In the Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut has an opinion piece about China’s recent actions involving its relationship with Libya, both before and after the fall of Gaddafi:
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.
Advertisement: Story continues belowThe 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”
