As early as 2009, in a speech at the Diplomatic Academy of the Singapore Foreign Ministry, when asked "how to view the rise of China", Lee Kuan Yew, then Singapore's senior minister of state, corrected the question:
"To be precise, China is not rising. A strong China is the norm. ”
Lee Kuan Yew was regarded as a master strategist who, in the 1980s, judged that China would take off economically, and through Temasek, invested in China with national power and made a lot of money.
His judgment of world strategy is also unusually accurate. More than 10 years ago, he asserted:
"In the second half of the 21st century, the U.S.-China relationship will become the most important bilateral relationship in the world."
Lee Kuan Yew was not surprised that China was back in East Asia, and he even responded directly to Japanese reporters at a press conference: "Japanese domination in East Asia is rare, even impossible to happen again, for thousands of years, China has been the center of the East Asian order, and it will be the same in the future." ”
China's dominance of the East Asian order is the norm, and the doves in other countries occupy the magpie's nest, which is heterogeneous.
Lee Kuan Yew's strategic vision is not temporary, but in the eyes of history. Lee Kuan Yew's insights can also answer why the China-Japan-RoK FTA has been repeatedly frustrated – when the order in East Asia has not yet returned to the normal state of China's dominance, local conflicts in the economy are bound to occur.
Although many Chinese people scorned his iron-fisted policy of de-Sinicization and his posture of being an anti-communist vanguard, the evaluation of his strategic pattern and the "giant of a small country" is worthy.
When we read history, we always read it in terms of the country, such as the Draft History of the Qing Dynasty, the Warring States Policy, etc., and few people read it in terms of region. When we really look up from China and pull it to the perspective of East Asia, we can see the mountains and small mountains, and we can clearly see the underlying logic of Lee Kuan Yew's judgment.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="13" > first, the Chinese logic that shaped the East Asian order</h1>
East Asian countries and the Confucian cultural circle basically coincide, and it can also be said that the East Asian region is a region that is deeply influenced and shaped by Chinese culture.
How to read history in Terms of East Asia, we must first make it clear: East Asian history includes the ancient, modern, and contemporary history of East Asia on the one hand, and the domestic history of the nation-states of East Asia and the history of their relations with each other on the other.
The most important and longest river channel of Shi Hai is the "Chinese Empire", to be precise, the unified and giant ancient Chinese country.
All the countries, including Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, all worship China as Zhengshuo and are called Chennagong in the identity of neibo or waibo.
The memory of the "Chinese Empire" of the nation-states that have survived and evolved independently in the East Asian order contain elements that Chinese generally despise, ignore, or even deny.
In the modern order, these States are contradictory to the old order of the "Chinese Empire"—like Korea, they cannot strip away the imprint of Chinese history and try to deny the history of vassalage. It is also this national mentality that has evolved into a growing cultural farce in South Korea.
It is also based on this national psychology that neighboring countries are always worried and afraid of the ambition of the Chinese people to "revitalize China and reproduce the Han and Tang Dynasties".
The emerging countries in East Asia have a geopolitical goal of overthrowing the United States or Russia, but to replace China, such as Japan in recent history.
In other words, even if it is an attempt to break the East Asian order dominated by China, it is the logic of China dominating the East Asian order. To put it bluntly, the underlying code of the geopolitical game has long been written by China.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="13" > second, nationalism breaks the identity of the East Asian order</h1>
There are probably two core components of modern East Asian history:
First, from the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to the end of World War II in 1945, the history of Japan's violent and murderous aggression in East Asia in the past half century;
Second, the history of resistance and development of modern nationalism in East Asian countries outside Japan.
In a horizontal comparison, the history of modern Europe is similar to that of East Asia. But the public enemy is not Japan, but Germany.
But Europeans reacted very differently from East Asians.
After the catastrophe of the world war, Europe completely rejected excessive arrogance and exclusive nationalism, laying the ideological foundation for the European Community.
But the Japanese invasion inspired nationalism in East Asian countries, and the existing view of the world, that is, the regional identity of the Chinese Empire, was completely broken.
It's interesting. Europeans, who had never established a regional identity, established a regional identity in the ruins of war; the East Asians, who had already established a regional identity, buried it in the fire.
Japan, a former aggressor, became an obstacle to the integration of the East Asian regional order. The United States has taken advantage of this history by frequently playing with the historical entanglements between China, Japan and South Korea and interrupting the integration of the East Asian Free Trade Area.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="13" > third, from the east Asian co-owner stigma to the East Asian public enemy</h1>
During the Cold War era, East Asian countries were also divided into two groups.
China, Vietnam, and North Korea belong to the communist camp, and South Korea, Japan, Singapore and other countries belong to the capitalist camp.
In the discourse of public opinion in the United States, China has been distorted from the co-sovereign of East Asia to the public enemy of East Asia.
This is an image left over from the Cold War era that has not been fundamentally changed to this day, that is, to slander China as a public enemy of the free world.
The impact of the "Cold War mentality" is extremely far-reaching, and it is still hanging over East Asia and is constantly being fueled by the United States.
During the Cold War era, the military alliance between the United States and Japan and the United States and South Korea was always aimed at China, and China's history of the Cold War, which was bullied, was also linked to the sad and indignant memory of being subjected to external invasion and devastation. Japan and South Korea are undoubtedly accomplices of imperialism.
But if you think about it, in East Asia, China is the dominant country in the socialist camp, but which country is dominant in the capitalist camp? Japan? Korea?
Obviously neither, but the United States.
In other words, the core of the current chaos of the East Asian order is not internal chaos, but chaos of external input. The East Asian order may play a leading role except China.
With the fever of ultra-nationalism and the revival of China's national power, it is only natural that East Asia will return to the pattern it has inherited for thousands of years.