Historian, author and commentator Professor Timothy Garton Ash talks about China’s growing economic influence in the global economy, as well as the potential rise of a super league of geopolitics in China, the U.S. and the EU.

See more of Timothy Garton Ash’s writing about China via CDT. Read much more of his writing on a variety of topics on his website.

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Post tags: China's rise, foreign policy, Timothy Garton Ash, U.S. relations
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A very long discussion in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs Review, the journal of the Foreign Affairs University, provides some context for what Hu’s tweeting might be about. The article, entitled “Global Politics in the Web 2.0 Era” is a discussion about how communication technologies are changing politics. The cases cited are the usual ones—the protests after the Iranian elections, the Arab Spring, SMS being used to organize protests against Philippine President Joseph Estrada, the Obama campaign’s use of Facebook and other social media—and political dynamics described are also now well known—web 2.0 empowers the individual to spread information, flattens hierarchies, and lowers the cost of mobilizing groups. Democratization and the growth of civil society are trends difficult to control, and as a result China must have a strategy for bringing about gradual change.

Online expression by Chinese netizens, according to the article, can be “immature, aggressive, or empty.” But if China can develop an effective legal system and internal controls, resolve complaints from society, urge people to contribute policy suggestions and better understand national conditions, and strengthen the capacity of the state and the Party, then web 2.0 technology should be viewed “at least [as] an opportunity that outweighs the challenges.”

There is a foreign policy component of the strategy as well. China must defend its Internet sovereignty. It must raise cybersecurity. It must be on guard against a Wikileak-style strategic crisis. It has to be vigilant against malicious rumors and outside interference. China must oppose America’s Internet Freedom agenda, but it also must do more than be reactive. The Chinese government must develop a diplomacy 2.0. The United States and Europe are already using microblogs like Sina Weibo to spread their message within China. During bilateral exchanges, diplomatic negotiations, and international conferences, Chinese officials should use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to spread their policy views. Use of social media will be an important part of building soft power.

See also a related discussion by Elizabeth Economy on how China needs to reset its foreign policy in light of new challenges, including the rise of social media. Read more about China’s diplomacy and about Hu Xijin via CDT.

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The Chinese people now openly voice their opinions, placing pressure on a traditionally opaque policy process. And when the world looks at China, it no longer sees a developing country; it sees the world’s largest exporting nation, the second largest economy and the largest population.

Commodity markets rise and fall on Chinese demand. The country’s trade and investment practices shape the way business is done throughout the world. Global climate change hinges in good measure on the future trajectory of Chinese energy policies. And no international regime—from protecting intellectual property rights, to controlling cyber warfare, to preventing nuclear proliferation—can thrive without full Chinese commitment.

For the international community, it is no longer enough for Chinese leaders to claim that China can “best help the world by helping itself.” China needs to consider how its policies contribute (or not) to the overall health and stability of the rest of the world.

Chinese foreign policy, however, has not kept pace with this rapid proliferation of demands. It neither meets its own challenges nor successfully addresses the growing demands of the international community. Instead, it is trapped by outdated foreign policy principles, ambition without accountability and, above all, by a political model that undermines the country’s potential for real leadership. China needs a strategic foreign policy reset.

Also watch an accompanying video interview with Economy. Read more about China’s foreign policy via CDT.

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Post tags: exports, foreign policy, public opinion, trade
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The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.

Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.

Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.

How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.

This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.

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Post tags: China's rise, chinese philosophy, economic development, foreign policy, U.S. relations
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The portrayal of Beijing as a non-ideological pragmatist in international affairs is at odds with its policy and behaviour toward some of the world’s worst dictatorships. For example, China maintained its support for Slobodan Milosevic’s regime almost until the very end of his rule. In Africa, China stuck by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, inviting him to visit Beijing even when he was an international pariah. Of Latin American leaders, the mandarins in Beijing seem to have taken a particular liking to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, a dictator in all but name.

China’s dictator complex was on full display during the Arab Spring. Around the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in February, the official Chinese media consistently cast Egypt’s anti-Mubarak forces as mobs who would do nothing but cause chaos. The Chinese handling of the recent collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was egregiously inept. Beijing not only received a high-level representative of the doomed Gaddafi regime in June – its arms manufacturers were trying to sell $200 million worth of weapons to Gaddafi’s forces in July, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution forbidding arms sales to Libya.

What does this dictator complex tell us about Chinese foreign policy?

The most obvious answer is that, instead of being non-ideological, Chinese foreign policy actually is quite ideological. As can be seen from recent events, even in situations where supporting dictatorships hurts Chinese interests, Beijing has chosen to side with these international outcasts. This ideological bias stems from the nature of China’s domestic political regime – a one-party state. The ruling Chinese Communist Party believes that its greatest ideological threat is posed by the liberal democracies in the West. Even as China benefits from the West-led international economic system, the Communist Party has never let down its guard against the democratic West.

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Chinese foreign policy is famously pragmatic, but even Beijing is having trouble reconciling how it “respects the choice of the Libyan people” only weeks after its companies spruiked vast quantities of guns, rocket launchers and missiles to be used against them.

For China’s collective leadership, there is much more at stake than Libya’s oil. The rolling jasmine revolutions, the NATO military intervention in Libya and the fall of Gaddafi each go to the core of the Communist Party’s conceits and insecurities.
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The conceit is that the US-led West is programmed for militaristic global domination and “containing” China’s rise, but is now in crisis.

In this narrative, NATO’s bombing of Libya belongs in the Iraq family of military misadventure, another step of amoral overreach, and is the overt expression of subversive American interference that was seen or imagined in Egypt, China and elsewhere. Whether it is North Korea, Iran, Pakistan or Gaddafi’s Libya, the enemy’s enemy is naturally a friend.

The insecurity is “the people are unsatisfied”, as a senior security officer put it to me, and each apparently successful revolution leaves China’s dictatorship a little more exposed. The Chinese might see unhelpful parallels between the authoritarian conditions that triggered uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya and what they experience at home.

Read more about China’s relationship with Libya from CDT: “Don’t Rush to Celebrate the Post-Gaddafi Era” and “China Recognizes Libya’s NTC as Ruling Authority; Moves Away from Policy of Strict Non-Interference”

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“China respects the choice of the Libyan people and attaches great importance to the status and the role of NTC, and has kept in close contact with it,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a written statement.

The announcement was made as the NTC has controlled most part of the North African nation following a six-month civil war and about 70 countries have recognized the legitimacy of the council.

“China will work with the NTC to realize a steady and smooth transition and development of bilateral ties,” Ma said, stressing China hopes that all the treaties and agreements inked previously with Libya will remain effective and be implemented seriously.

According to the spokesman, the NTC leadership are “delighted with the result that has long been expected.”

And from the Guardian:

China had already held talks with the NTC and said it valued its “important role”, but had held off full recognition.

“They have taken their time in recognising the rebels,” said Steve Tsang, professor of contemporary Chinese studies at Nottingham University.

“I would have thought they really should have done this much earlier. I suspect the timing was simply determined by the practical issues of negotiations with the National Transitional Council and that now they have something they think will be satisfactory from their perspective.”

But he added China’s behaviour would affect how it was seen by the rest of the world.

“You will have quite a lot of people concluding China is much more interested in protecting its own national interests than performing its duties as a leading power in the international scene. As [one of the] P5 [permanent members of the UN national security council] there are certain expectations and moral responsibilities … The way the post-Gaddafi situation has been handled, [people] have not been giving China a particularly high mark,” he said.

It is not yet clear what impact this move will have on relations between the new Libyan government and China, which have been tense following China’s past support for Qaddafi’s regime. The Wall Street Journal reports:

It wasn’t clear whether Monday’s announcement would pave the way for the further release of frozen Libyan funds, a major sticking point in relations between Beijing and the rebels. NTC leaders have complained recently that China was blocking the release of some such funds. Beijing has said it isn’t opposed to releasing more funds but needed to make sure adequate regulatory mechanisms were in place before agreeing.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports that the effort to sell arms to Qaddafi may have indicated tensions between the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry:

China’s leaders have never liked international sanctions, calling them interference in other nations’ affairs. But the disclosure of the Libyan negotiations underscores a divide many analysts say has long existed between the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry — which both have a say in approving arms sales.

Some believe that big state-run weapons companies, with their close ties to the military, easily make end runs around the diplomats in the Foreign Ministry, which negotiates China’s position on international sanctions.

“It’s possible, and has been the case in the past, that Chinese arms companies push their own agenda,” Mathieu Duchatel, a senior researcher in Beijing with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said in an interview. “There are informal relationships between the different actors, and the logical decision-making process can be bypassed in certain cases.”

The military alliance may gain an added edge when the diplomats are themselves embattled. Since the rebels mounted their revolt last February, China’s policy toward Libya has been up for grabs, with the government apparently torn between economic interest in Colonel Qaddafi’s continued rule and a desire to be on the winning side should his opponents take control.

A report in the Economist last week looks at how China’s response to the Libya crisis may reflect an evolution away from the strict policy of “non-interference” in foreign affairs:

Rhetorically, the principle of “non-interference” remains sacred. On September 6th China issued a white paper on its “peaceful development” (ie, rise), its first on the topic since 2005, well before financial crisis crushed Western economic confidence and propelled China even more to the fore in international terms. The document said China still upheld the principle and that it respected the right of others to “independently choose their own social system and path of development”. Usually this has meant supporting whoever is in power no matter how thuggish or unpopular. In Libya, though, China wavered.

It could have done as it did in earlier Arab uprisings: wait on the sidelines and recognise the legitimacy of opposition movements only after dictators had fallen. But Libya presented an unusual combination of challenges for China. These included demand at home for prompt action to ensure the safety of more than 35,000 Chinese working in the country; widespread support among (China-friendly) Arab countries for tough action against Muammar Qaddafi; and economic interests in Libya that might be threatened by supporting the wrong side.

China’s response at the start of the year to the upheaval in Egypt was typical of the old style. The state-owned media were quick to portray Cairo’s anti-government demonstrators as lawless troublemakers and played down their impact. The Communist Party did not want citizens at home to get any ideas. After President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in February, and with calls for a Chinese “jasmine revolution” circulating on the internet, many police were deployed in the centres of big cities to prevent any copycat unrest. China appeared defensive and insecure.

But its approach to the Libyan unrest proved somewhat different. First came its decision to vote in favour of UN sanctions against Colonel Qaddafi. Then it mounted a big operation to fly out its citizens on chartered flights and four military aircraft (China also sent a frigate from its duties off the Horn of Africa to provide protection for vessels transporting refugees across the Mediterranean). The official media called this the largest such operation China had mounted abroad since the Communist takeover in 1949. In a recent paper, the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, said these moves seemed to reflect China’s realisation that a posture of non-interference was “increasingly at odds with its global economic presence”.

Al Jazeera reports that, Chinese support or no, Libya’s government faces challenges ahead:

Sources:
- “China recognizes Libya’s NTC as ruling authority, representative of people” from Xinhua
- “Libya’s NTC gains Chinese recognition” from the Guardian
- “China Recognizes Libya’s NTC” from the Wall Street Journal
- “Secret Bid to Arm Qaddafi Sheds Light on Tensions in China Government” from the New York Times
- “China’s evolving foreign policy: The Libyan dilemma” from the Economist
- “‘Don’t Rush to Celebrate the Post-Gaddafi Era’” from China Digital Times
- “Beijing Says Qaddafi Officials Sought Chinese Arms Supplies” from China Digital Times

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In about a year’s time, a new group of leaders in Beijing will succeed President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. At the moment, analysts are focused primarily on the make-up of the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the supreme policy making body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Vice President Xi Jinping and Executive Vice Premier Li Keqiang, both members of the standing committee now, are assured of succeeding Hu and Wen, respectively. As a result, the guessing game that has engrossed many China watchers is over who will replace the other seven retiring members.

Speculating about top personnel decisions is both risky and not all that interesting. Such decisions are reached through intricate factional bargaining and compromises, and the ultimate outcome is typically not determined until the very end. Worse, handicapping the chances of frontrunners usually distracts us from trying to understand the broader policy implications of leadership transition. We become too preoccupied with the shifting fortunes of factions within the CCP leadership to explore whether leadership change actually affects policy.

So a more fruitful way of getting ourselves prepared for China’s upcoming leadership transition is to look back at history and examine whether the past top leadership changes resulted in significant foreign policy changes, and what explained such major shifts.

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Post tags: CCP 5th generation, foreign policy, Hu Jintao, leadership
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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 ….

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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Post tags: Europe, foreign policy, India, Japan, oil, Pakistan, People's Liberation Army, South China Sea, United States
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A recent poll shows there are more Americans who believe China will be the dominant power in 20 years than believe the United States will retain that position. Some analysts go further and argue that China’s rise will result in a clash similar to that between a rising Germany and a hegemonic Britain that led to World War I a century ago.

One should be skeptical about such dire projections. China still has a long way to go to catch up in military, economic and soft-power resources. In contrast, by 1900, Germany had surpassed Britain. Even if Chinese gross domestic product passes that of the United States at some point in the 2020s, the two economies would not be equal. China would still have a vast underdeveloped countryside, and it would almost certainly have begun to face demographic problems and slowing economic growth. As some Chinese say, they fear they will grow old before growing rich. China is a long way from posing the kind of challenge to America that the Kaiser’s Germany posed when it passed Britain.

But many Chinese do not see the world this way. They believe that the recession of 2008 represented a shift in the balance of world power, and that China should be less deferential to a declining United States. This overconfident power assessment has contributed to a more assertive Chinese foreign policy in the last two years. The shift in perceptions seems to have emboldened the Chinese government, even though the judgment is wrong.

Given that China and the United States face global challenges such as financial stability, cyber security and climate change, the two countries have much to gain from working together. Unfortunately, faulty power assessments have created hubris among some Chinese, and unnecessary fear of decline among some Americans, and these shifts in perception make cooperation difficult. Any American compromise is read in Beijing as confirmation of American weakness. But with more realistic projections and policies, China and America need not repeat the disastrous experience of Germany and Britain a century ago.

It would be wise to heed his words.

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