Regimented societies, and militaristic ones.

January 23rd, 2009, will be the 41st anniversary of North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo, a US Navy intelligence ship that may or may not have strayed into North Korean waters at the time of its capture. I was in Hong Kong on an R&R, “rest and recreation” week, from the war in Vietnam at the time. The news reports made it seem possible that events might combine to bring the People’s Liberation Army of China hurtling south again. I returned to my unit in Vietnam wondering if a much larger war was about to begin. That larger war in fact arrived a week later as the Tet Offensive. As difficult as the next few days were they thankfully did not involve conflict with the PLA.

Having since studied the history of that era, I now see that President Lyndon Johnson was even more worried than we about the possibilities and had determined not to provoke such an escalation. As it happened, the Chinese leadership was fully engaged at the time with the Cultural Revolution and was satisfied anyway to have the United States bogged down in a war of attrition with the Vietnamese. But we didn’t know any of that at the time.

I look now at the students I teach and wonder how I ever imagined being at war with their parents. What a dreadful waste of life Vietnam was but how much more dreadful it could have been. Of course, this generation – both in China and in the West - feels none of that tension. To them that era is ancient history. In China, my present students were born ten years after Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Modernizations” of 1978 first launched China on its spectacular rise to its coming parity with the Western economies. This generation, like its counterpart in the West, has grown up in an era of peace, prosperity and materialism. Like our own children, but perhaps especially in the China of “one child per family”, they have been indulged. Could they and we ever again go to war, as we did in Korea 50 years ago, and as appeared to be possible in 1968?

Unlikely, to say the least. The Beijing Olympics seem to have acted like an invitation to the people and the country to “open up” and get to know the world. My students don’t just want to learn English; they have told me they also want me to tell them about Anglo-American society and culture. The sight of Westerners, like my fellow teachers and myself, walking unaccompanied and unmonitored around Shenyang draws sometimes curious but often friendly glances. People are usually ready to help if we look lost when a few years ago they would have screamed for a policeman. Chairman Deng and his successors have permanently changed the orientation of China away from ideological confrontation with the West. Future competition between us will be rational and based on common interests. We are now in an era of increasing familiarity.

Some old patterns persist, however. Each morning, and precisely at 0700, for the first two weeks of the autumn term, the incoming freshman class of this college marched past my apartment window, literally. It is the practice for all Chinese university students to undergo military training in their first year. They marched through the campus in more or less orderly platoons, some in uniform but some not. One morning I counted a regiment and a half. You could tell that they were coming when, off in the distance, you heard what must have been the Chinese equivalent of “left, right, left right”.

Chinese society, however, does not seem to me to be militaristic despite the compulsory drill and the abiding image those of us who remember it have of China during the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards era. When I spoke later in the term to some of the freshmen about their training, I detected no enthusiasm for marching around. Nor is there much nostalgia for the “good old days” amongst their parents’ generation. The sheer crush of numbers in China requires a certain amount of regimentation if things are ever to get done in a timely way but there is little evidence of a love of militarism anywhere here.

This is the exact opposite of American society, which is decidedly unregimented – except at the airports – but certainly, and proudly, militaristic. I once offended a fellow student in a Military History program when I noted that Americans were a militaristic people. He assumed I was equating the United States with Nazi Germany. As do many others, he wholeheartedly believed that democracies – and particularly the American one - are populated with peace loving people while autocracies and dictatorships comprise the opposite. In fact, this "World War II model" has never been typical. At the beginning of history, Thucydides recorded that it was Athens, the democracy, that maneuvered Sparta, the autocracy, into the Peloponessian war. The Athenians used warfare deliberately, as part of their policy to expand trade and further their commercial interests. Britain, more of a democracy than anything else, was constantly engaged in minor mercantile wars throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, for the same reason. Since World War II, (and throughout its history prior to that war) the United States has followed a similar pattern of arranging wars against minor adversaries to promote its commercial interests. It is, moreover, the first modern democracy to have engaged in a preemptive war, probably to secure oil. War is, for the United States, an economic strategy that has always been approved - usually for manufactured reasons - by a majority of its population.

Like any other nation, China also protects its interests as aggressively as its ability to do so allows. As it happens, though, peace rather than war is a more efficient means through which China’s government can realize its stated goal of a harmonious, well-fed and stable society. While no other nation threatens China's borders, and as long as the present mutually beneficial trading relationship with the West exists, there is no reason to expect that China will “Americanize” its foreign policy. China’s people, who have a century or two experience of war and the hardship it brings, approve their government’s policies as enthusiastically as Americans are persuaded to approve of theirs. The difference between them though is a fundamental one. The evidence of the last forty years shows that China is a great deal less likely to launch a war against another country than is the United States.