June 30, 2011 11:04 pm
Working out what China wants
By Philip Stephens
We know what the west wants from a resurgent China. We have a pretty good sense of what China doesn’t want from the west. What’s missing from this story of global geopolitical upheaval is a clear idea of what China wants from its rise to great power status.
Like many European and American commentators I spend a fair amount of time listening to Chinese scholars, officials and diplomats. A few years ago such figures were a rare sighting on the international conference circuit. And visitors to Beijing were left feeling that their interlocutors had been carefully screened to admit only one view of the world.
Not any more. Some months ago I listened to a Chinese vice-minister casually acknowledge divisions at the illustrious Central Party School about relations with Washington. Some among the keepers of the ideological flame thought the US would only ever understand the currency of raw power; others that China’s self-interest still lay in co-operation as well as competition.
Chinese academics speak quite openly, albeit off-the-record, about the conflicting currents in Beijing – between nationalists and liberals, generals and party leaders.
The implications of the coming generational change at the top of the party are keenly debated.
One leading scholar was heard to say recently that Hu Jintao, who steps down next year as China’s president, had been little more than a “petty bureaucrat”. The west was in for a surprise when the generation of president-in-waiting Xi Jinping took office.
These young leaders had been shaped and hardened by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They would not be shy of wielding power.
Others are not so sure. One prominent (and very rich) business leader argues that the grinding process of getting to the top in the Chinese system militates still against a radical break with the past. What’s clear from most such conversations, though, is that Deng Xaoping’s admonition that China should hide its strength is nowadays observed more in the breach than the observance. Talk that China wants to take back charge of its East Asian neighbourhood is no longer met with protestations about a misreading of more benign intentions.
The west, which, absent a coherent European policy towards the rising powers, mostly means the US and Japan, is pretty clear what it wants from the new China. It was summed up in the worn, but still useful, phrase coined by Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, when he called for Beijing to behave as a “responsible stakeholder”.
This sees China taking its place in defending and developing the rules-based global order. Beijing has a point when it protests this is a western construction. Yet the US can argue that it has provided the essential framework for China’s rise.
On the other side of the fence, Chinese policymakers make few bones about what they don’t want from the west. Top of the list is any hint of a challenge to China’s territorial integrity. Support for more autonomy in Tibet or Xinjiang or for Taiwanese independence is a hostile act – an effort to foment the break-up of the Chinese state.
Second on the don’t-want list is a confrontation that would disturb the course of China’s rising prosperity. As much as it is now more assertive than Mr Deng might have liked, Beijing is anxious to avoid any rupture abroad that might jeopardise growth and social order at home. China will retaliate against, say, US arms sales to Taiwan, but within carefully-calibrated bounds.
A third taboo is western lecturing about China’s political and social order. David Cameron was reminded of this this week when he received Wen Jiabao in 10 Downing Street. The British prime minister got a public dressing down from the Chinese premier. China had had enough of British “finger-pointing” about human rights.
The snub was calculated. Accompanying officials let it be known that Mr Wen’s subsequent stopover in Berlin was much the more important leg of his European trip.
This was partly, of course, because of the much more valuable trade and investment relationship between Germany and China. But Angela Merkel, it seems, is also careful to make rather less of a public fuss about dissidents.
Beijing does not want to see any extension of intervention in the affairs of sovereign states. If China joins in telling others how to behave, others will claim legitimacy in telling it how to behave. Liberal internationalism also makes it harder for Beijing to strike dodgy deals with dubious regimes producing vital natural resources.
Chinese officials will agree there is sometimes a balance to be struck. Beijing has signed up to United Nations principles on the rights of citizens as well as states. But it will only go so far. Thus, while it allowed UN authorisation for intervention in Libya, Mr Wen insists the western military action was a mistake not to be repeated elsewhere.
So far, so clear. It is when you ask about China’s ambitions for its place in the world that inscrutability sets in. Yes, China wants a role commensurate with its history as a great and ancient civilisation. Yes, its economic rise has greatly expanded its strategic interests. But does it want to shape a different international order? How far will it extend its military reach? Does it see its own political and economic model competing more widely with western liberal capitalism? These are questions that rarely elicit illuminating responses.
Inference provides some of the answers. The activities of the People’s Liberation Army in the South China Sea and the present tilt of military spending point to the desire to push back US forces. A close alliance with Pakistan underlines the strategic weight given to safeguarding China’s supply lines to and from the oil-rich Gulf.
A strategy of divide and rule suggests a conscious desire to capitalise on Europe’s present weakness and undercut the Atlantic alliance. The more China rises, the wider will be the spread of its interests.
How wide? China is not bidding to fill the role of global hegemon recently vacated by the US. There are too many natural constraints on its power – think geography, India and Japan as well as the US. Beyond that, we do not really know. But then nor, I suspect, does China.
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