迈克尔-谢里丹的《中国之门》；伊丽莎白-C-经济的《中国的世界》--评论

迈克尔-谢里丹的《中国之门》；伊丽莎白-C-经济的《中国的世界》--评论

习近平和其他官员在2021年6月的一次会议上向中共宣誓。照片。吴汉光/美联社

两本权威书籍揭示了香港在振兴中国经济命运中的作用，以及北京试图将其意志强加于国外的企图。

伊莎贝尔-希尔顿

Sun 28 Nov 2021 09.00 GMT

为庆祝本月早些时候召开的第十九届中央委员会第六次全体会议，中国共产党又出版了一部关于其自身辉煌成就的历史。许多页都是关于现任主席习近平的英明，事实上是无懈可击的领导。习主席对领土完整和纠正过去的错误都非常重视，正如他所说的那样。在这个目录中，英国通过不平等条约获得了在19世纪被视为中国南海岸外的一块毫无希望的不毛之地。

这块不起眼的石头，除了一个深邃安全的港湾外，几乎缺乏所有的自然资源，但后来却发展成为世界上最有活力和最繁荣的社会之一。香港在英国殖民统治下如此繁荣，在很大程度上要归功于中国：当然，邻近的地理位置使香港能够发挥其作为中国与全球贸易、金融和投资世界之间中介的关键作用。但是，毗邻也使香港能够受益于从1949年开始逃离中国的数百万人的才能和精力，当时中国共产党在中国内战中的胜利引发了每天约10万人的出走。1950年，人数达到300万时，香港政府不情愿地关闭了边境。难民潮在50年代末的大跃进和60年代的文化大革命的灾难中持续不断，尽管北京尽力说服其公民在人民共和国的生活会更好。

中共对香港成功的这一特殊贡献不太可能出现在该党的官方历史中，但正如迈克尔-谢里丹在其关于这一独特殖民地的新编历史中所描述的那样，它确实在邓小平经过30年的毛泽东革命后为恢复中国的绝望命运而制定的战略中发挥了作用。在一个有说服力的情节中，谢里丹详细介绍了1977年中国官员从当时贫困的中国首次访问香港。他们在那里了解到的情况，包括香港196亿美元的贸易额和全中国148亿美元的贸易额之间的惊人对比，为邓小平向世界开放的政策提供了依据，首先是在边境那边的深圳建立第一个 "经济特区"。

香港对中国贫困公民的诱惑也给时任与香港接壤的广东省委书记习仲勋留下了深刻印象。1978年，在一次前往边境地区视察的过程中，他面对一个惊人的现象：中国一侧的田地被忽视了，因为人们拼命地试图越过也是一条贫困线的边境。他的结论是，与其惩罚这些可能的逃亡者，不如解决他们的贫困问题。

当他的儿子习近平在2012年取得中国最高权力时，该党可以公正地声称已经解决了这个问题。当时，香港正式回归中国，但根据撒切尔夫人和邓小平谈判达成的协议条款仍享有相对自治权，两者之间的对比与其说是财富上的差异，不如说是香港享有的政治、个人和文化自由。香港的年轻人想要更多。在过去的两年里，习近平对此的回应已经在众目睽睽之下展开。

激烈的、由不满情绪引发的民族主义是该党对新的战略对抗时代的首选说法。

香港的故事充满了戏剧性、政治性和个性，谢里丹从各种中国和英国的资料中很好地讲述了它。在他对英国和中国关于香港未来的谈判的叙述中，有一些对今天的启示：中国方面的战略方针面对英国方面的交战派别。上一任港督彭定康试图在1997年回归前锁定一个更广泛的特许权。香港的商业精英们持敌对态度，正如谢里丹所描述的那样，前驻北京大使、后来成为撒切尔夫人的国家安全顾问的珀西-克拉多克也是如此。克拉多克曾写下他所谓的克拉多克外交第一法则，即 "你需要担心的不是对方，而是你自己"。1993年，他成为其箴言的化身，当时他私下向中方介绍英国的谈判立场，以破坏彭定康。

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邓小平改变了中国的物质财富，但中国新的中产阶级对更开放的社会的渴望成为了习近平对这个复杂社会进行更严格控制的公式的牺牲品。激烈的、由怨愤激发的民族主义是该党对新时代战略对抗的首选叙事方式。在香港，正如谢里丹所说，这场斗争确实发生在 "政治权力、财富、身份、数据、自由和服从 "上。在十年的时间里，这场斗争在香港的街道上发生了，因为中国的领导人寻求对联合协议的承诺进行事实上的修改，而香港的公民则推动其全面实施。

中国在香港的行动，以及它在新疆的镇压和对全球大流行病起源的更仔细审查的敌意，其后果之一是民调结果显示，自由民主国家对中国的不信任和不认可达到了前所未有的程度。那么，什么才算是习近平外交的成功，我们能从伊丽莎白-C-经济的新书中找到什么关于中国的全球姿态和意图的教训？

Economy是一位资深的中国观察家，几十年来一直与中国进行建设性的对话和合作。然而，今天，正如她所详述的，新的战线已经划定，而且并不令人放心。中国通过疫苗外交和战略性地利用其对基本医疗用品的几乎垄断地位，利用大流行病来促进其自身利益。虽然习近平在国内的镇压政策引发了协调一致的国际经济制裁，以及与中国最大贸易伙伴欧盟的关键经济协议的失败，但中国似乎已经准备好承担代价。

中国重塑多边机构的努力是广泛而系统的

中国越来越多地利用其经济实力的强制力，在其他国家对与该党自己的说法不一致的历史和政治观点进行审查。在国内，这被称为 "引导舆论"。在国外，这是一种大胆的话语控制尝试，努力向世界强加一种关于中国政治、人物和权力行使的单一说法，并重塑全球机构以适应这种说法，支持中国的影响力。

经济》详细介绍了中国为安排其候选人担任关键国际职位所做的努力，这一过程包括不加掩饰的游说、威胁要阻止出口合同或承诺取消债务以赢得选票。中国重塑多边机构的努力是广泛而系统的，最近几届美国政府对联合国及其所有工作的忽视或敌视对其起到了帮助作用。

经济学认为，中国现在看到的不是一个由美国主导的世界秩序，而是一个通过 "一带一路 "倡议传播其价值观、贸易和技术的复兴国家；是美国在亚洲的主导力量，在不久的将来，美国已经被迫从这里撤退。

她并不认为成功是不可避免的，她认为美国和中国之间的竞争是应该支撑两个大国所期望的繁荣与和平世界的准则之一。今天，在香港不难找到这样的人，他们会认为稳定和繁荣已经通过严厉的国家安全法的实施得到了恢复，对已经失去的东西不加评价。正如《经济学》所描述的那样，更广泛的全球挑战并不相似。这两本书中的一个教训是，如果没有对自由民主国家所宣称的价值观做出一致的、有时代价高昂的承诺，游戏就不会顺利。

伊莎贝尔-希尔顿是chinadialogue.net的创始人和高级顾问。

 通往中国的大门。迈克尔-谢里丹所写的《中华人民共和国和香港的新历史》由威廉-柯林斯出版社出版（25英镑）。为了支持《卫报》和《观察家》，请在卫报书店（guardianbookshop.com）订购。可能需要交付费用。

 Elizabeth C Economy的《中国的世界》由Polity Books出版（25英镑）。为了支持《卫报》和《观察家》，请在guardianbookshop.com上订购。可能需要支付送货费。

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The Gate to China by Michael Sheridan; The World According to China by Elizabeth C Economy – review

Xi Jinping and other officials pledge their vows to the CCP during a conference in June 2021. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

Two authoritative books reveal Hong Kong’s role in reviving China’s economic fortunes and Beijing’s attempts to impose its will abroad

Isabel Hilton

Sun 28 Nov 2021 09.00 GMT

In celebration of the sixth plenum of the 19th central committee earlier this month, the Chinese Communist party published yet another history of its own glorious achievements. Many pages were devoted to the wise, indeed infallible leadership of the present incumbent, Xi Jinping. Chairman Xi sets considerable store by both territorial integrity and, as he might put it, the righting of past wrongs. In that catalogue, the unequal treaty by which Britain acquired what was seen in the 19th century as an unpromisingly barren rock just off the south coast of China loomed large.

The unappealing rock, lacking in almost every natural resource beyond a deep and safe harbour, was to grow into one of the world’s most dynamic and prosperous societies. That Hong Kong flourished as much as it did under British colonial rule was in no small measure thanks to China: proximity, of course, allowed Hong Kong to play its critical role as intermediary between China and the world of global trading, finance and investment. But proximity also allowed Hong Kong to benefit from the talent and energy of the millions of people who fled China, beginning in 1949, when the CCP’s victory in China’s civil war triggered the exodus of some 100,000 people a day. When, in 1950, numbers reached 3 million, the Hong Kong government reluctantly closed the border. The refugee flow continued through the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward in the late 50s and of the Cultural Revolution in the 60s, despite the best efforts of Beijing to persuade its citizens that life was better in the People’s Republic.

That particular CCP contribution to Hong Kong’s success is unlikely to figure in the party’s official histories, but it did figure, as Michael Sheridan relates in his compendious new history of this unique colony, in the formation of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy to revive China’s desperate fortunes after 30 years of Maoist revolution. In a telling episode, Sheridan details the first visit of Chinese officials to Hong Kong in 1977, from then poverty-stricken China. What they learned there, which included the startling contrast between Hong Kong’s US$19.6bn in trade and the US$14.8bn for all of China, informed Deng’s policy of opening to the world, beginning with the first “special economic zone” in Shenzhen, just over the border.

The lure of Hong Kong for China’s impoverished citizens also made a deep impression on Xi Zhongxun, then party secretary of Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong. In 1978, on a tour of inspection that took him to the border area, he came face to face with a startling phenomenon: the fields on the Chinese side were neglected as people tried desperately to cross a border that was also a poverty line. Rather than punish the would-be fugitives, he concluded, the party needed to attend to their poverty.

By the time his son, Xi, achieved supreme power in China in 2012, the party could claim, with justice, to have addressed that problem. The contrast then between a Hong Kong formally returned to China but still enjoying relative autonomy under the terms of the agreement negotiated between Margaret Thatcher and Deng was less the difference in wealth and, rather, the political, personal and cultural freedoms that Hong Kong enjoyed. Its young people wanted more. Xi’s response to that has been played out in full view over the past two years.

An intense, grievance-fuelled nationalism is the party’s preferred narrative for a new era of strategic confrontation

Hong Kong’s story is full of drama, politics and personalities and Sheridan tells it well, drawing from a wide variety of Chinese and British sources. There are lessons for today in his account of the negotiations between the UK and China on Hong Kong’s future: a strategic approach on the Chinese side facing warring factions on the British side. The last governor, Chris Patten, tried to lock in a wider franchise before the 1997 handover. Hong Kong’s business elite was hostile, as indeed, as Sheridan describes, was Percy Cradock, former ambassador to Beijng and later Margaret Thatcher’s national security adviser. Cradock had written what he called Cradock’s first law of diplomacy, which said that “it is not the other side you need to worry about, but your own”. He became the embodiment of his aphorism in 1993, when he privately briefed the Chinese side on the British negotiating position in order to undermine Patten.

Deng transformed the material fortunes of the PRC, but China’s new middle-class aspirations for a more open society became a casualty of Xi’s formula of a firmer party grip on this complex society. An intense, grievance-fuelled nationalism is the party’s preferred narrative for a new era of strategic confrontation. In Hong Kong, that struggle did take place, as Sheridan puts it, over “political power, wealth, identity, data, freedom and conformity”. It was enacted on the streets of Hong Kong over the best part of a decade, as China’s leaders sought a de facto revision of the promise of the joint agreement and Hong Kong’s citizens pushed for its full enactment.

One consequence of China’s actions in Hong Kong, as well as its repression in Xinjiang and its hostility to closer scrutiny of the origins of the global pandemic, is that polling returns show unprecedented levels of mistrust and disapproval of China in liberal democracies. What, then, counts as success for Xi’s diplomacy and what lessons can we find in Elizabeth C Economy’s new book on China’s global posture and intentions?

Economy is a veteran China watcher and had been engaged in constructive dialogue and cooperation with China for decades. Today, however, as she details, new battle lines have been drawn and they are not reassuring: China has leveraged the pandemic to advance its own interests through vaccine diplomacy and strategic exploitation of its near monopoly of essential medical supplies. While Xi’s repressive policies at home have triggered coordinated international economic sanctions and the failure of a key economic agreement with the EU, China’s largest trading partner, the country seems ready to bear the cost.

China’s efforts to reshape multilateral institutions are broad and systematic

China increasingly uses the coercive power of its economic power to impose censorship in other countries of views of its history and politics that do not chime with the party’s own accounts. At home, this is called “guiding public opinion”. Abroad, it is a bold attempt at discourse control, the effort to impose a single narrative on the world about China’s politics, personalities and the exercise of its power and to reshape global institutions to fit that narrative and buttress China’s influence.

Economy details China’s efforts to place its candidates in key international positions, a process that involves unabashed lobbying, threats to block export contracts or promises of debt cancellation to win votes. China’s efforts to reshape multilateral institutions are broad and systematic and have been assisted by the neglect or hostility of recent US administrations to the UN and all its works.

Instead of a US-dominated world order, Economy argues that China now sees a resurgent nation spreading its values, trade and technologies through its “belt and road initiative”; the dominant power in an Asia from which the US has been forced, in the near future, to retreat.

She does not argue that success is inevitable, seeing the competition between the US and China as one of the norms that should underpin the prosperous and peaceful world that both powers desire. Today, it is not hard to find people in Hong Kong who will argue that stability and prosperity have been restored by the draconian imposition of the national security law, assigning no worth to what has been lost. The wider global challenge, as Economy frames it, is not dissimilar. One lesson from both these books is that without a consistent and sometimes costly commitment to the values that liberal democracies proclaim, the game will not go well.

Isabel Hilton is founder and senior adviser at chinadialogue.net

 The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong by Michael Sheridan is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

 The World According to China by Elizabeth C Economy is published by Polity Books (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply