To suggest China's economic and cultural resurgence is somehow a miracle serves only to obscure the very real lessons it holds, writes Anouar Abdel-Malek As we probe the essence of the message China holds for the Arabs we must sketch in the prevailing mood. For a decade or more people in Egypt have been content to focus on China's emergence as an economic miracle, just as the West once had us view Japan as it arose from the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to become, within a quarter of a century, the second largest economy in the world. The "miracle" of the rising East suggests that this ascendancy -- or growth or development -- has nothing to do with reform: even our present-day champions of reform ideology would have us believe that this is the case with the economic revival and cultural resurgence of China which is of a magnitude unprecedented since the onset of the marginalisation and exclusion of the East from the course of history in the 16th century. The miracle occurs without a philosophy, concept or drive, let alone a long-range strategy for revival. It is as if the people of China, East Asia and then South East Asia are just so many millions of lifeless zombies that some inspired amateurs, or perhaps technological wizards, were able to bring to life with the mere press of a button; as if, before the hi-tech era there was nothing to bind and motivate all those peoples. Socio-political dynamics; nationalist, liberationist, reformist, socialist or other movements; philosophical, ideological or cultural values play no part in this resurgence, which is then characterised as miraculous. A dense haze thus clouds a clear view of China for a broad segment of Arab public opinion, especially among that new generation of technocrats who have chosen to squander the lessons of history and avoid political involvement. But we must pierce through this fog and take a closer and more accurate look at China's current moves towards Egypt and the Arab world. There is also a second modernising wave on the rise in the Arab world: those squadrons of Americanised Arabs who blare out their loyalty to and infatuation with the leadership of the monopolar hegemony with a stridency that defies imagination. Are their ears deaf to the mounting criticism against this mode of hegemony from within the US itself? Are they not aware that most nations of the world -- apart from the leaderships of Britain and Australia -- have hastened to put themselves at arm's length from the conflagrations precipitated by the American military machine in Iraq? These groups, that have their grips on power and the media in most of the Arab world, are the last to be able to understand the meaning of the rise of China, let alone to be able to benefit from the Chinese message to our peoples and nations -- that is if we do, in fact, have effective agencies capable of comprehending, benefiting from and responding to this message. The Arab world desperately yearns for independence, sovereignty, economic and social modernisation and, occasionally, for the radical alteration of the substance and structures of its social and political life, drawing from the fertile critical and revolutionary substance of the legacy of Arab nationalist thought and action. China has a message for this world, and its essence resides in the saying of Mao Tse-tung, leader of the Chinese revolution and founder of the People's Republic of China: "Let everything that is universal serve everything that is Chinese." Placing the global at the service of the national is what we need if we are to enhance our ability to benefit from our cumulative national legacy and to mobilise the productive forces of the people within the framework of a united national front comprising all political forces and nationalist ideological schools. Conversely, if we take this opening-up to mean handing over the keys to initiative, reform and renewal to transnational political and economic forces we will have embarked on the path that leads to forfeiting the substance and tools of sovereign decision-making, paving the way for our domination by outside powers. We should not allow the slogans and catchwords of partial reform lead us down the path to dependency and subjugation. On 30 September, the Economist featured a special supplement entitled, "The dragon and the eagle." Both neo-liberals and the Egyptian and Arab opposition would do will to read the conclusions it draws from a number of studies on the state of the global economy. Pam Woodall, the magazine's economic editor opens: "American consumers and Chinese producers have led a global boom. China is creating genuine wealth, but America's binge is based partly on an illusion." The thrust of the entire report seems to confirm Napoleon's celebrated remark, "Let China sleep, for if it awakes it will shake the world." China is clearly awake. The article demonstrates that China has played an integral role in stimulating the economies of the nations of the South in general and in propelling the economies of India, Brazil, Russia and Japan towards economic recovery and boom -- contrary to the aims of the aggressive policies of America's mammoth monopolies. In its attempt to assess the Chinese economic resurgence, the article begins by relating that when Zhou Enlai, Chinese prime minister from 1949 to 1976, was asked about the impact of the French revolution on world history he replied that it was "too early to answer that question". The Chinese today hope that the effects of their own economic revolution will manifest themselves much more rapidly. But how, precisely, is China working towards this goal? The national leadership, state party and armed forces have been assiduously working to strengthen the foundations of Chinese might at home and abroad. Domestically, this entails striking a reasonable balance between the booming economies of the cities on the Pacific coast and the interior, from central China to the country's northern and western borders with Russia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. In this regard the leadership felt that blindly copying western political systems would not work for China. Instead they formulated a system whereby representatives to all village, municipal, district and governorate councils would be elected democratically, with no restrictions on the party membership of the candidates. The system is in operation throughout two-thirds of China and currently more than 80 per cent of the members of these councils are from outside the Communist Party. At the same time there is a concerted attempt to upgrade the performance of the Communist Party, as epitomised in the "resolution to enhance the party's ability to govern" adopted by the party's central committee on 19 September. Realism, order and discipline are key to China's resolve to press ahead with the expansion of grassroots democracy while reaffirming the centrality and upgrading the efficacy of the Communist Party's central leadership. However, there is another key concept at play, one that was arrived at by attempting to answer the question as to how to avoid the pitfalls and adverse consequences of the way in which empires throughout history have risen to power. The solution can be summed up in a single word - peacefully. Practically, China's peaceful rise translates into a two- pronged foreign policy. On the one hand China is determined to participate actively in all possible regional and international organisations, notably ASEAN (which Beijing persuaded to create a new security forum which is scheduled to meet before the end of 2004), APEC, the WTO and, more recently, the G8. On the other hand it is striving to establish a mechanism for "a dialogue on security and exchanges between the military forces of other Asian countries", as Chinese President Hu Jintao put it in a meeting of the recently founded Boao Forum for Asia last April. The aim is to create a "strategic partnership" among ASEAN nations under a three-point motto: "non- alignment, non-confrontation, and non-targeting of any third party." And, just to drive the point home, Hu asked his armed forces to up their level of readiness to confront any external threat, not least because of the influx of American strategic offensive weapons systems into Taiwan, leading the Chinese opposition Democratic Party to accuse the Taiwanese president of planning to secede from China. In short, China is on the move. It is holding meetings with ASEAN nations over the question of North Korea, it is working to normalise its relations with India to the south and it is busy preparing for the fifth Asia-Europe forum. Last, but not least, it is extending bridges to the Arab world, in which connection I would offer a piece of advice to our rulers: take part in as many of those organisations and forums as you can, even if only in the capacity of an observer, and always bearing in mind that that designation -- observer -- carries important implications.
