muse
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2006
- Messages
- 13,006
- Reaction score
- 0
China - a great but hesitant power
Gulfnews: China - a great but hesitant power
09/26/2008 11:32 PM | By Philip Stephen, Financial Times
Each time I visit China I am struck by the hesitation. The world watches in awe and, if truth be told, with considerable apprehension, as China reclaims a place as a great power. Yet those steering the country's rise betray a strange ambivalence.
In Beijing, pride jostles with insecurity; studied diffidence sits alongside brisk self-confidence. Insistence that others, particularly the US, should be properly respectful of China's new status co-exists with a nervous inwardness.
The Olympics, it has been said many times, taught China more about the world and the world more about China. That is probably true. Yet there is little sign that the success of the games will recast Beijing's global outlook. China has still to decide what sort of power it wants to be. This matters greatly to the rest of us.
The inauguration in January of a new US president promises a fresh chapter in that nation's politics. The sunny confidence in laisser faire capitalism of the Reagan era has been lost to the convulsions in financial markets. The Iraq war demands a welcome humility as to the efficacy of US military power. To my mind, though, this election also closes the curtain on the Roosevelt/Truman era. The post-war global order, shaped in America's image, is nearing the end of its natural life.
This column has argued many times that the decisions taken by the next US president will be critical in determining what replaces it: a wider, more inclusive set of international rules and institutions; or a return to great power competition. Anyone with a passing knowledge of history will hope it is the former.
The choices made in Washington are a necessary but insufficient condition for a new international architecture. The decisions taken in Beijing will be as important. There will be no more pivotal relationship in coming decades than that between the US and China. As things stand, though, America is struggling to adjust to the passing of its unipolar moment while China is reluctant to admit the implications of its rise.
Learned discussions
Twice during recent months I have sat in on lengthy and learned discussions between Western and Chinese politicians, policymakers and scholars. Most recently I attended an excellent Sino-British event sponsored by the Great Britain-China Centre and the international department of China's Communist Party.
On one level, the impulses driving Chinese policymakers seem clear enough. This is a country with a ruthless sense of narrowly defined national interest. Beijing does not eschew multilateralism per se - it understands its new-found prosperity rests on a rules-based global trading system - but it remains a jealous guardian of national sovereignty. The bit of the United Nations charter that counts above all others is the one that proscribes interference in the domestic affairs of other states.
This China, rooted in the self-confidence that comes with being the world's oldest surviving civilisation, sees no reason to take lectures from the US or Europe on its human rights record or on its political system. It eschews the universalism claimed for Western democracy and resents the implication that its own political and social order is inferior. The legitimacy of the Communist Party, runs the refrain, lies in its success in lifting out of poverty hundreds of millions of its citizens.
In this frame of mind, Beijing is always exasperated with, and often angered by, demands that Tibet should be given significant autonomy, if not independence. "We solved the Tibet problem in the 1950s," I heard one ranking official say. "The Dalai Lama left." As for Taiwan, we should be in no doubt: Beijing will stop at nothing to prevent its independence. China's unity is inviolable.
This China defends a Westphalian view of sovereignty by refusing to put human rights at the centre of its relationships with Myanmar, Sudan or Zimbabwe. Non-interference is a vital source of geopolitical stability, an official told me during an earlier visit.
I should ask China's small regional neighbours whether they want Beijing to imitate the US by overturning regimes deemed hostile. Some of these arguments are tactical, of course. China has strategic reasons to prop up the regimes in Myanmar and North Korea, economic ones to keep close to Sudan and Zimbabwe. In any event, to demand that these countries end repression of their citizens might validate outside interference in China's affairs.
There is, though, the other China. Here, certainties are replaced by doubts and ambiguities, the desire to walk tall on the international stage by an abiding fear that if the domestic economy slows, the country will fall to social and political disorder.
This China has begun to wake up to the implications of its new-found status - to the idea that the price of being a great power is closer scrutiny of its governance at home and its actions abroad. Hence, it has steered the six-party talks to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and has backed three UN sanctions resolutions aimed at dissuading Iran from building the bomb. It has shown willing to nudge, if not push, the Sudanese government over Darfur.
My sense is that the internal debates around all these issues are more fluid and more intense than it might seem on the surface. But everyone agrees that the trajectory will depend critically on whether China sustains its economic miracle. I often hear Western policymakers worry about Beijing's new-found power. But perhaps they should be more fearful of a faltering China.
Gulfnews: China - a great but hesitant power
09/26/2008 11:32 PM | By Philip Stephen, Financial Times
Each time I visit China I am struck by the hesitation. The world watches in awe and, if truth be told, with considerable apprehension, as China reclaims a place as a great power. Yet those steering the country's rise betray a strange ambivalence.
In Beijing, pride jostles with insecurity; studied diffidence sits alongside brisk self-confidence. Insistence that others, particularly the US, should be properly respectful of China's new status co-exists with a nervous inwardness.
The Olympics, it has been said many times, taught China more about the world and the world more about China. That is probably true. Yet there is little sign that the success of the games will recast Beijing's global outlook. China has still to decide what sort of power it wants to be. This matters greatly to the rest of us.
The inauguration in January of a new US president promises a fresh chapter in that nation's politics. The sunny confidence in laisser faire capitalism of the Reagan era has been lost to the convulsions in financial markets. The Iraq war demands a welcome humility as to the efficacy of US military power. To my mind, though, this election also closes the curtain on the Roosevelt/Truman era. The post-war global order, shaped in America's image, is nearing the end of its natural life.
This column has argued many times that the decisions taken by the next US president will be critical in determining what replaces it: a wider, more inclusive set of international rules and institutions; or a return to great power competition. Anyone with a passing knowledge of history will hope it is the former.
The choices made in Washington are a necessary but insufficient condition for a new international architecture. The decisions taken in Beijing will be as important. There will be no more pivotal relationship in coming decades than that between the US and China. As things stand, though, America is struggling to adjust to the passing of its unipolar moment while China is reluctant to admit the implications of its rise.
Learned discussions
Twice during recent months I have sat in on lengthy and learned discussions between Western and Chinese politicians, policymakers and scholars. Most recently I attended an excellent Sino-British event sponsored by the Great Britain-China Centre and the international department of China's Communist Party.
On one level, the impulses driving Chinese policymakers seem clear enough. This is a country with a ruthless sense of narrowly defined national interest. Beijing does not eschew multilateralism per se - it understands its new-found prosperity rests on a rules-based global trading system - but it remains a jealous guardian of national sovereignty. The bit of the United Nations charter that counts above all others is the one that proscribes interference in the domestic affairs of other states.
This China, rooted in the self-confidence that comes with being the world's oldest surviving civilisation, sees no reason to take lectures from the US or Europe on its human rights record or on its political system. It eschews the universalism claimed for Western democracy and resents the implication that its own political and social order is inferior. The legitimacy of the Communist Party, runs the refrain, lies in its success in lifting out of poverty hundreds of millions of its citizens.
In this frame of mind, Beijing is always exasperated with, and often angered by, demands that Tibet should be given significant autonomy, if not independence. "We solved the Tibet problem in the 1950s," I heard one ranking official say. "The Dalai Lama left." As for Taiwan, we should be in no doubt: Beijing will stop at nothing to prevent its independence. China's unity is inviolable.
This China defends a Westphalian view of sovereignty by refusing to put human rights at the centre of its relationships with Myanmar, Sudan or Zimbabwe. Non-interference is a vital source of geopolitical stability, an official told me during an earlier visit.
I should ask China's small regional neighbours whether they want Beijing to imitate the US by overturning regimes deemed hostile. Some of these arguments are tactical, of course. China has strategic reasons to prop up the regimes in Myanmar and North Korea, economic ones to keep close to Sudan and Zimbabwe. In any event, to demand that these countries end repression of their citizens might validate outside interference in China's affairs.
There is, though, the other China. Here, certainties are replaced by doubts and ambiguities, the desire to walk tall on the international stage by an abiding fear that if the domestic economy slows, the country will fall to social and political disorder.
This China has begun to wake up to the implications of its new-found status - to the idea that the price of being a great power is closer scrutiny of its governance at home and its actions abroad. Hence, it has steered the six-party talks to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and has backed three UN sanctions resolutions aimed at dissuading Iran from building the bomb. It has shown willing to nudge, if not push, the Sudanese government over Darfur.
My sense is that the internal debates around all these issues are more fluid and more intense than it might seem on the surface. But everyone agrees that the trajectory will depend critically on whether China sustains its economic miracle. I often hear Western policymakers worry about Beijing's new-found power. But perhaps they should be more fearful of a faltering China.
