中
国明朝宦官、舰队指挥官郑和在下西洋时所乘坐的木质宝船曾经是人类史上建造的最大船只，一些资料记载这些巨船的桅杆有九根之多，无疑是海上的庞然大物。它们要比几十年后哥伦布(Christopher Columbus)寻找新大陆所用的船只大了许多，在郑和最远到达东非海岸的七次探险中，这些宝船是整个船队的旗舰。郑和第一次下西洋时是1405年，当时他带领了大约3万人，第七次是在1430年。
然后郑和的远航戛然而止。他的多次远行为明朝财力增加了巨大负担。皇帝发布了海上贸易禁令，并关闭了造船厂。在之后四百年时间里，中国的目光再未望向疆土之外。郑和下西洋也成了充满荣光的非常之举。
现在，在21世纪刚刚开篇之际，整个世界都在指望着中国能担当起自己还很陌生的全球领导者的角色。眼下美国的声望渐趋式微，而中国的地位则日渐上升。
Jon Krause
急切的国际社会似乎万分愿意让中国来领袖群伦，然而从历史上看，中国却没有为此做好准备。
中国与美国不同，并无改造世界的宏愿：其长久以来秉承的是不干涉别国内政的方针。即便是在毛泽东时代，中国也从未像前苏联那样寻求世界霸权，虽然中国激发了亚洲其他地区以及亚洲之外的革命。如今中国在很大程度上已经不再是社会主义，很难界定其现在的意识形态、价值观和世界观为何。
不久前一群年轻的中国专业人士（其中有几位是共产党员）在北京一家餐馆聚餐，有人提出了一个本应很容易回答的问题。谁能说出"三个代表"的内容？"三个代表"是中国前国家主席江泽民提出的政治理论，已被写进中国宪法，并成为学校教学内容。没人举手回答这个问题。有人能说出其中两项吗？也没有。一项？还是有点难度。
人们普遍认为中国在国内外的指导原则是一种极具实用主义的思想：只要能实现国内生产总值(GDP)增长就好。
西方人的到来打破了中国与世隔绝的状态。1793年，英王乔治三世(George III)派马戛尔尼勋爵(Lord Macartney)前往中国，游说中国开放通商。马戛尔尼带了大批礼品，本意是想让乾隆皇帝的朝廷上下大开眼界。礼品包括机械时钟、计时器、望远镜、数学仪表等等共600箱，用了200匹马、3,000名搬运工人运送。
乾隆对英王使者的答复名传于世：天朝物产丰盈，无所不有，原不藉外夷货物以通有无。英国以炮舰迫使中国打开了通商大门；衰落的中国成为西方列强瓜分的对象，中国称这一时期为"百年屈辱"。
北京奥运会激发了众多地标性建筑的诞生──鸟巢国家体育场、水立方、庞大的央视新总部大楼，在这样的背景之下，人们很容易遗忘中国在不久之前还再度处于封闭状态。
中国共产党于1949年起开始执政，此后30年的绝大部分时间，获得中国签证都是难事一桩，甚至经常是根本不可能的。商界人士只能每年来华一次，参加广交会。在毗邻中国内地的香港，旅游大巴会将成群结队挂着相机的美国和日本游客送到边境，看看另外一边的"红色中国"。偶尔前往西方的中国官员是人们好奇的对象，跟现在的朝鲜颇为相似。
中国一片混乱。为了深入了解中国的情况，外国情报人员秘密前往香港，监听内地广播电台。
1978年，邓小平实施了改革开放政策，终结了毛泽东时代那种与世隔绝、人人自危的状况──无休无止的阶级斗争和包括世界最严重饥荒在内的人为灾害。
开放外国贸易和投资的决策最早通过沿海经济特区实施，这一决策令中国走上了经济腾飞的道路。预计中国将很快超过日本，成为世界第二大经济体。
中国的改革开放取得了诸多成就：成功地令3亿人摆脱了贫困；对抗疾病、扫除文盲；大力发展科技，实现了载人航天。这一切给许多发展中国家提供了指引。同时个人自由也得到了空前的发展。
如今，随着全球经济步履蹒跚地从二战以来最严重的衰退中复苏，中国又在新的方面赢得了世界的钦羡。
在西方世界朝着金融深渊飞驰急冲之时，中国谨慎前行。危机过后，中国经济仍强劲增长。中资银行没有受到有毒资产影响；其庞大的国民储蓄几乎没有受到任何影响。今年，北京和上海房地产市场如火如荼。
外界也希望中国能发挥其新的战略实力──以及其明显的灵巧手段──协助解决当前最为紧迫的安全问题。曾担任过卡特(Jimmy Carter)总统国家安全顾问的布热津斯基(Zbigniew Brzezinski)提议二十国集团(G20)中的两大强国──美国与中国──来应对伊朗和朝鲜的核威胁、巴以冲突、印巴紧张局势以及气候变化等问题。
奥巴马将带着一份看起来非常熟悉的事关地缘政治的代办事项单抵达北京。美国的目标一直是说服中国承担与其不断增长经济影响力相符的全球职责，巩固而非威胁当前的国际安全。用美国前副国务卿佐立克(Robert Zoellick)的话说，中国应当成为一个负责任的利益相关方。
不过，中国官方关于"构建和谐社会"的承诺通常与在伊拉克和阿富汗发起两起战争的强势美国存在分歧。多数情况下，这意味着中国一直扮演着不情愿的追随者的角色，而不是领导者。批评人士说，中国在从朝鲜到伊拉克以及达尔富尔的全球问题地区的处事纪录表明，中国是按照推进其经济利益的方式承担其职责的。
在朝鲜，中国一直引领着国际外交举措，试图遏制朝鲜的核计划。中国的石油和食品使得朝鲜政权得以维持，但中国一直犹豫不愿以此相威胁。持怀疑态度的美国人士说，中国之所以按兵不动，是因为担心朝鲜政权崩溃不仅会使得大量难民涌入中国，还会导致中国直接面对美国军事力量。
类似的中国经济利益与国际义务之间的矛盾也在非洲上演。中国公司正在非洲大举投资能源和原材料，以推动中国经济增长。中国在从尼日利亚到埃塞俄比亚的诸多非洲国家进行了不带附加条件的投资，这种做法完全不同于西方国家将投资与人权和环境改善相关联的政策。在苏丹，中国向战火纷飞的达尔富尔地区派驻了维和人员，同时又通过购买石油和销售武器支持苏丹政府。
伊朗或许为中国的领导意愿提供了迄今最大的考验。美国和欧洲盟友认为，在核计划上施压伊朗方面，中国具有关键的作用。伊朗是中国第二大石油供应国，仅次于沙特阿拉伯。目前而言，中国一直反对对伊朗实施更为严格的制裁措施。
中国领导人将他们的宏大的权力愿望藏在谦逊之中。他们说中国仍然是一个贫穷的发展中国家，人均国内生产总值(GDP)只有美国的十分之一。
不过，中国的军队正在迅速现代化。中国每个学童都知道慈禧太后挪用海军军费在北京颐和园建造石舫的故事。这个故事已经成为了国家衰弱的一个隐喻和一个武装起来的召唤。
上个月，中华人民共和国建国60周年庆典的阅兵仪式向中国13亿人民传达了一条有力的信息。隆隆驶过北京长安街的洲际弹道导弹，空中呼啸而过的加油机，这些都标志着中国不仅最终成为了一个强大国家，而且还能够向海外部署力量。
这些日子，中国对西方"奇技淫巧"的胃口没有界限。中国手机拥有量已经达到了6.5亿部，中国还超过了美国成为全球最大的汽车市场。
世界上没有哪个新兴国家比中国更为热情地把握全球贸易机遇。2001年，中国决定加入世界贸易组织(WTO)，中国经济从此也进入了一个新轨道。对外贸易顺差──尤其是对美国的──帮助中国积累了超过2万亿美元的外汇储备。
中国现在具备了其所渴求的更高地位，世界似乎也同样热切地让中国具有这一地位，那么中国会怎么做？
2500多年前，中国的哲学家老子曾经说过，治大国若烹小鲜。这一箴言是提给治理中国的士大夫的──这一阶层成为了古代世界的一个治理模式。这种低干预的治理手段从未成为共产党统治或是其治国术的标志。在当今世界，影响力和合法性比以往更多来自于一个国家执政理念的魅力的大背景下，这个问题具有极大的重要性。
上个月的法兰克福书展向世界提供了了解中国内部运作的一个机会，成为了关于中国"软实力"和领导能力的一个研究个案。
中国是作为主宾国受邀参加书展的。中国政府为此投入了数百万美元，组织了2,000多名作家、出版商和艺术家参加这一活动。一切都运转良好，直至展会组织者邀请了两位中国持不同政见者参加书展开幕前一个名为"中国与世界──观念与现实"的讨论会。愤怒的中国官员随即威胁要抵制这一活动，直到组织者收回邀请才肯罢休。
中国前驻德大使梅兆荣冷冰冰地说，我们不是来听民主课的。
德国外交部一位发言人说，两条原则同样适用于法兰克福书展。对待客人应该有待客之道，没有自由的艺术是不可想象的。
Andrew Browne
The wooden treasure ships commanded by Admiral Cheng-ho, a Chinese Ming dynasty eunuch, were among the largest vessels ever built, nautical monsters that by some accounts carried nine masts.
Bigger by far than the ships of Christopher Columbus that set out decades later for the New World, they were the flagships of an armada that ventured as far as the east coast of Africa on seven naval expeditions. The first embarked in 1405 bearing some 30,000 men; the seventh in 1430.
Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. Cheng-ho's adventures had helped to ruin Ming finances. The emperors put a halt to sea trade and closed the shipbuilding industry; China looked inward for the next four centuries. The expeditions to the 'Western Seas' were a glorious aberration.
Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the world is looking to China to assume an unfamiliar role of global leadership. At a time when American prestige is fading, China's status is rising.
President Barack Obama arrives in China next week seeking help on everything from climate change to North Korea's nuclear threat. At meetings of the Group of 20 nations, China's opinions are urgently sought on issues such as banking reform and executive pay. Persuading China to take a lead will be a challenge.
History has done little to prepare this country for the kind of leadership that an anxious international community seems so ready to thrust on it.
Unlike the U.S., China doesn't aspire to remake the world: Its longstanding mantra is 'nonintervention' in the internal affairs of other countries. Even under Chairman Mao's reign, China never sought world domination, like the former Soviet Union-although it stirred up revolution in other parts of Asia and beyond. Now that China has largely discarded socialism, it's hard to find a definition for what remains of its ideology, values and world view.
Recently, at a dinner in a Beijing restaurant of a group of young Chinese professionals-several of them Communist Party members-somebody raised a question that should have been simple to answer. Can anybody list the 'Three Represents'? The reference was to the political theory of former President Jiang Zemin, which has been written into the state constitution and is taught in schools. Not a single hand went up. Could anybody name two? Nobody. One? With difficulty.
A hard-nosed pragmatism is generally considered to be China's guiding principle at home and abroad: whatever produces growth in gross domestic product.
China's aloofness from the world was interrupted when the West came knocking. In 1793, Lord Macartney was dispatched to China by Britain's King George III to open the country to trade. He arrived with presents meant to dazzle the court of the Qianlong emperor-mechanical clocks, chronometers, telescopes and mathematical instruments. The 600 packages required 200 horses and 3,000 porters to transport.
'There is nothing we lack,' the emperor famously told the royal emissary. 'We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects.' The British forced open the doors to trade with gunboats; an enfeebled China was carved up by Western powers in what China calls its 'century of humiliation.'
It's easy to forget, driving by Beijing's Olympics-inspired landmarks-the Birds Nest Stadium, the Water Cube, the colossal CCTV Tower-that until quite recently China had closeted itself again.
For most of the first 30 years of Communist rule in China, which started in 1949, it was hard and often outright impossible to get a visa. Businessmen were granted access once a year for the Canton Trade Fair. In neighboring Hong Kong, tourist buses would deliver groups of camera-toting Americans and Japanese to the border to catch a glimpse of 'Red China' on the other side. The rare Chinese official who ventured to the West was a curiosity, much like North Koreans today.
China was in turmoil. To divine what was going on inside the country, foreign intelligence decamped in Hong Kong to monitor local radio stations.
Deng Xiaoping put an end to Chairman Mao's era of murderous seclusion-its endless class struggles and man-made disasters, including the world's worst famine-with his 'Open Door' reforms in 1978.
The decision to open the country to foreign trade and investment, initially through Special Economic Zones along the coast, set China on its path of supercharged economic growth. China is shortly expected to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy.
China's achievements have provided a beacon for much of the developing world: its success in lifting 300 million people out of poverty; its fight against disease and illiteracy; its embrace of technology that has put Chinese astronauts in space. All this, while allowing an unprecedented flowering of personal freedoms.
Now, as the global economy emerges shakily from the worst recession since World War II, China is attracting admiration from new corners.
While the Western world hurtled towards the financial abyss, China was moving ahead cautiously. It has emerged from the crisis with an economy growing powerfully. Its banks are unpolluted by toxic assets; hardly a ripple disturbs its vast pools of national savings. This year, property markets in Beijing and Shanghai are sizzling.
There are hopes, too, that China will use its new strategic heft─and its apparently deft touch─to help resolve the most pressing security issues of the times. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, proposed a drastically slimmer G20─a G2, the U.S. and China─to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; India-Pakistan tensions; climate change.
When he arrives in Beijing, Mr. Obama will be clutching a geopolitical 'to-do' list that looks quite similar. America's broad goal has been to persuade China to assume the global responsibilities that go with its growing economic influence in a way that strengthens, rather than threatens, existing international arrangements. China, urged former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, should become a 'responsible stakeholder.'
Yet China's official commitment to a 'harmonious world' is often at odds with an assertive America fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More often than not, it has meant that China has been a reluctant follower not a leader. Critics say that China's record in the world's trouble spots, from North Korea to Iraq and Darfur, suggests that it defines its responsibilities in ways that enhance its economic interests.
On North Korea, China has been heading diplomatic efforts to try to rein in Pyongyang's nuclear program. But it is hesitant to threaten the flow of Chinese oil and food that keeps the regime alive. Skeptics in the U.S. say that China holds back because it fears a collapse of North Korea that would not only unleash a flood of refugees across its border but also place U.S. forces face-to-face with its own.
Similar tensions between China's economic interests and international obligations play out in Africa, where Chinese companies are investing massively in energy and raw materials to fuel China's growth. The 'no-strings' investments from Nigeria to Ethiopia fly in the face of Western efforts to link investment with improvements in human rights and the environment. In Sudan, China has sent peacekeepers to the war-torn region of Darfur, while bolstering the government by buying oil and selling arms.
Iran may provide the biggest test to date of China's willingness to lead. Washington and its European allies see China's role as critical in the effort to pressure Tehran over its nuclear program. So far, China has resisted tougher sanctions against a country that is its second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.
China's leaders wrap their great power aspirations in modesty. They point out that China is still a poor developing country, with one tenth of the per capita GDP of the U.S.
Yet China is rapidly modernizing its military forces. Every schoolchild in China knows the story of the Dowager Empress who used funds earmarked for the navy to build stone boats at the Summer Palace in Beijing. The story has become a metaphor for national weakness, and a call to arms.
A military parade last month to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sent a powerful message to China's 1.3 billion people. The intercontinental ballistic missiles that rumbled down Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, and the tanker planes that lumbered overhead, signaled that China not only was at last a strong country, but also could project power beyond its shores.
These days, China's appetite for 'ingenious objects' from the West knows no bounds. It has 650 million mobile phones; it has passed America as the world's largest auto market.
No emerging nation on earth has seized the opportunities of global trade more enthusiastically than China. Its decision to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 launched its economy into a new orbit. Surpluses from foreign trade─particularly with the U.S.─have helped China rack up more than $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.
So what does China want to do with the enhanced status that it craves, and which the world seems equally anxious to concede to China?
Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi wrote: 'Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.' The advice was aimed at the scholar-officials that ran China─a Mandarin class that became a model of governance for the ancient world. The light touch has never been a hallmark of Communist rule, or of its statecraft. That matters greatly in a world in which influence and legitimacy derive more than ever from the attractiveness of a country's governing ideals.
Last month, the Frankfurt Book Fair offered the world a glimpse into the internal workings of the Chinese state, and a case study on the limitations of China's 'soft power' and its ability to lead.
China was invited to the fair as the guest of honor. The Chinese government had invested millions of dollars in the event, lining up some 2,000 Chinese writers, publishers and artists to attend. All went well until organizers invited two Chinese dissidents to a prefair symposium titled 'China and the World─Perception and Reality.' Furious Chinese officials threatened to boycott the event and backed down only when organizers withdrew the invitations.
'We did not come to be instructed about democracy,' Mei Zhaorong, China's former ambassador to Germany, icily declared.
'Two principles also apply to the Frankfurt Book Fair,' said a German foreign ministry spokeswoman. 'Guests are treated like guests, and art without freedom is inconceivable.'
Andrew Browne
Bigger by far than the ships of Christopher Columbus that set out decades later for the New World, they were the flagships of an armada that ventured as far as the east coast of Africa on seven naval expeditions. The first embarked in 1405 bearing some 30,000 men; the seventh in 1430.
Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. Cheng-ho's adventures had helped to ruin Ming finances. The emperors put a halt to sea trade and closed the shipbuilding industry; China looked inward for the next four centuries. The expeditions to the 'Western Seas' were a glorious aberration.
Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the world is looking to China to assume an unfamiliar role of global leadership. At a time when American prestige is fading, China's status is rising.
President Barack Obama arrives in China next week seeking help on everything from climate change to North Korea's nuclear threat. At meetings of the Group of 20 nations, China's opinions are urgently sought on issues such as banking reform and executive pay. Persuading China to take a lead will be a challenge.
History has done little to prepare this country for the kind of leadership that an anxious international community seems so ready to thrust on it.
Unlike the U.S., China doesn't aspire to remake the world: Its longstanding mantra is 'nonintervention' in the internal affairs of other countries. Even under Chairman Mao's reign, China never sought world domination, like the former Soviet Union-although it stirred up revolution in other parts of Asia and beyond. Now that China has largely discarded socialism, it's hard to find a definition for what remains of its ideology, values and world view.
Recently, at a dinner in a Beijing restaurant of a group of young Chinese professionals-several of them Communist Party members-somebody raised a question that should have been simple to answer. Can anybody list the 'Three Represents'? The reference was to the political theory of former President Jiang Zemin, which has been written into the state constitution and is taught in schools. Not a single hand went up. Could anybody name two? Nobody. One? With difficulty.
A hard-nosed pragmatism is generally considered to be China's guiding principle at home and abroad: whatever produces growth in gross domestic product.
China's aloofness from the world was interrupted when the West came knocking. In 1793, Lord Macartney was dispatched to China by Britain's King George III to open the country to trade. He arrived with presents meant to dazzle the court of the Qianlong emperor-mechanical clocks, chronometers, telescopes and mathematical instruments. The 600 packages required 200 horses and 3,000 porters to transport.
'There is nothing we lack,' the emperor famously told the royal emissary. 'We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects.' The British forced open the doors to trade with gunboats; an enfeebled China was carved up by Western powers in what China calls its 'century of humiliation.'
It's easy to forget, driving by Beijing's Olympics-inspired landmarks-the Birds Nest Stadium, the Water Cube, the colossal CCTV Tower-that until quite recently China had closeted itself again.
For most of the first 30 years of Communist rule in China, which started in 1949, it was hard and often outright impossible to get a visa. Businessmen were granted access once a year for the Canton Trade Fair. In neighboring Hong Kong, tourist buses would deliver groups of camera-toting Americans and Japanese to the border to catch a glimpse of 'Red China' on the other side. The rare Chinese official who ventured to the West was a curiosity, much like North Koreans today.
China was in turmoil. To divine what was going on inside the country, foreign intelligence decamped in Hong Kong to monitor local radio stations.
Deng Xiaoping put an end to Chairman Mao's era of murderous seclusion-its endless class struggles and man-made disasters, including the world's worst famine-with his 'Open Door' reforms in 1978.
The decision to open the country to foreign trade and investment, initially through Special Economic Zones along the coast, set China on its path of supercharged economic growth. China is shortly expected to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy.
China's achievements have provided a beacon for much of the developing world: its success in lifting 300 million people out of poverty; its fight against disease and illiteracy; its embrace of technology that has put Chinese astronauts in space. All this, while allowing an unprecedented flowering of personal freedoms.
Now, as the global economy emerges shakily from the worst recession since World War II, China is attracting admiration from new corners.
While the Western world hurtled towards the financial abyss, China was moving ahead cautiously. It has emerged from the crisis with an economy growing powerfully. Its banks are unpolluted by toxic assets; hardly a ripple disturbs its vast pools of national savings. This year, property markets in Beijing and Shanghai are sizzling.
There are hopes, too, that China will use its new strategic heft─and its apparently deft touch─to help resolve the most pressing security issues of the times. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, proposed a drastically slimmer G20─a G2, the U.S. and China─to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; India-Pakistan tensions; climate change.
When he arrives in Beijing, Mr. Obama will be clutching a geopolitical 'to-do' list that looks quite similar. America's broad goal has been to persuade China to assume the global responsibilities that go with its growing economic influence in a way that strengthens, rather than threatens, existing international arrangements. China, urged former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, should become a 'responsible stakeholder.'
Yet China's official commitment to a 'harmonious world' is often at odds with an assertive America fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More often than not, it has meant that China has been a reluctant follower not a leader. Critics say that China's record in the world's trouble spots, from North Korea to Iraq and Darfur, suggests that it defines its responsibilities in ways that enhance its economic interests.
On North Korea, China has been heading diplomatic efforts to try to rein in Pyongyang's nuclear program. But it is hesitant to threaten the flow of Chinese oil and food that keeps the regime alive. Skeptics in the U.S. say that China holds back because it fears a collapse of North Korea that would not only unleash a flood of refugees across its border but also place U.S. forces face-to-face with its own.
Similar tensions between China's economic interests and international obligations play out in Africa, where Chinese companies are investing massively in energy and raw materials to fuel China's growth. The 'no-strings' investments from Nigeria to Ethiopia fly in the face of Western efforts to link investment with improvements in human rights and the environment. In Sudan, China has sent peacekeepers to the war-torn region of Darfur, while bolstering the government by buying oil and selling arms.
Iran may provide the biggest test to date of China's willingness to lead. Washington and its European allies see China's role as critical in the effort to pressure Tehran over its nuclear program. So far, China has resisted tougher sanctions against a country that is its second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.
China's leaders wrap their great power aspirations in modesty. They point out that China is still a poor developing country, with one tenth of the per capita GDP of the U.S.
Yet China is rapidly modernizing its military forces. Every schoolchild in China knows the story of the Dowager Empress who used funds earmarked for the navy to build stone boats at the Summer Palace in Beijing. The story has become a metaphor for national weakness, and a call to arms.
A military parade last month to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sent a powerful message to China's 1.3 billion people. The intercontinental ballistic missiles that rumbled down Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, and the tanker planes that lumbered overhead, signaled that China not only was at last a strong country, but also could project power beyond its shores.
These days, China's appetite for 'ingenious objects' from the West knows no bounds. It has 650 million mobile phones; it has passed America as the world's largest auto market.
No emerging nation on earth has seized the opportunities of global trade more enthusiastically than China. Its decision to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 launched its economy into a new orbit. Surpluses from foreign trade─particularly with the U.S.─have helped China rack up more than $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.
So what does China want to do with the enhanced status that it craves, and which the world seems equally anxious to concede to China?
Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi wrote: 'Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.' The advice was aimed at the scholar-officials that ran China─a Mandarin class that became a model of governance for the ancient world. The light touch has never been a hallmark of Communist rule, or of its statecraft. That matters greatly in a world in which influence and legitimacy derive more than ever from the attractiveness of a country's governing ideals.
Last month, the Frankfurt Book Fair offered the world a glimpse into the internal workings of the Chinese state, and a case study on the limitations of China's 'soft power' and its ability to lead.
China was invited to the fair as the guest of honor. The Chinese government had invested millions of dollars in the event, lining up some 2,000 Chinese writers, publishers and artists to attend. All went well until organizers invited two Chinese dissidents to a prefair symposium titled 'China and the World─Perception and Reality.' Furious Chinese officials threatened to boycott the event and backed down only when organizers withdrew the invitations.
'We did not come to be instructed about democracy,' Mei Zhaorong, China's former ambassador to Germany, icily declared.
'Two principles also apply to the Frankfurt Book Fair,' said a German foreign ministry spokeswoman. 'Guests are treated like guests, and art without freedom is inconceivable.'
Andrew Browne
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