Reading Kindleberger in Beijing: Xi Jinping’s China as a provider of global public goods
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Carla P. Freeman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120941401 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Chinese foreign policy: A Xi change? |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120941401
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(2) 297 –318
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120941401
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Reading Kindleberger in
Beijing: Xi Jinping’s China as a
provider of global public goods
Carla P. Freeman
Abstract
In 2017, scholar Joseph Nye postulated that a rising China that failed to deliver global public goods
could result in a ‘Kindleberger Trap’, failing, like the then rising United States about a century ago,
to supply global public goods at a time of need. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made expanding
China’s role in global public goods provision a hallmark of his foreign policy. This study assesses
Xi-led China’s commitment to supplying global public goods using guideposts from historical
examples of countries that made the shift from consumers to suppliers of global public goods.
It finds that China seeks to enlarge its role in providing global public goods. However, Beijing is
supplying those global public goods that it sees as maximising its interests, while simultaneously
reshaping existing or constructing new modalities for their delivery. This behaviour, associated
with systemic challengers, weakens confidence in China’s role as a stabiliser in future global crises.
Keywords
China, global governance, global public goods, hegemony, globalisation, Joseph Nye, Kindleberger
Trap, Xi Jinping
In 2017, Harvard scholar Joseph Nye published an essay entitled ‘The Kindleberger
Trap’, a counterpoise to his colleague Graham Allison’s frequently referenced work on
the ‘Thucydides Trap’, warning that when a rising power threatens to displace the regnant
power, war is the likely result. Allison’s (2015) study led him to urge China and the
United States to exercise strategic foresight to avert what he suggested was an otherwise
inevitable collision. Nye’s essay, in contrast, takes as its starting point Charles
Kindleberger’s observation that a key factor in the global economic chaos that erupted
beginning in 1929 was the failure of the then-rising United States to assume Great
Britain’s function as the lead global stabiliser. Drawing from this insight, Nye contends
that, rather than focus so heavily on the danger of a Sino-American ‘Thucydides Trap’,
greater attention should be given to what he identifies as a potentially more imminent
Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, USA
Corresponding author:
Carla P. Freeman, Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 1619
Massachusetts Ave., NW, Room 732, Washington, DC 20036-1903, USA.
Email: cfreeman5@jhu.edu
941401BPI0010.1177/1369148120941401The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFreeman
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
298 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(2)
risk: that China, like the United States nearly a century ago, may decline to supply needed
global public goods, and therefore become ‘a disruptive free rider that pushes the world
into a ‘Kindleberger Trap’ (Nye, 2017). Thus, in Nye’s view, a key danger to global stabil-
ity will not be China’s assumption of a greater role in providing global public goods, but
instead its failure to do so.
Nye’s usual popularity among the Chinese international relations (IR) commentariat
makes it notable that many Chinese scholars reacted unhappily to his speculation about
China’s role in a ‘Kindleberger Trap’. One Central Party School scholar, for example,
retorted that ‘the United States is no longer a solution to the problem (sic) of the world,
but the problem itself’ (Liang, 2018: 16). Another asked why, given China’s ‘resolution
to rejuvenate the Chinese nation’, there was concern that China might fail to deliver
global public goods (Cao, 2017). Such dismissal may reflect that many in Beijing read
Nye’s essay – which, as a commentary rather than an academic article, clearly aimed at a
policy audience – as casting doubt on one of the distinctive hallmarks of Xi Jinping’s
foreign policy: a call for China to expand its role as a supplier of global public goods.
Xi made clear from his 2012 debut as general secretary of China’s Communist Party,
chairman of its Central Military Commission, and designated president of its government,
that China was prepared to ‘make a greater [emphasis added] contribution to mankind’
(Xi, 2012). He has since repeatedly used the podium at global forums to make unprece-
dented references to China’s role in providing ‘global public goods’, variously guoji
gonggong pin, quanqiu gongwu pin, guoji gonggong chanpin, or guojixing gonggong
wupin.1 Previously, although Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, had spoken internationally
about China as a responsible power, he used the term public goods only in a domestic
context (Hu, 2005). Since 2013, beginning with Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s speech at the
Third World Peace Forum in Beijing, other senior Chinese officials have also described
China’s expanding role in international development, global trade and investment, as well
as the massive global connectivity scheme linking China to the world via new ports, roads
and railroads known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as providing global public
goods (Hou et al., 2014: 35). At the time of writing, as the coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) crisis is rapidly becoming truly global, messaging from China’s foreign
ministry and state media emphasises China’s role in supplying global public goods for
global health security (Foreign Ministry of China, 2020; Su, 2020).
In contrast, China-watchers in Washington, DC, are generally sceptical of official rhet-
oric from Beijing about China’s role as a supplier of global public goods. Beijing’s use of
the concept is often viewed through a prism of offensive realism, which sees China as an
aggressive strategic rival of the United States interested in undermining the international
status quo to augment its own relative influence (Norrlof and Reich, 2015). China-led
initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and BRI, associated by
China with international public goods provision, are depicted as aimed at creating a
‘veneer’ that a Sino-centric economic order already exists in Asia (Ratner et al., 2020).
In many respects, Xi’s approach to foreign policy fuels such scepticism and complicates
efforts to discern China’s real commitment to global public goods provision. Zhou Enlai,
who was premier under Mao Zedong, famously described diplomacy as ‘just another war,
but of words’ (Le Pesant, 2001: 140). Xi has reenergised the role of the CCP in overseas
propaganda activities along with expanding other dimensions of public diplomacy (Brady,
2015). An aim is to boost China’s ‘discourse power’, or ‘huayuquan’, to ‘tell a good
Chinese story’ on the international stage (Custer et al., 2019: 1–2). Xi’s rhetoric on global
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