HOW CHINA IS CHANGING GLOBAL DIPLOMACY.
Cultural Revolution
by Joshua Kurlantzick
The New Republic
Post date: 06.21.05
Issue date: 06.27.05
At a major Asian security conference this month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was typically blunt. Discussing China's military modernization, Rumsfeld said that China's upgrade of its military technology was a threat to countries across Asia. "Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment?" Rumsfeld asked.
Unfortunately, he is focused on the wrong problem. China is indeed on the verge of posing a major threat to U.S. power and could potentially dominate parts of the developing world. But the real concern is not that China's armed forces will challenge the mighty U.S. military, which soon may spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined.
No, China's rising power is reflected in a different way. In late 2003, Australia hosted back-to-back state visits by two world leaders. The first to head down under was George W. Bush, a staunch ally of Australia, which, along with the United Kingdom, was a major provider of non-U.S. troops for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. On arrival, however, Bush was treated like a boorish distant cousin; his official reception was polite, but barely so. He stayed just 21 hours, and, speaking before the Australian parliament, faced protests outside and inside the chamber, where Green Party senators repeatedly interrupted him with catcalls.
The treatment was far different when Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived for a more extended stay. Though, less than a decade ago, fear of being swamped by Asians was a potent electoral issue in Australia, now Canberra threw open its arms to the Chinese leader. For days, Australia's business and political elite fêted Hu at lavish receptions. And, at China's request, Australian lawmakers barred potential irritants--like Tibetan activists--from parliament, as Hu became the first Asian leader to address the Australian legislature, receiving a 20-minute standing ovation. Perhaps this differing treatment shouldn't have been surprising. Australia's leaders were simply following their people's lead. Recent polls suggest that, despite decades of close American-Australian relations, Australians generally have a more favorable view of China than of the United States.
China has also scored diplomatic successes in Latin America, long thought to be within Washington's sphere of influence. During a highly successful twelve-day Latin America trip, which, like his visit to Australia, coincided with a brief Bush trip to the region that received a cool reception, Hu signed some $30 billion in new investment deals and subtly staked a claim that the United States was failing as the major power in the region. Hu stopped in regional giant Brazil, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva upgraded bilateral trade ties with Beijing and decided to send Brazilian advisers to Beijing to study Chinese economics. During an earlier trip to China, Lula had cooed to Hu: "We want a partnership that integrates our economies and serves as a paradigm for South-South cooperation."
Most important for Beijing, in oil-rich Venezuela, a nation increasingly shunned by the United States--which tacitly condoned a 2002 coup attempt against Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez--Chinese officials are solidifying an alliance with Caracas while providing Chávez an opportunity to point out Washington's failures in the region. While Chávez talks of slashing oil deliveries to the United States, he promises Beijing a long-term supply of petroleum. "China is a world power. She doesn't come here with imperialist airs," announced the Venezuelan leader, leaving the distinction with another world power unsaid. Chávez also plans to send advisers to Iran to help Tehran funnel its oil to Beijing. (Iran has inked deals to supply China with natural gas and to provide the Chinese state oil company, Sinopec, with a stake in one of Iran's biggest oil fields.)
Beijing's inroads with Australia and Latin America, two vastly different regions of the world, signify aspects of the same sea change. For the first time in centuries, China is becoming an international power, a nation with global foreign policy ambitions. In fact, China may become the first nation since the fall of the Soviet Union that could seriously challenge the United States for control of the international system.
As it develops, China has several key interests in the world. Because of China's booming economy and lack of domestic resources, securing stable supplies of oil, natural gas, and other natural resources--as well as safe passage for these resources--is of primary interest to Beijing. Second, as China's leading companies continue to grow and improve the quality of their products, Beijing clearly needs access to foreign markets. Less obviously, but no less significantly, China seeks to demonstrate that it is an international power, worthy of the same respect as the United States and capable of projecting enough power to limit U.S. intentions in Asia and other parts of the developing world. And, perhaps most important, Beijing wants to bring its own socioeconomic and political models to other developing countries, just as the United States historically has been committed to--at least rhetorically--the spread of democracy.
Beijing is pursuing these interests through a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, China appears to be building a string of alliances across the globe with nations shunned by the United States--nations like Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. At the same time, China appears to be wooing non-rogue developing nations--both democracies like Brazil and stable pseudo-authoritarian states like Malaysia. Beijing does so by championing a vision of international relations centered on national sovereignty--one that contrasts sharply with recent U.S. doctrine, by leveraging China's economic successes to win over foreign leaders and by using Chinese soft power to win hearts and minds even in places like Australia, once considered firm American allies.
China's rise may have significant positive effects. As China takes on a larger role in the world, it may come to assume a large role in peacekeeping, global aid disbursements, and other responsibilities currently handled by the United States and other wealthy nations. China even contributed funding to elections in Iraq. Because it straddles both the rich and the poor world, China could also help mediate between developed and developing countries at institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Yet China's more prominent international footprint is likely to threaten U.S. interests seriously. Beijing's quest for natural resources will thrust it into competition with the United States, particularly in crucial regions like West Africa and the Middle East. China's emergence as a growing power could threaten America's role as the primary guarantor of stability in Asia. Its increasing access to international markets could damage U.S. corporations, especially if Chinese businesses were subsidized by Beijing through soft loans that would allow them to operate unprofitably, at least for a time, and squeeze competitors' margins. And China's power could damage one of the most important U.S. interests of all: the spread of democracy, which will ultimately enable us to win the war on terrorism. Despite stumbles in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and other places where the White House continues to choose stability or cooperation on counterterrorism over liberalization, the United States remains the major force for democratization in the world.
Though hawks have been warning of a "China threat" for over a decade, they usually focus on China's military capabilities, not its diplomatic skills. The view elaborated in Rumsfeld's speech will likely be reflected in an upcoming Defense Department report on China's military intentions, programs, and strategies. Hawks have pushed to make the report as dire as possible, portraying China as a military threat that has sized up the weaknesses of the U.S. Armed Forces. Similarly, a recent Atlantic Monthly piece by Robert Kaplan forecasts a military showdown with Beijing. Yet, while China probably has the world's third-largest military budget, in most respects, Beijing badly lags the U.S. military. The Chinese military still relies too heavily on conscripts and wastes time and resources forcing troops to study political doctrine. Beijing probably spends less than $80 billion per year on its military, according to a rand study, in contrast to over $400 billion that the White House requested for the Pentagon's fiscal year 2006 budget. (China's defense spending as a percentage of GDP is also smaller than that of the United States.) In fact, a 2003 report on the Chinese military by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that Beijing was at least two decades from closing the gap on the United States.
In reality, an insecure Beijing, weakened by 150 years of foreign incursions into China, historically pursued a relatively nonaggressive foreign policy, focusing on defending core interests but rarely seeking influence over issues outside its borders and usually abstaining from important debates at the United Nations. In launching China's reforms in the late '70s, Deng Xiaoping pushed the country to develop its domestic economic and social resources, and not to focus on foreign affairs. In fact, Deng often explicitly warned China not to be a world leader--at least not for now--and, during Deng's time, China remained a poor, inward-looking nation.
That has begun to change. In May alone, China ran a trade surplus of almost $9 billion, and it sits atop the second-largest pile of currency reserves on earth. High growth--combined with intensive inculcation of nationalism via the Chinese press and education system--has created a self-confident populace more insistent that China play a major role in the international system, as University of Colorado Sinologist Peter Hays Gries notes in his book, China's New Nationalism. And, though this nationalism sometimes lies dormant beneath the surface of Chinese society, it can explode with little warning, as with the anti-Japan protests this spring--when I witnessed Beijingers, who normally brag about their Sony DVD players, scrambling over each other to try to smash up the Japanese embassy.
Meanwhile, two decades of development have also sharply raised the education level of Chinese leaders and diplomats. As former Time foreign editor Joshua Cooper Ramo notes in a fascinating new essay called "The Beijing Consensus," "In 1982 only 20 percent of China's provincial leaders had attended college. In 2002, this number was 98 percent." The Chinese government has made a concerted effort to upgrade its diplomatic corps, boosting their language fluency and other important skills. As a result, today Chinese leaders and diplomats are savvier and more knowledgeable about the outside than the men of Deng's generation. As one former American diplomat in China told me, Chinese officials can now describe in detail the splits within the U.S. neoconservative movement, a grasp of nuance sorely lacking in Beijing just ten years ago.
Richer, more worldly, more confident, China's mandarins have begun to reassess their place in the world. As Ramo writes, China is pursuing a deliberate policy to bolster its role in the international system and project its development model abroad. It is enunciating a new foreign policy doctrine, just as a young United States once did. The China doctrine has several components. One is the idea of "peaceful rise"--that China is growing into a preeminent power but would never use its strength unilaterally to threaten other countries, supposedly a sharp distinction from U.S. policy. Second is the notion that China has created a model of socioeconomic development that can be applied elsewhere--what Ramo calls the "Beijing consensus" of development for poor nations. This model argues that developing nations must pursue innovation-led growth by obtaining the latest technology; must control development from the top, so as to avoid the kind of chaos that comes from rapid economic opening; and must rely on links with other developing nations to counter the economic advantages of Western states. In controlling development from the top, of course, the Beijing model implicitly rejects both the free market and the idea that ordinary citizens, not a small elite of rulers, should control countries' destinies.
China then wields its policy doctrine, along with other weapons like trade and aid, to draw developing nations to its side. Beijing focuses in part on countries like Iran and Sudan, which are shunned by the United States, but it also aims closer to Washington's heart, seeking, if not to win over U.S. allies, then at least to complicate their loyalties by emphasizing that gains for developing nations come at the expense of arrogant Western powers. Playing off Western powers works: As prominent Indian economist Jayanta Roy said after visiting China, "I was happy to see that there is a hope for a developing country to outstrip the giants in a reasonably short period of time."
The Chinese challenge is most obvious in three areas of the world: Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Asia is China's natural sphere of influence and the one with the largest number of ethnic Chinese living outside China's borders. Asia is also the area in which China has made up the most ground on the United States. At first, China concentrated on Asian nations alienated from Washington. Since 1997, the United States has enforced severe sanctions against Burma's dictatorship. China has unsurprisingly paid the sanctions no mind. Instead, Beijing has sold Burma's military junta over $1 billion in military equipment. In return, Chinese businesses have gained access to Burma's valuable natural resources, while Chinese diplomats have become almost the only foreigners with insight into the workings of the secretive Burmese government. Today, wealthy Chinese businesspeople cruise the streets of Rangoon, Burma's impoverished capital, in late-model Mitsubishi jeeps, gabbing on ultra-pricey cell phones.
In Laos, until recently blocked by Congress from enjoying normal trade relations with the United States, China has become one of its largest trade partners. In Cambodia, where Prime Minister Hun Sen's poor human rights record--including alleged involvement in a grenade attack that maimed an American citizen--has led to frosty relations with Washington, China has given Phnom Penh at least $200 million in loans. Likewise, after the recent Uzbekistan crackdown on demonstrators, China quickly welcomed Uzbek autocrat Islam Karimov to Beijing. Across the Pacific Ocean, meanwhile, China has become a major aid donor to countries like Fiji--countries that could be crucial to U.S. military basing and missile defenses but that Washington has essentially ignored.
But, in the past five years, Beijing has also honed in on countries with close relationships with the United States, nations like South Korea, Thailand, and Mongolia. Again, understanding that leveraging Beijing's policy doctrine is crucial, Chinese diplomats repeatedly contrast China's "peaceful rise"--and its supposedly nonthreatening posture--with an aggressive, unilateralist United States. "We Asian countries" must work more closely together, at this time of "new manifestations of power politics," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Southeast Asian leaders at a 2003 summit, using typical Chinese coded language to refer to the United States. What's more, Chinese diplomats emphasize that China does not prod foreign nations to pursue political reform or market-driven economic liberalization. This reassurance is popular among Asian nations--such as Cambodia or Thailand--that have poor human rights records, that resent U.S. criticism of their domestic affairs, and that have a history of centralized economic planning, which makes China's Beijing consensus economic model appealing.
The response to Beijing has been overwhelming. As Southeast Asia scholar Carlyle Thayer has reported, China has inked long-term bilateral cooperation agreements with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, has, for the first time, accepted military aid from China. At the same time, while progress on several prospective trade pacts between the United States and Thailand have stalled, trade between China and Southeast Asia is growing by nearly 20 percent per year, and ten Southeast Asian nations have agreed to join a free-trade zone with China. China's trade with the rest of Asia is also expanding. Even India, which has a long-standing border dispute with China, has established new trade ties with Beijing.
Asian leaders increasingly look to China for economic and political cues as well. Though, less than a decade ago, Beijing maintained icy relations with Jakarta--strained by periodic attacks on Indonesia's ethnic Chinese--today, Indonesia's president publicly praises China's emergence as a leader in Asia. Singapore's senior minister, Goh Chok Tong, has expressed similar sentiments, saying, "China's extraordinary development sets the example for other Asian countries to follow." Ramo has reported that Vietnam, which fought a border war with China only 25 years ago, is now studying China's economic models for clues to faster development. In South Korea, President Roh Mun-Hyun has led Seoul toward Beijing's orbit, looking to China for help handling North Korea. In Thailand, which, during the cold war, was probably America's staunchest ally in Southeast Asia, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has said that China and India are now the "most important countries for Thailand's diplomacy." Meanwhile, Central Asian nations have formed a regional security group with China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization--an organization in which China takes the lead, pushing the group to focus on issues of concern to Beijing, such as the restive ethnic minority Uighur population in western China.
As they look to China, Asian leaders are increasingly willing to do Beijing's bidding. Nations from Nepal to Singapore have restricted the activities of Tibetan and Falun Gong activists. Presumably at China's insistence, Malaysia's deputy prime minister publicly warned Malaysian politicians to avoid official visits to Taiwan, while Thailand tried to deny a visa to a top Taiwanese labor official.
Average Asians, too, look to China, which is building up its soft power in the region. In one poll, three-quarters of Thais said they considered China Thailand's closest friend, while less than 10 percent picked the United States. Asian businesspeople covet invites to the Boao Forum for Asia, a conference about Asia's future held on a Chinese resort island to which Beijing invites thousands of business and political leaders. Asian students increasingly seek out education in China, rather than the United States, and Chinese-language schools are gaining popularity in South Korea, Malaysia, and other countries. Meanwhile, ethnic Chinese living outside the Chinese mainland, once afraid to showcase their heritage for fear of being singled out as a wealthy minority, have become increasingly outspoken about their roots. In part, they are more comfortable with their heritage, because China has begun actively promoting Chinese culture through new cultural centers and TV stations. (By contrast, the United States has cut back on its cultural centers in Asia, many of which used to be affiliated with the United States Information Service.) "It looks like being Chinese is cool," publisher Kitti Jinsiriwanich told The Wall Street Journal, explaining his decision to produce a glossy magazine about ethnic Chinese life in Bangkok and why advertisers were lapping up his copy.
In Africa and Latin America, where postindependence economic models imposed by Western international financial organizations have failed to raise living standards, China's ideas, its companies, and its emphasis on a multipolar international system are also increasingly welcome. Beijing has signed trade deals with 40 African states. In many resource-rich African countries--including pariah nations like Sudan, where Beijing covets Sudanese oil--China has dramatically bolstered its diplomatic and economic presence, as Stéphanie Giry has reported in these pages ("Out of Beijing," November 15, 2004). In Zimbabwe, Beijing has become a major provider of military hardware, including fighter jets. "Suffering under the effects of international isolation, Zimbabwe has looked to new partners, including China, who won't attach conditions [to aid]," one Western diplomat told The Christian Science Monitor.
Hu's 2004 trip to Latin America highlighted China's growing power there as well, even as the Bush administration neglects the region. As Ramo notes, China's enormous consumption of natural resources, such as steel, oil, and copper, makes it an essential ally and trading partner of nearly any nation in Latin America and Africa. Indeed, not only did Hu sign $30 billion in new investment deals during his Latin trip, but China has become Brazil's second-biggest trading partner. By comparison, during his 2004 Latin America swing, Bush spent little time anywhere other than Colombia and Chile (and almost got in a fistfight in the latter). Furthermore, the American president has failed to persuade Latin nations to back his proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas pact, one of the White House's main goals for the Western Hemisphere.
As in Asia, China's education system and culture-- components of its soft power--have become attractive to African and Latin American elites. Beijing has developed a proposal to bring over 10,000 African professionals to China for human resources development. And, as in Asia, key African and Latin leaders, awed by China's economic success, praise Beijing's foreign policy doctrine and development model. "China is doing a wonderful job," Muyingo Steuem, a Ugandan government adviser dazzled by China's big cities, told The Financial Times during last year's World Bank conference on poverty alleviation, held in bustling Shanghai. "In developing countries, China is regarded with a mixture of envy, admiration, and awe," U.N. Development Program chief Mark Malloch Brown told the FT during the same conference.
In some respects, China's new foreign policy assertiveness is only natural, and it could benefit the developing world. Until 150 years ago, China was one of the world's most powerful nations, and Beijing is, in many respects, regaining the position in foreign affairs and global trade it enjoyed for centuries. As China engages more with the developing world, it is beginning to project its power for the good of others. It has been expanding its participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations. Beijing has also started playing a larger, more positive role in global trade talks and could help to bridge the gap between richer nations and the developing world on tough issues like agricultural subsidies; China has also lived up to its WTO commitments, in some cases more so than the United States. After the Asian tsunami, China offered significant aid disbursements to affected nations (though Beijing's pledge of roughly $85 million in initial government aid was dwarfed by the U.S. offer). China also has become more of a player on the U.N. Security Council, a role it traditionally abdicated--Beijing has backed antiterrorism resolutions and avoided blocking the U.S.-led war in Iraq. As China becomes more powerful, it may take on a more beneficent role at Turtle Bay.
But, despite significant political opening over the past two decades, China remains a highly authoritarian state, one in which individuals who try to form national political organizations are suppressed. In recent months, the government has launched a new strike against dissent, detaining prominent intellectuals, upping its crackdown against the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, increasing press censorship, and bolstering its Internet firewalling. China also canceled an international human rights conference due to be held in Beijing and arrested a Hong Kong-based journalist for the Singapore Straits Times and a Chinese researcher for The New York Times. Today, China has the largest number of journalists in jail of any country.
This is hardly an ideal political model for developing nations--following the Chinese model might forestall democratization. Indeed, African, Asian, and Latin American democrats certainly can take no comfort in their leaders moving closer to Beijing, since China places no priority on human rights in its decisions about its allies. Beijing's aid and trade prop up the brutal Burmese and Sudanese regimes, allowing them to ignore Western sanctions, and Beijing reportedly has helped prevent the U.N. Security Council from taking tougher action against genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur.
What's more, China's talk of noninterference may be just that--talk. As the University of Colorado's Hays Gries writes, China historically has practiced a politics defined by the term biao li bu yi--"surface and reality differ." After all, Chinese academics at government-linked think tanks say that, ultimately, China will surpass the United States in Asia and control the region. Some foreign leaders recognize that China's kinder face abroad may mask a desire to increase Chinese power across the developing world. A classified report by the Philippine armed forces captures the difference between Beijing's statements and actions. It notes: "China's actions are widely viewed as a doubled-edge[d] diplomatic strategy aimed at furthering its strategic goals in the region."
Unfortunately, though some nations may resent China's growing power, too often they resent the United States more. The United States has all but abdicated its presence in parts of the developing world, and Washington seems unprepared for China's emergence as a more aggressive foreign policy actor. Washington lacks enough diplomats who truly understand China's foreign policy intentions and how it executes its ambitions on the ground. Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge has noted that the workforce at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing is half the size of the one assigned to the new embassy in Baghdad.
At the same time that China's influence has grown, the U.S. means of leverage--aid allocations, trade deals, academic ties, popular culture--are weakening, undermined by everything from new restrictions on student visas to the prisoner abuse scandals at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Worse, when dealing with longtime allies like Thailand, Washington too often talks about little other than terrorism. Asians find the American "obsession" with terrorism tedious, Karim Raslan, a prominent Malaysian writer, told The New York Times. "We've all got to live. We've all got to make money," he said. "The Chinese want to make money, and so do we."
Savvy American officials are beginning to understand how China is switching from a defensive to an offensive foreign policy. During an important visit to Southeast Asia earlier this year, new Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a former trade negotiator, tried to recapture lost ground. He emphasized not only counterterrorism cooperation but also economic ties, aid disbursements, and other issues of importance to Asian nations. The mild-mannered Zoellick was a hit. "The Zoellick road show was an important signal from Washington that Southeast Asia was not being ignored by the world's No. 1 superpower," enthused the Singapore Straits Times.
Meanwhile, administration hawks--who concentrated on China early in Bush's first term--are beginning to refocus their attention on Beijing. Even as Rumsfeld talks about China's military power, other hawks are trying to more effectively leverage key foreign allies against China. They are doing so by drawing important nations more tightly under the U.S. security umbrella. Washington appears to have convinced Tokyo to move closer to the U.S. position on Taiwan--as reflected in a joint statement issued in February--and the Bush administration is reaching out to India, with Rumsfeld calling for closer ties with New Delhi.
But these are only initial steps. Is Washington up to the task of reorienting foreign policy to handle a competitor like the cold war-era Soviet Union, one with a defined foreign policy doctrine and allies across the globe?
Too often, official Washington, whether focused on China's military or awed by China's booming economy, simply disregards the gravity of China's changing foreign policy. During a private luncheon last year for the American ambassador to Thailand, one person asked about recent unrest in southern Thailand, where the United States closed its consulate a decade ago--and where the region has become a potential hotbed of Islamic extremism. The ambassador mentioned that the United States was still trying to exert influence in the south and had reopened a program in southern Thailand, a small "American corner" where Thais could read English-language books to learn about the United States. What happened to the U.S. consulate, asked someone else in the audience. The ambassador paused. "I think it's the Chinese consulate now," he said. Everyone in the room laughed.
