Authors: Odd Westad
C
HINA’S INTERNATIONAL FUTURE
depends not only on China itself. It also depends on how others treat China. The power with the greatest ability to influence the future of China (and the world) is the United States. When China becomes the world’s largest economy sometime in the 2030s, the United States will still be the world’s leading military power, and it is set to remain so for another decade or more after that. Even more importantly, at the moment when China does become the world’s largest economy, around forty percent of its population will still be poor by international standards. Its per-capita income will be less than half that of the United States (and less than a third of Singapore’s, which around that time is projected to take over from Norway as the world’s richest country per capita). The United States will, because of its wealth and its power, be able to influence China’s rise in ways that no other country can. The big question is whether the United States will be willing to accommodate an increase in China’s status or will attempt to frustrate it.
Despite Chinese suspicions—historically grounded, as we have seen—that the United States wants to contain China because its majority population dislikes the Chinese, there is little contemporary evidence
of such prejudice. On the contrary, surveys show that all groups of Americans rate Chinese and Chinese Americans very highly on most variables, although some ethnic stereotypes persist. But when it comes to attitudes toward the current Chinese government, the picture changes. About two-thirds of Americans believe that it will be difficult for US leaders and the CCP regime to get along in the future. The key issues for conflict are seen to be human rights, Tibet, and trade.
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The majority believes that China could be a partner of the United States if Beijing became more democratic, but they also worry that the US government is not doing enough to preserve US jobs and wealth against Chinese competition. Just like nationalist views in China of other countries, the latter concern is really a criticism more of Washington than of Beijing. But the preoccupation with China’s lack of democracy and how it treats its own people is more fundamental and harder to overcome even if a US administration wanted to work with a CCP regime.
As we have seen, the Chinese fascination with the United States is nearly boundless. It mixes fear with attraction and admiration with disgust. Most Chinese can distinguish criticism of a government from criticism of a people, a nation, or even a state, but China’s new nationalism often gets in the way of a cool-headed appraisal of US policies. So does the Taiwan issue, where a vast majority of Chinese in the PRC believe that the United States is to blame for the lack of reunification, now as in the past. It is quite possible that popular Chinese views of the United States will turn more negative in the future, almost irrespective of what the US government says or does.
Anti-American attitudes among Chinese citizens are a double-edged sword to the CCP. Despite its hope that such attitudes can be used to solidify domestic support for current Chinese leaders, any rise in popular sentiment on the issue leaves Beijing with a problem. The CCP does not want a sustained confrontation with the United States, because it is convinced that would hinder China’s economic expansion. At the
moment the PRC government is, as we have seen, quite happy for the country’s economy to function within a US-led global economic system. The United States is after all acting in ways that, broadly speaking, promote growth in China. The last thing the PRC needs is a long-term strategic face-off with the most powerful country on earth, of the kind that destroyed the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.
China is therefore not headed for a form of Cold War with the United States. Despite what leaders in Beijing and Washington sometimes claim, there is simply not enough distance between the two sides in terms of how they believe the world is supposed to work to create a Cold War. There will be incidents and rivalries to be sure, and there is always the risk that Korea or Taiwan—the two perennials in the Sino-American relationship—may upstage any attempts at building strategic trust. But a long-term and systematic attempt at destroying each other with any means short of all-out war, such as Washington and Moscow mobilized around in the postwar era, is simply not in the cards. Being able to create distinct forms of cooperation, though, is quite another matter. For that to happen, China must become more than a spoiler of US policy in international affairs, and it is uncertain whether that can happen under its current regime. At its rhetorical core, Chinese foreign policy is concentrated on concepts that strike many Americans as rather old-fashioned: sovereignty, of course, but also honor, sincerity, and international respect. While general invocations of these concepts win China friends overseas, their specific use to protect petty dictators such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, or the Burmese junta plays badly internationally, and is disastrous in relations with Washington, where both liberals and conservatives feel that China’s only aim in so doing is to assist America’s enemies, whomever they may be. China has to learn that sticking it in the eye of the world’s hyperpower may bring short-term gratification, but it does not amount to a grand strategy in international politics.
C
HINA’S FOREIGN AFFAIRS
in the new century are quickly moving beyond its old horizons. A main challenge for any future Chinese leadership will be how to develop a
global
foreign policy and respond to concerns in regions that historically are little known in China, but that, to an unprecedented degree, will affect and be affected by the country’s economic growth. Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East need a policy by Beijing that goes beyond trade and resource extraction. But it will be very hard for the CCP or any other Chinese leaders to create such effective policies. The Chinese population is relatively uninterested in foreign affairs and less and less interested the more foreign these affairs become. Besides, China so far has had little to contribute outside its key economic role. As one African official said to me, China is not going to be an inspiration for good governance or anticorruption measures. Unlike the United States, China seems uninterested in peace plans, regional cooperation, or ethnic reconciliation. On the contrary, it seems intent to limit its political role as its economic importance increases. Such an approach is unlikely to serve China well.
The world may be tired of US interventionism, but it is certainly not ready to welcome an abstemious superpower. Most people, when crises occur, expect great powers to
lead
. The Middle East is bound to be a troubled region for decades, and China needs a policy that addresses the causes of the trouble and that will use economic clout to put such a policy into practice. China also needs to respond to those African leaders who will be saying, over the coming decades, that Beijing is simply following in the footsteps of the imperialists. It simply offers its own sorts of sweeteners to get access to natural resources, instead of forming partnerships with Africa and investing in poverty reduction. In order to improve its act China needs to draw on the expertise of the Chinese diaspora and strengthen its knowledge centers at home, making them more free and more open to the public. It needs policies and instruments for policy making that go beyond the simple purposes of securing China’s gains.
Some of my Chinese friends shake their heads at these arguments. How can China, they ask, develop such policies when it has so many unsolved problems at home? China cannot teach others about pluralism and tolerance, because it has a political regime that is dictatorial and intolerant. It cannot solve ethnic and religious conflict abroad, because it has no solution to such controversies within China. The Chinese people may want a state that is a great power but is itself immature in foreign affairs, often reducing other societies to simple caricatures of themselves. The counterargument is straightforward: Besides the rather obvious historical point (for someone who lives in Britain) that solving one’s own problems is not a prerequisite for developing policies for the world, China does not have a choice. No country with an economy that increasingly affects almost every human being can turn away from problems as they arise, even outside its own region. Sensible Chinese foreign policy leaders say that China does not want to have an American-style approach to the world, with its built-in conviction that all the world’s problems can and should be solved by the United States. That may be right, but it cannot be an invitation to put one’s head in the sand and then gloat over the mistakes of others. Such an approach may help achieve minor aims, but it is not a foreign policy, and far less a strategy.
One of the biggest ironies of Chinese foreign policy is that while Beijing has begun to realize that Baghdad and Buenos Aires matter, Brussels and Berlin are largely ignored. Although the European Union is now the PRC’s biggest economic partner, China’s relationship to the EU has been concentrated almost exclusively on narrow issues of trade and technology transfer. Chinese diplomats justify this, rather lamely, by saying that China traditionally prefers to deal with individual states rather than regional groupings. But as the ASEAN example has shown, this policy has not been very successful in the past and is even less likely to succeed toward a behemoth that is increasingly unified in international affairs. Even the Chinese policy toward individual European
countries has been, mainly, a nonpolicy, limited to stimulating economic exchange interspersed with the occasional and increasingly ritualistic condemnation of visits by the Dalai Lama or other
bêtes noires
in Beijing’s political bestiary.
This neglect of the third big concentration of power in the world will be problematic for China unless it dramatically changes its approach. Smart people in the Chinese foreign policy leadership are already strenuously arguing this point. It is possible that China will adjust its European policy over the coming decades, and that the two will draw closer. While China is more like the United States in its acceptance of change, it is more like Europe in its adversity to risk. This duality may seem contradictory but is not. Change, deemed to be internal, is viewed as controllable. Risk, containing at least elements of the external, is seen as uncontrollable. The Chinese and Europeans may turn out to be, on the whole, entirely wrong in their views of how best to interact with the outside world, but there is little doubt that their approaches have something in common, which may connect them further over time.
A
S WE HAVE SEEN
, China still has a lot of catching up to do in its approaches to the outside world. Some of this readjustment will be difficult to achieve until China gets a government that is more representative of its people. The Communist leaders at present argue that China has special characteristics that endorse the continued rule by its self-appointed elite. Sustaining this arrangement in the long run will be next to impossible. The Chinese are not more cloddish than other people at governing themselves, or more deserving of having decisions made for them by a small group. Because of China’s history, it is reasonable to assume that only a broadening of participation in political discussion and in government can help overcome the current deficiencies in Chinese foreign policy. But even when such a change happens, it is important for outsiders to remember that China’s foreign affairs will for a long time be run by people who are groomed and trained
within the current political system. This almost certain continuity means that the more that is done today to engage and debate the Chinese foreign policy elite, the better the chances are for future policies that reflect the rest of the world’s interests and not just China’s, irrespective of politics within the country itself.
Even when it becomes the world’s largest economy, China will be in no position to take the lead in global politics. The more probable scenario is a slow deterioration of US power, during the span of which we move toward a more multipolar world. The period in which the global economy will be centered on China, while the United States remains the world’s most powerful state, will be a dangerous one, in which both countries will have to tread very carefully to avoid conflict. Wise leaders will be helped in their efforts by the many ways in which the two countries will depend on each other for their people’s welfare and by the existence of other and different forms of powers, Europe and India first among them, which will remind leaders in Beijing and Washington that the stakes are high in their bilateral relationship. An emerging multipolar world may push China and the United States toward collaboration, or at least tolerance of each other, despite differences in political systems.
It is unlikely that China will get a Western-style form of government within the average lifetime of the readers of this book. But it is also unlikely that the CCP will remain in power the way it is today for several decades to come. The most plausible outcome is a fairly authoritarian government at the center, which will grudgingly allow some more provincial self-rule and more cultural autonomy for minorities. Such a blend—even if it is not what most foreign friends of China would like to see—could keep the country in political shape for a long time to come, and frame its relations with the outside world in a non-confrontational manner. But these are the views of a historian who cannot predict the future any better than others who know the country and its people well. What is certain, though, is that those who expect
China to remain for a long time as it is today will be proven wrong. Its turbulent past points toward a changeable future, during which both locals and foreigners will be surprised at the continuous resourcefulness and adaptability of the Chinese people.