25 May 2014
China's president Xi Jinping with David Cameron in December. Photograph: Xinhua/REUTERS
Recent actions and statements by the Communist party leadership in Beijing have again raised the question: should we fear China? China's dramatic rise as a global economic powerhouse has been extensively charted, if not universally accepted. But on a range of other fronts, China now appears in the process of challenging, and rejecting, not only American and western geopolitical leadership but also the legal, institutional and security framework of the post-war international order upon which that leadership was founded.
A recent paper published by Chen Jimin of the Communist party's central committee school, entitled The Crisis of Confidence in US Hegemony, reflected a widely held assumption evident in much Chinese thinking: that the US is in irreversible retreat, and growing weaker as China grows stronger. The issue, as seen in some Beijing quarters, is not how to manage China's rise but how to manage, and profit from, America's decline. The outcome of this seismic and hazardous transition may ultimately determine who runs the 21st century.
China's apparently growing opposition, or at least its deepening disregard, for the old world order came into sharper focus at the UN last week. Beijing joined Russia in vetoing a security council draft resolution calling for the crisis in Syria, including allegations of war crimes committed by both sides, to be referred to the International Criminal Court. In blocking the draft, China and Russia went against the 13 other members of the security council and the express wishes of 65 member states. Disturbing, yes. Hard to justify, certainly. Yet this sort of contrarian behaviour is increasingly the norm. China has frequently obstructed, or failed to support, other proposed UN actions on Syria and international crises ranging from Sudan and North Korea to Libya and Zimbabwe. Beijing caused real dismay in western diplomatic circles in March when it refused to join in condemning Russia's annexation of Crimea.
China's policy is not merely reflexive. It is proactively engaged in shaping alternative international power structures and realities that better serve its interests. President Xi Jinping last week proposed a new Asian security organisation that would include Russia, Turkey and Iran, but exclude the US. What he failed to mention were the negative implications for collective security of China's recent oil-drilling incursion into Vietnam's offshore exclusive economic zone, in contravention of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; its seizure of Philippines' territory in the South China sea and refusal to partake in a UN-run arbitration procedure; its restated claims to Indonesian and Malaysian waters; its ongoing confrontation with Japan, following its unilateral declaration of an air exclusion zone over contested islands in the East China sea.
In many of these disputes, China has bypassed the main regional organisation – the 10-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), demanding instead that its weaker neighbours deal with it on a bilateral basis. It is in contrast pursuing an expanded role for alternative international groupings which it can easily dominate. China's alleged state-sponsored cyber theft aimed at US and western businesses, its expropriation of other people's patents and intellectual property, its authoritarian, one-party domestic political model, its disregard for western ideas of human rights, free speech and open media reporting, its abusive treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang (scene of yet another bomb attack last week) and, for example, its ongoing failure to address its appalling environmental record may all be cited as additional reasons why China is developing in ways that are fundamentally inimical to western values, beliefs and interests.
On this analysis, China is no partner and no friend. It is a rival and potentially, a future menace to the way the west – meaning the old world order – would like the 21st-century world to be organised. This, at least, is how hardliners, particularly in the US, like to frame the argument.
Yet the argument is wrong on two counts. First, it lacks both self-knowledge and humility. When the true extent of the Syrian catastrophe is closely observed, when the ruinous impact of western interventionism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is held to the light, when the UN's abject failure to halt the tragedies of Rwanda, Bosnia and Congo is recalled, who is to say the new century does not need a revamped institutional framework? When the enormous gap between rich and poor nations, between north and south, between developed and developing world is examined, who will claim the western powers, so long in the driving seat, have earned the right to continuing predominance? When China's drive and energy is set against the old order's self-serving complacency and hypocrisy, who most deserves the chance to do things differently? The US, after all, is no paragon when it comes to UN resolutions.
Second, those who would condemn or confront China misunderstand the nature of the problem they face. China remains a developing country with enormous, unfulfilled human needs, a potentially explosive democratic deficit, a large post-2008 debt, a slowing economy, a chronic dependence on imported raw materials, a gaping urban-rural, rich-poor divide and a worsening threat from violent ethnic minority unrest. Some of China's recent foreign policy actions, especially towards close neighbours, have been self-defeating in part because the military and the security apparatus have too much autonomous power. A course correction is required. President Xi has been centralising authority around himself and may try to make one. But he faces opposition from the old guard, including former presidents, especially in his campaign to root out endemic official corruption. Xi has warned that, unless checked, the spread of corruption will "doom the party and the state". In this many-fronted struggle it is not certain he or the party will prevail.
China, in other words, is no unstoppable, all-threatening juggernaut, nor is it an inevitable heir to solo superpower status. It is a country like any other, albeit bigger, with complicated problems and challenges, an emerging power but not necessarily a malignant one. China need not be feared; reassurance lies in much greater engagement, and much less western hubris. For the old world powers, the necessary trick is to persuade China to play by the rules, whatever the new rules turn out to be.
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