Whose century is it? Depends who’s marking time.

When you hear the question “Whose century is it?,” what comes to mind?  Do you think of a country — China, or the United States, maybe India?  Do you think of a kind of person?  The creative type.  Someone who’s quick to learn.

Perhaps it’s the century of ever more advanced technology — though, didn’t the 20th century feel that way, for those living through it? Or — maybe you have a more dystopian view — it’s the century of climate change and climate disaster, or ISIS or resurgent strongmen — Modi in India, Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China.

Or maybe you question the very question. I mean, does a century have to belong to anyone? And even if it does, who gets to decide, and when, and based on what? And in any case, isn’t it a little early to say?

Let me begin to answer with a brief backstory. For most of my adult life, I’ve been a foreign correspondent — mostly in Asia, but also reporting in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, on both sides of the turn of this century. Most recently, I was The World’s East Asia correspondent, based in Beijing and traveling widely, for a decade.

One of the great things about being a foreign correspondent is that you get your own assumptions and world view challenged on a regular basis. Step outside your own comfort zone, and into someone else’s and your own view expands, and many assumptions prove worth rethinking. Will be go forward with the same spirit of open-minded exploration?

Thanks to a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, I, with my old friends at The World, will be looking at ideas, trends and twists that matter in the 21^st century, at how power and influence accrue these days, in ways both similar to and quite different from how they did in the last century. There’ll be interviews, and stories, some of my own, some from The World’s newsroom. Sometimes I’ll hit the road, and see how the question “Whose century is it?” is playing in other parts of the world.

So please come along for the ride.  Subscribe to the biweekly Whose Century Is It?podcast on iTunes, or — for richer content and context, visit my page — PRI.org/century, where you’ll find blogposts, transcripts, photos, recommended reading and other links to learn more about the subject in the podcast. I’ll also regularly be doing stories and Q&As for The World, and there’ll be links to those, too.

And through it all, I’d love to hear your ideas, thoughts, reactions, comments and criticisms. Please send them along to whosecentury@gmail.com, or send me a message on Twitter at @marykaymagistad.  It all helps.

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And now, a little more from the premiere podcast of Whose century is it?

Thinking about the question “Whose century is it?” brings up not just the obvious answers, but also an interesting question about the very way we tell time, and mark time, and imbue eras of time with meaning. There have been many different calendar systems in the world, over time, each reflecting the values and priorities of the society it serves. 

I came across an interesting book about the subject, "Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures,"written by Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University in New York. I was intrigued not just by the subject of his book, but also by his interdisciplinary approach. So I got in touch.

As we chatted about how different cultures approach the challenge of marking time, he said, let’s just be clear that these are subjective constructs. There’s nothing magical or absolute about decades or centuries, any more than there is about the borders between nations. He says, many cultures tell time in decades and centuries, because if you’re starting to count you need only look down at your fingers, and there’s a Base 10 system, ready to work with. But he says, even that’s not true for everyone. He says the ancient Mayans, for instance, didn’t wear shoes, so could use their toes as well as their fingers.

“A colleague of mine recovered an old barn door down in Yucatan some 20 or 30 years ago, and on the back of this barn door, there were these charcoal marks, these stroke marks,” he says. “And he analyzed the stroke marks, and lo and behold, they were in a Base 20 system … a Mayan calendar, with a 260-day count.

In Indonesia, too, Aveni says, there are all kinds of calendars.

“We know that in Indonesia, there are multiple calendars that are kept on wooden sticks, all kinds of cycles — 9-day cycles, 8-day cycles, 12-day cycles,” he says. They are still in use in rural areas. They are still used among agricultural prognosticators, who pay close attention to constellations in the sky – where they are, when they appear, when they disappear. They have a constellation called the plow, and when it’s upright it’s time to plow, and when it turns over, it’s time to stop.”

There have been countless calendars over human history. When I lived in Thailand, many official documents used the Buddhist calendar — so, for instance, this year isn’t 2015, but 2558. The extra 543 years brings us back to the year of the Buddha’s passing.

When I lived in China, there was the Western calendar — which is used for most things, like business and travel and making appointments — but there’s also the lunar calendar, and the lunar New Year, and a long tradition of connecting with the stars and the planets both to set the rhythm of life, and also to seek meaning. In fact, for centuries, Chinese astronomers were way ahead of those in the West. When I lived in Beijing, one of my favorite places to visit, was the ancient observatory, in the heart of the city. It’s a stone tower, with ancient stargazing equipment on its roof, and it was China’s national observatory for 500 years. 

A researcher there, Lu Di Shan, told me: “In ancient China, people pay a lot of attention to celestial phenomena, because they believe the phenomena that happen in the sky means something happens to the emperor, or to the whole empire.”

Aveni says, they weren’t alone.

“In most of the world, as I understand, who deal with time, is that human history and natural history are connected,” he says. “You cannot separate the history of the universe, which is to say the development of geology, geologic periods, evolutionary biology, cosmology, you cannot separate those events — when the dinosaurs got bombed and so on, from human events, like when Woodrow Wilson died, or when we went to war in Southeast Asia. “

So this isn’t to say that we should all run out and consult the stars about whose century it is, or might be — although, many people do. In fact, that’s kind of what the ancient Chinese astronomers were doing.   

“The Chinese, in the 12^th century, 13^th century, and in the Ming Dynasty, even later, very much believed that it was planetary conjunctions that had to be watched, the close coming together of planets — not just which ones came together, but how they came together — did they go around this side? Did they go around that side? Because these were the minions in heaven; these are the minions of the emperor,” Aveni says. “And you have to keep an eye on them, because when these planets conjunct, when they come close together, this means that the dynasty is threatened. There is something that’s going to happen, and it’s not going to be very good.”

So — every year, there would be rituals, and sacrifices to the temple of the Earth, and of the Sun, to placate nature and harness time. Each year, the cycle would begin again, and the empire would be preserved. Usually.

“Because when you have cycles of time, you can almost say that you have another chance to renew — you can renew yourself, you can make yourself better,” Aveni says. “There’s the idea that the crop that was not fertile last year can be fertile the next year, if we do the right rituals, if we do the right things. And the Maya, and the Aztecs — I think most cultures of the world, as I try to suggest in "Empires of Time," at least based on my research, believed in cyclical time.

Did you ever have the Sunday night blues? You know, the time has rolled around, the end of the week. It was a horrible week, I insulted the boss on Monday, and I did a bad thing on Thursday, and I overate on Friday — but this week will be different. So we go through the Sunday night period to start a new week. So I think in many ways, we live cyclic time. But when we get to the longer periods, the longer cyclic periods, we see it more as linear — we see the Big Bang, the end of the universe. It’s our culture. We’re the peculiar ones.”

But one thing we do share with the ancient Maya, and with many other cultures, is that we imbue eras of time with meaning. We might measure those eras differently, Aveni says, but the basic impulse is the same.

“So, yeah, it’s about celebrating the rituals that keep us going. We sacrifice. Why do we sacrifice? We sacrifice so we can be guaranteed fertility in the next cycle. We give up a part of ourselves, a part of our corn crop, some of our blood. But the real situation for the emperor, I think, is to acquire the legitimacy to the continuity of rulership. I want to be able to guarantee that I’m going to make my kingship everlasting, through my sons and my daughters, by connecting myself through this, what I call, politics of time.”

Aveni gives as an example a Mayan inscription on an ancient monument that marks Mayan eras of time — the Tuns, the Katuns, the Baktuns.

“There’s a politics to Mayan timekeeping, and I can go back to Stele B at Copan, where we say the ruler, Mr. Uoaxaclajuun, it’s his katun,” Aveni says.  “Well, next to that statement, are statements relating to his ancestors, who were his aunt, and his mother and his father, and great-grandfather. And it goes back, and back, and back, very much like the Old Testament begats, to the founder of that dynasty, 1,000 years ago. And what the Maya are doing here is that the ruler is using the concept of time, and the astronomic events used to mark it, to plant his roots, the deeper the better, into the past. And if you can plant them so deep that you can say, ‘why, when we went back to Baktun 1, 3,300 years ago, there was my father, who was the founder of the Baktun and the creator of the universe, because the universe is 3,300 years old in our calendar, and I am related. I am his descendent.”

“This is not unlike what our own politicians do, since we are already in politics season, maybe a year or so early, when someone will say, ‘I stand for the principles of Reagan.’"

They even held a round of debates among Republican presidential candidates at the Ronald Reagan Presidential library, with Reagan’s plane serving as the backdrop. 

We do say — "the Reagan era" and "the Kennedy years." We talk about the 20^th century as having been the "American Century." And in China, when I lived there, in the ‘90s and in the first decade of this century, there was a lot of confidence that this century, would be China’s. 

Remember that moment, during the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, when a sea of drummers from the People’s Liberation Army pounded in perfect unity, and the stadium crowd roared? People felt real pride, all over China. And around much of the world, people thought — wow. They really have it together.

From that moment, I started to hear more and more, in China, that China was coming into its time, that this is the Chinese century. That feeling was amplified weeks later, when the economic crisis kicked in, and Chinese could look to the United States and say — ‘huh. You don’t really have it together so much after all.’ 

There were even increasingly snarky comments.  Wen Jiabao, who was then China’s premier, said at a press conference that he hoped the United States was being responsible enough with China’s money.   In fact, it served China’s interests to buy US Treasury bonds, one of the world’s safest investments, even in the midst of the economic crisis. China was at the time regularly buying foreign currency to help keep the value of its own currency low enough that Chinese exporters could compete in the US market.

Still, a certain amount of hubris became more apparent in the public statements of Chinese officials. A Chinese ambassador said that when it came to criticizing China about its human rights record and such, it was time for the US to just shut up. Even Xi Jinping, who was then vice-president said, “there are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country.”

Xi Jinping, of course, is now China’s President, and Communist Party Chief, and in the almost three years he’s held those positions, he’s concentrated an exceptional amount of power in his own hands. His vision is of China reclaiming what he sees, what many Chinese see, as China’s rightful place as the world’s preeminent power.

A step toward that was a huge military parade in Beijing in early September: There were 12,000 troops, and tens of thousands of other marchers, jet fighters overhead, tanks and armored personnel carriers and the latest missile systems rolling by on the ground — with a pointed message that some of the missiles could reach US troop positions in the Asia-Pacific. And there was Xi Jinping, standing up through the sunroof in a sleek black car, with an almost deadpan expression — giving the slightest of waves and shouting greetings to the troops, who were standing at attention. 

Now, you might reasonably ask why China was holding such a massive military parade at this particular moment. There have only been 14 such military parades in the history of the People’s Republic of China, and every other time, they’ve been on National Day — Oct. 1st, and usually in years ending in a 9, marking decades since the Communist Party came to power in 1949 — their own way of shaping time to create meaning.

So — why now? As one host at Chinese Central Television, or CCTV, put it, “We celebrate our victory, and move forward, build on our legacies, and show the world our ability to defend.”

Ministry of Defense Colonel Zhou Bo put it more plainly, in English, for an international audience. The CCTV host asked him: “China has developed its own strategic bombers, its own carriers. Does that mean China will go further in its defense tactics? And Col. Zhou said: “Of course. Because in the old days, essential defense in on your territory, with your coastline. But nowadays, there is such an increase in China’s overseas interests.”

Of course, he says, China will build a strong navy. Its ships have already become more active and more aggressive in the South China Sea. Those waters are claimed, at least in part, by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. Its seabed is thought to be rich in oil and gas, and much of world’s seafreight passes through its waters. For years, the Chinese line to its neighbors on this was ‘let’s set aside our differences, and work together for mutual benefit.’ Now, the line is, ‘the South China Sea is ours. It’s always been ours. And we have the right to defend our interests there.” Building up a strong navy, and military, and showing off what they’ve got — sends a message of, ‘we prefer peace, but don’t get in our way.’

But this parade — and China’s new muscularity in reaching for what it wants — isn’t limited to other claimants of the South China Sea. It’s also challenging the existing power structure the Asia Pacific. It’s challenging Japan, with which it also has a conflict over islands in the East China Sea, and it’s challenging the United States, as the preeminent Asia-Pacific power. Xi Jinping has talked to President Obama about wanting a new kind of great power relationship — one in which a new power can rise, without threatening the existing power militarily.

Ostensibly, the Sept. 3 parade was to mark the day in 1945 when the Japanese formally signed their surrender, ending World War II. For decades, China and Japan have been important trading and economic partners for each other. Some two and a half million Chinese tourists visit Japan each year. So — why mark the Japanese surrender in such a big way this year with, for the first time, such a huge show of force, and hours of coverage on state-run television, and a three-day national holiday, and with pointed and repeated references to Japanese atrocities and Japanese fascism?

Well, meaning is created by what we choose to remember. If you’re a rising power, or an ambitious leader, and you think this is your century, connecting yourself with a victorious past doesn’t hurt. And if you’ve got a slowing economy, and big challenges to deal with at home, as China’s leaders do, appealing to patriotic sentiment doesn’t hurt either. So, it’s not surprising that Xi Jinping struck this chord in his speech at the parade.

“As an ancient Chinese saying goes, "After making a good start, we should ensure that the cause achieves fruition," Xi said. “The great renewal of the Chinese nation requires the dedicated efforts of one generation after another. Having created a splendid civilization of over 5,000 years, the Chinese nation will certainly usher in an even brighter future.”

With that, with the whole parade and its attempt to shape time for political benefit, Xi was, as Anthony Aveni put it, reaching for a future legacy by planting his roots deep in an ancient past. The ancient Mayan ruler Uaxaclajuun, who tried to enhance his legitimacy by connecting himself with the beginning of the universe, couldn’t have said it better.