture” of China's traditions and its emergence as the epicenter of a transformed Asian and global economy, as some liberals expect. Rather, as China's long history suggests, it will bring a “recombination” of old and new elements. The old element is the “core value” or “Chinese notion of all-embracing unity (da yitong)” that “is normally uncontested” and appropriates from Confucianism hierarchical, reciprocal, and morally based values [and] the political qualities that supposedly flow from these values—wisdom, morality, generosity, obligation to respect the interests of others” (pp. 10–11). The new element emerges from “a non-linear, multi-sited, and multidirectional set of processes” that does not simply “radiate in one direction, outward from the center” (p. 9) and at times “impose its heavy hand on provinces … as in today's Tibet and Xinjiang” (pp. 12–13). Rather, it generates “an unprecedented process of self-invention … full of internal contradictions [which] like the American Dream … is empty and leaves boundless space to the human imagination” (p. 17). The six empirical chapters elaborate on this theme: Allen Carlson examines Chinese thinking toward border regions (bianjiang) that combines past traditions of Han flexibility (“loose rein”) with modern foreign concepts of non-traditional security issues and multiculturalism. Xu Xin dissects the Taiwan formula of “one country, two systems,” a “blend [of] the Westphalian notion of state sovereignty, and the Sinocentric way of dealing with autonomous entities in the periphery” (p. 66). Tianbiao Zhu emphasizes China's “flexible policies” toward economic development compressed by globalization, which allow China to circumnavigate between centralized “tributary modes of production,” including political repression and decentralized “petty capitalist modes of production” based on networks of family and kinship.
Takashi Shiraishi tests the proposition that China's state and corporate actors, like Japanese and American ones before them, seek “to create a milieu outside China that is familiar to them so that they can operate more comfortably and perhaps more effectively” (p. 120). However, China arrives late in the game, and except for one or two exceptions—Laos and Myanmar—confronts Asian states eager to exploit China's economic expansion but also determined to foster security alignments with the United States.
In a different but illuminating chapter, Chih-yu Shih examines four views of “Sinicization” by Asian diasporic academics—a Japanese (Akira Iriye) who sees China as an open-ended process of becoming, both different from yet compatible with the West; a Korean (Samuel Kim) who sees China as an open-ended process of synthesis, similar to and integrated with the West; a Cantonese (John Wong) who sees China as a relentless problem-solver, reflecting a distinctive but pragmatic nationalism; and a Chinese in India (Chung Tan) who sees China as an intermingling of civilizations, neither dominating nor threatening other civilizations.
Caroline Hau looks at the process of “becoming ‘Chinese’ in Southeast Asia” through successive waves of colonial imperialism—European, Japanese, and American—and concludes that “contrary to the idea that mainland China is currently remaking the region and world in its image, parts of mainland China … are actually undergoing a form of Anglo-Sinicization that makes [them] more like the modern hybrid ‘Anglo-Chinese’ that emerged … out of … ‘East Asia’” (p. 199).
This volume, along with its earlier companion volumes, stands as a testament to the intellectual mastery and mentoring of Katzenstein. He sets out to challenge what he regards as singular constructions of civilization by intellectual and political entrepreneurs who serve particular interests through divisive discursive maneuvers (p. 215). Singular traditions, he asserts, are “illusions” (p. 211). All identities are multiple and contested. They do not radiate outward but ferment in peripheral areas where they intermingle and influences flow back and forth. They do not clash; only political actors within them clash: “The history of civilizations is one of mutual borrowing that does not endanger a civilization's character” (p. 215).
The editor provides a vital third way to view the world of civilizations, a constructivist confluence rather than realist clash or liberal consolidation. But, at times, he seems to want to place civilizations above politics. For him, civilizations are context, not content. They are structures, not agents. That may well be. But if the motivations and behavior of political actors do not differ across civilizations, civilizations are meaningless.
What is more, by putting civilizations above politics, Katzenstein risks creating his own political construction or singularity. As Shih reminds us in his chapter, “no view on China can be politically neutral” (p. 154). Huntington concluded that Western civilization is not universal (“The West: Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs 75 [November/December 1996]: 28–46), and focused on differences among civilizations. Katzenstein believes that there is or can be one global civilization and focuses on similarities. He appeals in the end for a new “civilization of empathy,” “a new biosphere consciousness” that replaces “civilizational consciousness inhering in multiple modernities.” (p. 236). In Anglo-America and Its Discontents, he calls for a “polymorphic globalism,” “a loose sense of shared values entailing … the material and psychological well-being of all humans” (p. 242).
Well, what is this loose sense of shared values that unites East and West? What, for example, are minimum expectations across civilizations for women's rights and their psychological well-being? Are we talking about individual rights (e.g., woman's right to divorce) or social rights (e.g., family's or husband's right to honor, authority)? Does psychological well-being include political rights to self-government, the practice of religion, the possession of property, and access to the media? These questions require some analysis of the cores and not just the peripheries of civilizations. This volume deals almost entirely with the periphery of Chinese civilization—borderlands, Taiwan, industrialized South, East Asia, diasporic academics, and Southeast Asia. What if the volume had included a core Han Chinese point of view or a native, not diasporic, point of view from Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Vietnam?
Katzenstein is too inquisitive to miss the implications of these civilizational differences. He embraces the continued necessity of the U.S.-Japan security treaty “to reduce the uncertainty of the regional security environment in which China and its neighbors operate” (pp. 25–26). That is a profound concession to Huntington and realism. But it is a concession made only after rebalancing Huntington's view that core civilizations never change. Thanks to Katzenstein and his collaborators, we now know that civilizations comingle and are neither superior (cosmopolitan) nor exclusionist (core). But we are still faced with the question of what in each civilization is good or bad—including the new civilization of modernity and empathy that Katzenstein advocates.
