Lessons from China on national pride
How to unify a Disunited Kingdom
Dear all
The newsletter is a day late this week, but for a good reason: I was waiting for an article to be published in the UK magazine Reaction. Here it is, and although I owe a debt of thanks to Iain Martin for allowing me to reprint it in full, it would be much better for you to click onto the original article here.
As someone who deeply believes in the united part of the United Kingdom, I have been struck by how easy it has been for the separatist SNP to lead the charge for the break-up of the country. You would be hard pressed to find any other country in the world with such a lax attitude to national cohesiveness.
Yet prevention is not, in the long term, the answer. What has been shown time and again, from business to politics to the military, is that people stick together best when they are given something positive to aim for, a clear and inspirational vision of progress and improvement. This is something that China is currently excelling at - and it is a lesson for Westminster to look at if we want to keep our country together.
As always, please remember to share and subscribe!
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The United Kingdom is looking distinctly disunited. With the deep fractures of Brexit still not
mended, the latest faultline to re-emerge is the desire by many, perhaps a majority, of Scots to secede. Yet the death of the three-hundred-year-old Union is not inevitable. What might save it is a lesson taken from a country many would consider an unlikely source of good ideas about public policy, and one that many in the West look at with increasing suspicion. That may be true, but China certainly knows a thing or two about keeping a country together.
“No issue preoccupies Chinese leadership more than the preservation of national unity.” So wrote the famed American statesman Henry Kissinger in his book, On China. Given the country’s history, its rulers are right to worry about the country staying united. China has broken up and come back together many times since its first unification in 221 BC, each dividing event accompanied by the deaths of thousands, and sometimes millions. Tellingly, one of the most famous literary quotes in China, taken from the classic text Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is “the Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide”.
China’s recurrent atomisation is thanks in great part to its inherent divisions. Its cuisine – a central part of Chinese culture - differs depending on the province. Linguistically, as recently as twenty years ago only a little more than half the country could speak Mandarin. Although 92% of the country is ethnically Han, that still leaves over 110 million people, spread over fifty-five official minorities. The divisions within China run deep.
The country’s most recent time broken apart was between 1912, when the last emperor fell, and 1949, when the Communist Party finally won the brutal civil war. Chinese leaders, like most of the Chinese people themselves, have no truck with division.
As such, the Communist Party has put great effort into building national unity. To do so they have done what any professional company or army would do, and built a national strategy.
The West is highly critical of the harsh security that the authorities use in China to keep society in order, and in many ways, this is rightly so. But to focus on the stick is to ignore the carrot. What China’s leaders have done, and brilliantly, is to establish for the majority of the people a strong yearning to pull together.
They have done do by setting before them a national goal, and then encouraged its citizens to work together to achieve it. By 2049, the Chinese government aims to ‘build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious’ – or the goal of “national rejuvenation”, as most refer to it.
This simple expression, known right across the country, neatly brings together the country’s longstanding history with ambitious plans for the future. It is a vision of recaptured glory, and expansion yet to come, bound up in a slogan that can easily be shared and bought into. The more that is achieved, whether it be the elimination of poverty or a spaceship on the moon, the more the country buys into the ambition. As the analyst Lawrence Kuhn once put it, “in China, pride is the driver”.
Not only does the national goal bind the people, but it helps to coordinate government action across the departments. Like a company having an overarching strategy, one that dictates the direction for the whole organisation, almost everything the Chinese bureaucracy does is with one eye on meeting the 2049 target.
The UK by contrast hasn’t had a strategic plan – at least, one that the public has understood and got behind – for generations. As the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1962, “Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role”, and this is still true today.
Yet for its first two hundred and fifty years, the United Kingdom did have a national purpose: the growth and maintenance of the Empire. Whilst it was never universally popular, the Empire gave purpose to many in Britain. As the Oxford historian Nigel Biggar notes, people in the United Kingdom felt they were part of a larger purpose, an “expansive force for good”, even if reality didn’t always match the belief.
There were also many tangible benefits for the public, as the Scots discovered. Having been forced into the Union on the back of national bankruptcy, Scotland hugely benefited from Britain’s expansionism through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Glasgow, for example, became one of the world’s wealthiest cities by the middle of the 1800s, thanks in part to its status as a global centre of shipbuilding. Scots also created some of the Empire’s most successful companies, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Jardine Matheson.
Britain’s post-World War II decline put paid to a positive vision of what the UK should be and do. This in turn allowed, at least in part, a degradation of social and national cohesion. As Tony Blair put it in a speech in 2000, “Our failure in the post-war period to generate a clear sense of national purpose has hindered us.”
Into this strategic void has stepped the SNP. They have cannily crafted a national purpose, namely to leave the Union and create a proud and independent Scotland. Westminster, on the other hand, has done nothing to counter this. There is simply nothing much to bind a Devonian with an Aberdonian in terms of national strategy.
Brexit is the chance to change this. The UK government has already started with some of the structural changes it needs to make in order to bring the country together, for example a national industrial strategy that should be able to share more economic prosperity across the four home nations. The subsumption of DFID under the FCO has also augmented the ability of the Foreign Secretary to pull the levers of power and influence abroad to the greater benefit of the nation.
What is missing is the message. “Global Britain” is a start, but it doesn’t have the swagger of “national rejuvenation by 2049”, or indeed the romance of the William Wallace boast that “Scotland is free”. Whatever the national strategy ends up being, it has to inspire all corners of the United Kingdom, and, with more young people wanting Scottish independence than old, be relevant to the younger generations too. It also needs time to bed in, which is why it is so imperative that the SNP aren’t allowed to hold a referendum for another generation.
Like it or loathe it – and there will be many in Washington who take the latter view given its rival’s rise – China has inspired its people with a sense of national purpose. The UK would be advised to follow suit, not only to thrive, but to survive.