Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

China is a partner, not a foe

By Henry Leong - posted Wednesday, 10 May 2006


With the United States-led war on terror, and its disastrous Iraqi occupation saturating the media, Washington is turning to yet another rising security challenge - China. Over the past few months, key speeches by the Bush administration and policy documents have signalled US concerns about a rising China.

They included Secretary of State Condolezza Rice’s speech in Sydney for a trilateral approach by Australia, Japan and the US to “engage” China; Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review and mixed signals sent by Congress and the executive over the re-evaluation of the yuan; the Sino-US trade deficits and the repeated concerns over human rights in the communist state.

When one follows the US-dominated rhetoric and discourses, it would appear that China is the next Soviet Union: a precursor to the next stage of the Cold War that never ended in 1991. But is there a real basis for making such an assessment? Or is the nature of China’s rise something more complex than it is purported to be?

Advertisement

The article argues that while China’s rise is complex, the nation of 1.3 billion people is unlikely to be the nemesis in the new cold war. Three themes will support the proposition that China is not the existential threat that some sectors of the American establishment perceive the country to be.

Chinese power is different

First, the nature of Chinese power is very different from the defunct Soviet Union, notwithstanding that both are communist states.

The Soviet Empire was an expansionist and totalitarian regime. It inherited the Tsarist mantle of enlarging its borders in the European theatre, the Far East Asian front, the Caucasus corridor and the Central Asian region in the name of national security; messianic propagation of its values and ultimately, absolute control.

The first salvo fired in the Cold War was Stalin’s move into East Berlin after World War II. The Berlin Wall was built, dividing the capitalist west and the communist east in a protracted ideological tussle between Moscow and Washington that lasted over four decades.

On every front, the Soviet leadership presented the “Socialist paradise” as an ideological, political, economic, military and cultural rival to the United States. Although the Soviet empire was essentially a military power, it did not prevent the Kremlin from forming alternative organisations such as COMECON, the Warsaw Pact and other Soviet-led security and friendship pacts.

The many proxy wars fought by the two superpowers in the developing world were one of the many expressions of this rivalry. If there was one enemy that matched the true definition of a nemesis, it was the Soviet Union.

Advertisement

In contrast, China is not an expansionist power in the classical or contemporary sense. Neither does Beijing harbour colonial or hegemonic aspirations to pressure other states to embrace all things communist and Chinese. China is more concerned with recovering lost territories, a legacy of colonialism where dynastic China was “carved” up by western interests.

China’s policy towards Taiwan illustrates a claim in territorial sovereignty rather than an act of aggression. From the perspective of history and international law, China is exercising its sovereign prerogative to reclaim what rightfully belongs to the Chinese people. Beijing is staking a legal right to repossess a “renegade province” in a similar manner that it brought Hong Kong and Macau into Special Administrative Regions post-1997.

The circumstances of how the three regions were denied to China may differ but its legal right over them remains inviolable.

In the case of Taiwan, the substantial difference is that it is enmeshed among the interests of three great powers: China, the US and Japan. As such, comparisons by some scholars drawing parallels between the manner in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governs post-1949 China, and how dynastic (pre-1911) China established a system of suzerain and vassal relations in South-East Asia suffer from an historic disjoint and applicability. This is because post-1949 China is operating in a system of sovereign states where there are established rules and norms for inter-state dealings, unlike the former era of empires and kingdoms where the weaker subject "states" submitted to the stronger overlord entities.

The CCP is primarily obsessed with maintaining domestic stability, ensuring political control and sustaining economic growth. These are the three indivisible and inseparable political agendas of Beijing.

The Chinese preoccupation for domestic stability also extends to having a stake in the stability of the international system it so depends on for growth. This is underlined by Beijing’s emphasis on “peaceful development”.

While some hawkish cynics may dismiss it as the latest CCP rhetoric, the truth of the matter is that Chinese strategic thinking is consistently focused on the notion of luan (chaos) and the need for centralised domestic control. Hence, policies that are likely to usher in a state of chaos are anathema to the Chinese elite.

Chinese concerns are different

Beijing’s concern with stability is best seen in its recent “Go West” policy, aimed at addressing the crisis in the countryside. For two decades now, China has seen annual growth rate of 9 per cent on average, but this has benefited the urban east at the expense of the rural west.

The result is 120 million migrant workers and 150 million under-employed agricultural workers, accompanied by rising social tension and instability. The Chinese National People's Congress convened in Beijing on March 5 and officially adopted its eleventh “Five Year Plan” to tackle the dangerous syndrome of the “poor rural peasants and their rich urban cousins”.

The strategy aims to reverse the traditional flow of wealth from the rural to the urban sector. A few areas are targeted:

  1. the lowering of peasant taxes;
  2. consolidation of rural semi-democracy;
  3. better job matching and
  4. the improvement of education.

The 11th Five Year Plan (FYP) will reduce taxes for the peasantry and increase farm incomes. The lowering of taxes for peasants will remove one of the key structural impediments that is frustrating their standard of living.

As China lives and breathes the free market economy, peasant incomes have not kept pace with their agricultural yield. In many cases, peasants have seen a regression in their financial return: not a few are struggling to produce more in the hope of reaping higher returns, only to be caught in a vicious cycle of higher prices, unchanged tax rates and stagnating harvests.

The FYP will also address the quality of education. Beijing will endeavour to improve the quantity and quality of education by doing away with tuition fees for primary and junior high school students in western provinces and making it compulsory for urban teachers to teach for a period in rural areas as one of the criteria for promotion.

At the same time, the central government will consolidate the semi-democracy of the villages. The thinking behind this move is that by allowing inhabitants to choose freely from the acceptable candidates, it will stem the tide of excesses by local authorities and of municipal corruption - a common, but an increasingly bitter, issue for rural constituencies.

The 11th FYP will also seek to match migrant workers' skills with industrial needs. Migrant labour already in the cities will benefit from vocational training. Their children will also receive education. Training will be extended for another 100 million more on the waiting list. Continued growth requires a skilled labour force in both modernised manufacturing and the service sector.

Beijing has also committed to increasing the number of students in higher education from the current 23 million and the number of graduates from last year's record high of 3.4 million. This raises the overall education spending by more than 40 per cent, from 2.8 to 4 per cent of GDP.

Chinese responses to US concerns are different

The Soviets, under President Nikolai Khruschev, threatened in the 1960s to “bury the US [and the capitalist economies] with socialism”. Khruschev’s infamous speech at the UN General Assembly, where he rapped his shoe on the rostrum and uttered the chilling words, is perhaps the most graphic depiction of the antagonistic posture of the Soviet Empire towards the US. In the words of Winston Churchill, the “iron curtain has descended on Europe [and the world]”. Of course, the benefit of hindsight has shown us that the USSR imploded four decades later. The Iron Curtain corroded away and capitalism and democracy triumphed.

China does not and has never sought to “bury” the US. Instead, China’s diplomacy has been one of co-operation and not confrontation. This was seen in the recent April 2006 Sino-US summit. Both parties have expressed their role in the international system as “stakeholders”.

However, the usage of the term differs. The US used it to convey that China must use its new power for more than just economic gains, but flex its diplomatic muscles to facilitate a breakthrough in areas such as the North Korean nuclear deadlock and the Iranian nuclear issue. The Chinese employ “stakeholder” to mean “partners in constructive co-operation” as President Hu stressed in his address to Yale University.

The co-operative stance of China towards the US is far cry from the days of Mao Zedong. Gone are the days when Beijing’s preference for political and economic self sufficiency were characterised by an isolationist attitude towards foreign events that did not concern China. Since Deng Xiaoping’s modernisation program in 1978, China has become very much part of the international community. It is fully plugged into the international political and economic system.

China also has a major say on all salient international issues of the day and agrees to disagree with other members of the Security Council. The case of Iran and North Korea are two examples of China asserting its position, which though contrary to the US stance, is a more constructive approach in international diplomacy for keeping the peace.

The Sino-US ties are one of interdependence and mutual benefit. Of course, this does not belie the fact that fundamental differences in political cultures, systems of government and foreign policy agendas persist. The perennial issues of human rights, trade deficits, re-valuation of the yuan, religious persecution, intellectual property rights and China’s oil consumption patterns will confront any Chinese and American president in office.

Depending on the political climate in Washington and Beijing, selected issues can become political footballs for leaders to “kick” and “score goals” for the benefits of their domestic constituents and media consumption. But this dynamic relation again shows the Sino-US relations will blow hot and cold but never lukewarm or peripheral.

Ties that bind

The tendency to look for new enemies is characteristic of the moralistic bent in American foreign policy thinking. But it is a moral crusade that ends up creating unintended monsters and constructing self-fulfilling prophecies of a diabolical entity seeking to do mortal harm to the world in general and to the US in particular.

China is not the nemesis of the new Cold War. It is a normal, non-belligerent political actor pursuing its agenda in similar ways that any country of democratic or non-democratic persuasion will do.

Harvard Professor Richard Rosecrance remarked that China is a rising power that is willing to be co-opted unlike Soviet Union, Germany and Japan into the international community. But he also cautioned that this is provided that “we get it right”. Rosecrance’s observation encapsulated the unique and different configuration of the Chinese nation.

Isn’t it time to see China as a partner and not a foe? China, a nemesis? Certainly not.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

7 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Henry Leong is a graduate student in international relations at the Australian National University. His research interest is in Asian Security, particularly, in alliances and multilateralism. He trained as an archivist in Singapore.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Henry Leong

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Henry Leong
Article Tools
Comment 7 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy