By Danah Zohar
When China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met senior US diplomats in Alaska on March 18, he told them they must replace their “zero-sum mindset” with a “win/win mindset”. The days of one superpower dominating the world, he said, were over, and all major powers, including the US and China, must develop a cooperative relationship that worked best for the mutual benefit of all. In saying this, Yang went straight to the heart of the thinking that sets America firmly in opposition to China’s rise.
Zero-sum thinking has been central to Western culture for thousands of years. The West has always been a culture of One Truth, One Way, One God. Moses declared this on Sinai when he set Western monotheism on its path, Aristotelian philosophy embedded it with either/or logic, and in the 17th century, Newtonian physics declared “one best path from A to B” as absolute scientific truth. This mindset finds its most extreme expression in America’s simplistic, black and white, with us or against us mentality. “One best way” has shaped American domestic and foreign policy, and it is central to American national identity.
Every day, Americans are reminded they live in “the greatest country in the world” and US-style democracy is the best, only morally just way of governing a nation. Generations of their politicians have sent American soldiers to war to fulfill the mandate of a “Manifest Destiny” to carry the burden of world leadership. Asking Americans to give up their zero-sum mindset is asking them to give up their religion, their logic and their sense of national purpose and identity. But this sets them, and perhaps the world, on a tragic path.
People convinced their way is the best way, indeed the only viable way, feel threatened by difference. America feels a need to dominate even allies who mainly share its values and its way of doing things. How does it then deal with a country so different from itself as China, or with concepts so foreign as a multipolar world or “a community of nations with a shared future”? How is it to understand China at all except through the lens of its own thinking, and thus as “an existential enemy” set on replacing it as the world’s supreme power? As the psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If you believe there can only be one winner in a struggle for global power, then China’s proposal everyone can be a winner in cooperative world order can only be a lie or a trick, intended to make the US drop its guard.
But China’s win-win mindset is as old as the West’s zero-sum thinking, and has its origins in a situation not too dissimilar from today’s interconnected and interdependent world. During the reign of China’s first historically recorded dynasty, the Shang (1600-1046 BCE), the Zhou tribe, who ruled one small state, managed to defeat the combined armies of many larger states, and the King of Zhou found himself ruling over most of what was then China’s entire geographical area. But there were constant uprisings and rebellions against him. The Zhou realized they were not strong enough to maintain their position by force, so the king conceived the entirely new tianxia (“all under heaven”) governing model. Instead of ruling by domination, the Zhou would now position themselves as one among a vast network of cooperating states. All member states of this network would naturally find it more in their own interest to cooperate with each other — and the Zhou — than to seek dominance for themselves. This multi-state network occupied all of what was then the known world, so tianxia was the first model for global governance. It has been China’s win-win model for negotiating ever since, in both business and diplomacy.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily News Exchange Item
