What next for China?
| Author | Leonard, Mark |
| Position | Features - Essay |
In this era of globalisation and universal norms, it is striking that China's foreign policy is still marked by an unashamed focus on 'national' power. It is hard to imagine advisers to Napoleon, Lord Palmerston, Bismarck, or even George Bush drawing up complex charts to rank their own country's economic, political and military power against the competition. But that is precisely what Chinese thinkers are doing. Measuring 'CNP'--short for Comprehensive National Power--has become a national obsession. Each of the major foreign policy think-tanks has devised its own index to give a numerical value to every nation's power.
But although all Chinese thinkers agree that their country must do all that is possible to recover its status as a Great Power, they do not all agree on how best to achieve this goal.
Neo-comms vs. liberal internationalists
On one side of the spectrum is a growing group of 'liberal internationalists'. These thinkers--such as Zheng Bijan, Qin Yaqing and Shi Yinhong--believe that China should abandon its victim complex and play a more active role in international affairs.
Their starting point has to be an acknowledgement that China is rising (thereby abandoning Deng Xiaoping's principle that China should hide its brightness). But in parallel with this admission, Beijing must have a concerted strategy to show that China is interested in joining rather than overthrowing the existing international order. They want China to become more assertive in defending its interests, but to do it within the existing system. This idea was captured in Zheng Bijan's famous slogan of 'Peaceful Rise'.
On the other end of the spectrum are the assertive nationalists, China's answer to the neo-cons, or considering their formal affiliation, 'neo-comms'. One of the most vocal is Professor Yan Xuetong, Director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University. He is angry at the influence that liberal internationalists have had on Chinese foreign policy: 'The basic difference between us and them is that they emphasise appeasement and we want containment', he says.
This applies to the USA, Japan and Taiwan. Their basic argument is that because China is weak we should make concessions. We think that if you make concessions, they will just ask for more. The problems we are having with Japan and Taiwan are a direct result of years of appeasement.
In the middle is the largest group of thinkers--the pragmatists--who will support any idea that advances China's interests. All three camps are mixing Western theories with traditional Chinese thinking to advance their cause. They have taken three of the most striking Western ideas about globalisation and turned them on their head, transforming concepts used to describe the decline of the nation state into strategies for increasing China's national power.
For example, the idea of 'soft power', which is associated in the West with the attractiveness of companies such as McDonald's and Levi's, has been transformed in Chinese hands into a quest by the Chinese state to recapture the 'moral high-ground' of international relations.
The idea of 'multilateralism' is associated in the West with the dilution of national sovereignty as member states agree to be bound by the rules of supranational institutions like the European Union or World Trade Organisation. It has been recast as a tool of national power projection that allows China to develop links with other Asian countries that exclude the USA.
Finally the idea of 'asymmetric war'--coined to describe the tactics of guerrilla groups such as the Viet Cong or Al-Qaeda--has been rethought by China on an industrial scale. Chinese strategists have explored ways of using military weapons, financial assets and international law to challenge US power rather than seeking to match its might in conventional terms. As the discussion below shows, Chinese liberal internationalists and neo-comms alike are pushing against the barriers of Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy orthodoxy to promote the idea of a 'Walled World'.
Soft power
The military scholar Yang Yi argues that the US has created a 'strategic siege' around China by assuming the 'moral height' in international relations. Every time the People's Republic tries to assert itself in diplomatic terms, to modernise its military or to open relationships with other countries, the USA presents it as a threat (Yang, 2006). And the rest of the world, Yang Yi complains, all too often takes its lead from the hyper-power. According to him
the United States has the final say on the making and revising of the international rules of the game. They have dominated international discourse, occupying the 'moral high ground' of the majority of international public opinions and rules of conduct. Therefore, what often occurs in international affairs is that the United States argues 'only we can do this, and you can't do this.
Chinese thinkers are desperately trying to free themselves from this trap. One of the hottest buzz-words in Chinese foreign policy circles is 'ruan quanli'--the Chinese term for 'soft power'. This modish concept was invented by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990 (Nye, 1990), but it is being promoted with far more zeal in Beijing than in Washington DC. Unlike its more aggressive antithesis 'hard power', which is about bribing or forcing other countries to do what you want, 'soft power' is defined as the ability to get others to want what you want. It depends neither on economic carrots nor political sticks, but rather on the attractiveness of your culture and ideas, your legitimacy in the eyes of others, and your ability to set the rules in international organisations.
Chinese scholars, such as Yang Yi and Yan Xuetong, complain that for most of the last twenty years 'soft power' has been the preserve of the West: Western countries had the biggest markets; Western culture and morality were the most aspirational; and the international institutions created after the Second World War were also Western constructs, with membership open to the rest of the world only if they met certain standards of behaviour. But now...
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