I had a cousin, a reputed backbencher in his class, who once impressed his literature professor by peppering his essay with a few wise-sounding lines in Tamil. When questioned, he claimed the lines were from Thirukkural composed by the ancient philosopher-poet Thiruvalluvar. With no Google available those days and no text of Thirukkural in the poorly-stocked college library for him to check, the poor prof had no go but to give my cousin a good score. The lines were actually from a song in an MGR potboiler.
Xi Jinping is much like my cousin. He likes to pepper his speeches with classical quotes and epigrams. Before anyone gets me wrong, let me add—there is a difference, though. Unlike my cousin’s, the Chinese helmsman’s quotes are genuine, well-studied and appropriate. Most of them are drawn from Chinese masters like Confucius and Sun Tsu or oriental thought systems like the Tao, but there are times when he borrows from Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo or Goethe, especially when he wants to impress western audiences. He hasn’t yet touched Chanakya—not surprising—though he has met the Indian prime minister close to two dozen times, and despite there being a thriving cottage industry in India that manufactures quotes in the Mauryan master’s name for students of WhatsApp university.
Classical quotes impress listeners. Xi’s latest target has been the Hormuz-squeezed Donald Trump, who called on him in Beijing earlier this month. Perhaps because America lacks a classical age, and therefore suffers from a shortage of classical thinkers save a modern-day Jefferson or a Thoreau, Xi chose a Greek master to impress his guest.
He invoked Thucydides, a fifth century BC Athenian naval commander and historian, whose account of the Peloponnesian War led to the theory that when a rising power seeks parity with an established power, it could lead to war. Modern-day American scholar Graham Allison has theorised that just like the rise of Athens made Sparta insecure and both finally clashed, the attempt by China to seek parity with the US could lead to war. Allison studied 16 power rivalries in the world since 1500 to show that 12 of them ended in war.
Xi seems to be fixated on the Thucydides Trap. He has referred to it time and again, first during a state visit to the US in 2015 where he said, “There is no such thing as the Thucydides Trap…. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.” In other words, conflict can be avoided if America respects China’s core interests (read Taiwan).
The problem is that Xi’s intended target missed the point. Trump thought Xi was talking about America’s weakening strategic will, and posted on Truth that things were bad under Joe Biden; now America is being made great again.
What worries the world is that with all his Thucydides claptrap over the last one decade, Xi seems to be leaving behind a quarter century-old promise that China had made under his predecessor Hu Jintao—that China’s rise would be a “peaceful rise", as extrapolated by Zheng Bijian, who headed the Communist Party school. The idea was that China would put a premium on economic development rather than expansionism, avoid conflict through cooperation, and avoid the pitfalls of Imperial Japan, Weimar Germany, and the Soviet Union, all of which grew challenging the existing superpowers. Was it all a trip up a Chinese garden path?
prasannan@theweek.in