What the west can learn from China

As China extends its trade, investment and influence to every part of the world, the west has become increasingly agitated about what it sees as the new Chinese imperialism. Perhaps this isn't surprising, given the west's own history of expansion.

It is an irony of globalisation, which the west has thought of so long as its own invention, that now China is the great beneficiary. The United States in particular finds it difficult to see this as anything other than a drive for world domination. But we need to look at globalisation from a Chinese viewpoint too before rushing to conclusions and jeopardising a future that requires global co-operation rather than angry accusations.

For we are dealing here with something other than a temporary geopolitical shift. Global ambition has been a formative part of the western worldview for over 2,000 years, framing the fates of nations and governments. By contrast China has traditionally styled itself as the "middle kingdom", the centre of a world that could be safely left to its own devices so long as it did not intrude.

As long ago as ancient Rome, the orator Cicero imagined in his fable Scipio's Dream an Earth exceedingly small and insignificant in comparison to the Milky Way, but a place where "men were put ... for a purpose, to guard and rule the world in the closest possible approach to the order and consistency of the cosmos itself."

A similar image was used by the 14th-century poet Dante, who looked down in his Divine Comedy from heaven to a sorry Earth and was persuaded, in his Monarchy, of the necessity for a universal or global monarchy and empire.

These motifs of secular and religious universalism are key elements in the imagination of the 18th-century western prophet of globalisation, Adam Smith, who conceived of nature as an enormous, sophisticated and subtle machine, supervised by an omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent and utilitarian deity. The sole aim of the machine and probably of the deity, he wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is to maximise happiness and human welfare in the world.

Compared with the traditional western perception of the world, the ancient Chinese seemed to have a more detached approach. The focus on the welfare of their own people may strike western minds as parochial but it has very deep roots in Chinese culture. Lao-Tzu, for example, suggests in his writings that humans do so much in pursuit of their insatiable desires they are likely to ruin the earth. He argues that everything will fall into place if we practice "not-doing", withholding our own assertiveness, being constantly without desire so as to observe the subtlety of nature.

Thus Lao-Tzu rarely speaks of politics on a universal scale. Instead, he elaborates on how to run a good state in the interest of its people. He says that what makes a great state is its being like a low-lying river drawing water from other sources; a great state, by being receptive to small states, gains them for itself; and the great state only wishes to unite people and nourish them.

Both the traditional western way of thinking and the traditional Chinese way of thinking still have an impact today. The west still tells the story of the whole world, but now it calls this story "globalisation". And China is largely telling a story about itself, being merely the great beneficiary of western globalisation.

There is a popular Chinese idiomatic expression that says people within the "four seas", which literally means the borders all around China, are brothers and sisters and it is a good example of this prevailing mentality. China's global economic activity, then, according to its traditional way of thinking, draws on the rest of the world in order to look after its own people. There is another old Chinese saying, "sweep the snow only in front of your doorstep". The contrast with the west's concern to shape the world in its own image could not be more profound. The scope for mutual incomprehension is therefore vast.

Beyond the potential for conflict, however, neither the western conception of globalisation as the creation of a single world market, nor China's use of globalisation to its own advantage, are enough on their own to deal with the challenges of climate change, nuclear security or global inequality.

If we can combine the best of the tradition of the west's global vision with China's less all-encompassing approach, we might be able to envisage a truly new world order, thinking globally, but acting nationally and locally. A shared appreciation that any country, any locality can adopt an approach that benefits humankind as a whole does not demand the imposition of one culture on another. Rather it requires, in the words of Joseph Conrad, "an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to." Let's make this not just a sentimental pretence but a firm idea, one that can inspire the co-operation of equals in the immense project of creating a different world.

Zhang Xiaoying, an associate professor and Head of the Department of English and Journalism at the School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University.