Abstract
This article seeks answers to two related questions in the context of China’s rise as a
great power. Has the Chinese leadership abandoned Deng’s low-profile diplomacy
and reoriented .Chinese foreign policy towards a more assertive or even
aggressive direction, supported by its new quotient of wealth and power? Is
China ready to take a global leadership role and assume international
responsibility as a great power? Focusing on China’s foreign policy after the
beginning of the global downturn in 2008, this article finds that China has
indeed become increasingly assertive in its defence of so-called ‘core’
national interests, reacting stridently to all perceived slights against its
national pride and sovereignty. While China has built its national strength
to effectively defend its state sovereignty and wield significant global
influence, it is still preoccupied by its immediate interests concerning
daunting internal and external challenges to its regime survival,
economic development and territorial integrity. Beijing’s assertiveness in defending its core interests, therefore,
is not accompanied by a broad vision
as a rising global power, making China
often reluctant to shoulder greater international responsibilities. In its
search for its rightful place,China is still reluctant to meet expectations for
it to play the leadership role of a
great power.
* Suisheng Zhao is a Professor and the
Director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation atJosef Korbel School of
International Studies,University of Denver and senior fellow at the Charhar
Institute. A founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary China, he is
the author and editor of more than ten books. His most recent books are: China’s Search for
Energy Security: Domestic Sources and
International Implications; China and the United States:Cooperation and
Competition in Northeast Asia;China-US Relations Transformed: Perspectives and Strategic Interactions; Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of
Law versus Democratization;A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern
Chinese Nationalism.
Key
Words
Chinese foreign policy, China’s global power
aspiration, China as a rising power,core national interests, global leadership
and responsibility, Chinese nationalism, global financial meltdown.
Introduction
China’s phenomenal rise as
a great power has been accompanied by a change in its foreign policy behaviour,
adopting a more confrontational position in relation to Western countries, as
well.as tougher actions, including repeated use of paramilitary forces,
economic sanctions, fishing and oil ventures, and other intimidating means, to
deal with territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas in the late
2000s and the early 2010s. This development has raised at least two related
questions.One is whether the Chinese leadership has abandoned Deng’s
low-profile diplomacy and has reoriented Chinese foreign policy towards a more
assertive or even aggressive direction, supported by its new quotient of wealth
and power, as an increasing number of observers have suggested that China has emerged ‘sooner and more assertively
than was expected before the wrenching global
financial crisis’.1 A Western scholar even went so far as to argue that ‘Beijing now
asserts its interestsand its willingness
to prevail- even at the expense of appearing the villain’.2 Another
Western observer believed that China was ‘moving gingerly
beyond the paradigm of developmental modesty’.3 The second
question is whether China is ready to take a global leadership role and
international responsibility as a great
power in confronting problems such as climate
change, genocide, and nuclear proliferation. In other words, is China prepared
to play the positive leadership role of a great power in the 21st century?
Most
of China’s foreign policy decisions were made through the lenses of issues that
were of
sole
importance to China, rather than on the basis of broader regional or global
economic and
security
concerns.
Seeking an answer to these questions,this
article focuses on China’s foreign policy behaviour after the beginning of the
global downturn in 2008. It finds that China has indeed become
increasingly assertive in its defence of
the so-called ‘core’ national interests, reacting stridently to all perceived
slights against its national pride and sovereignty. These changes produced
deleterious effects on China’s foreign policy making, and led China into tension
with both Western powers and its Asian neighbours, making China ‘one of the
loneliest rising powers
in world history’.4 Despite the significant
change, most of China’s foreign policy decisions were made through the lenses of
issues that were of sole importance to China, rather than on the basis of broader
regional or global economic and security concerns. While China has built its
national strength to defend effectively its state sovereignty and wield significant
global influence, it is still preoccupied with its immediate interests concerning
daunting internal and external challenges to its regime survival, economic
development and territorial integrity. Beijing’s assertiveness in defending
its core interests, therefore, is not accompanied by a broad vision
as a rising global power, making China often
reluctant to shoulder greater international responsibilities. Still in search
of its rightful place in the 21st century world, China is still
reluctant
to meet expectations for it to play the leadership
role of a great power. This article starts with an analysis of China’s pursuit of
its core interests during the global downturn and then goes on to
explain its driving forces. The third section
examines the implications of China’s new assertiveness
in pursuance of its core interests. From taoguangyanghui to Assertively
Pursuing Core Interests For many years after the end of the Cold War, being
aware that its circumscribed national strength and geostrategic position did
not allow it to exert enough clout, China followed
the taoguangyanghui policy- hiding its
capabilities, focusing on national strength-building, and biding its timeset by
Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s, kept its head low and avoided confrontation
with the U.S. andother Western powers.5 China’s lowprofile policy was a
response to China’s vulnerability in the wake of the Western sanctions
following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. As a result, Beijing devised a
‘mulin zhengce’ [good neighbour policy] for relations with its Asian neighbors
to create a peaceful regional environment conducive to its
economic development. In its relations with
major powers, Beijing made pragmatic accommodations to ‘learn to live with the
hegemon’, i.e., make adaptations and policy adjustments to accord with the
reality of U.S. dominance in the international system, and because the U.S.
held the key to China’s continuing modernization efforts.6
China
followed the taoguangyanghui policy- hiding its capabilities, focusing on national
strength-building, and biding its time- set by Deng Xiaoping in the early
1990s,
After rapid economic growth over the past
three decades, China weathered the global economic slowdown that started in
2008 better than many Western countries, and overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest
economy in 2010. China’s foreign policy behaviour has shifted towards a more assertive direction.
For one thing, China’s core national interests, defined as ‘the bottomline of
national survival’ and essentially non-negotiable,7 suddenly became a fashionable
term, appearing increasingly frequently in speeches of Chinese leaders and
official publications. While some Chinese scholars have cautioned to be more
ambiguous in listing China’s core interests, to leave room for maneuver, Chinese leaders have
made it clear that
sovereignty and territorial integrity are among
China’s core national interests. Chosen obviously with the intent to signal
the resolve of China’s rising power aspirations, Chinese leaders have steadily included
more and more controversial issues in the expanding list of China’s core interests.
Pursuing these core interests, China has reoriented its foreign policy in a
more assertive direction, reacting stridently to all perceived slights against its
national pride and sovereignty. These changes damaged China’s relations
with Western countries and many of its Asian-
Pacific neighbours.
Fueled
by rapid economic growth, China engaged for nearly two decades in a swift and
wide-ranging military modernisation with an emphasis on building naval
capacity.
In its relationship with Western countries,
China no longer avoided appearing confrontational, ‘berating American officials
for the global economic crisis, stage-managing President Obama’s
visit to China in November, refusing to
back a tougher climate change agreement in Copenhagen, and standing fast
against American demands for tough new Security Council sanctions
against Iran’.8 With Western economies floundering
and Chinese economic and diplomatic clout rising, a perception of the U.S. in
heavy debt to China, but still attempting to leverage its superiority to keep
China down, has made Chinese leaders less willing to make adaptations and more
ready to challenge the U.S. in defending what they call core interests. A
battered West presented a gratifying target for pent-up contempt.Raising the
stakes with regard to the U.S. predictable arms sales to Taiwan, China
ratcheted up the rhetoric in its dire-sounding warnings against the
consequences of the arms sales as a serious challenge to China’s core interests.
Rear Admiral Yang Yi openly stated that it was time for China to sanction the
U.S. defense firms behind
the sales to “reshape the policy choices of
the U.S.”.9 When the Obama Administration notified Congress of the US $6.4
billion arms sale to Taiwan on 29 January, his administration was met with
unprecedented Chinese objections. In addition to what China did in the past by
announcing the suspension of some military exchanges with the U.S. and
unleashing a storm of bluster by various relevant government and military agencies,
the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, officially threatened for the first
time to impose sanctions against American companies involved in the arms
sales.10 In response to President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai
Lama in early 2010, instead of following the low-profile dictum, China reminded
the West of the tough statement that Deng once made: “no one
should expect China to swallow the bitter fruit that hurts its
interests”.11 China’s
assertiveness vis-à-vis Europe, on issues involving its
core interests, was even more apparent. Regularly punishing European countries
when their leaders met the Dalai Lama in an official setting, China denounced German
chancellor Angela Merkel over her meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader.
China also suspended ties with Denmark after its prime minister met the Dalai
Lama and resumed them only after the Danish government issued a statement
saying it would oppose Tibetan independence and consider Beijing’s reaction
before inviting him
again. After French president Nicolas Sarkozy
met with the Dalai Lama in his capacity as the president of the European Union
(EU), Beijing abruptly canceled the scheduled EU summit in December 2008 to
show that, even amid the global economic crisis, it was ready to confront
the leaders of its biggest trading
partners. In its relations with Asian-Pacific neighbours, Beijing asserted its
core interests to prevail in maritime territorial disputes, even at the expense
of appearing the villain. For many decades after the founding of the People’s Republic
of
China (PRC), China pursued a delaying strategy,
which maintained China’s claim to the disputed territory but avoided using forces to
escalate the conflicts because its military forces were mostly land-based and
its naval capacity could rarely reach beyond its near seas. Fueled by rapid
economic growth, China engaged for nearly
two decades in a swift and wideranging military modernisation with an emphasis
on building naval capacity. With enhanced military capacity,
the People’s Liberation Army
Navy (PLAN)’s mission has expanded beyond primarily defending China’s coastlines
to securing the resources and sea lanes from the East China Sea along the Ryukyu
Islands chain, through Taiwan and the Philippines, and to the Straits of Malacca
in the South China Sea. Feeling it has more leverage and right to assert its
core interests forcefully, and catering to popular nationalist demands, China modified
its long time-delaying strategy and embarked on a new pattern of aggressively
asserting its suzerainty and sovereignty over the disputed maritime territories.
As a result, although China’s official statements on core interest issues involving sovereignty
and territorial integrity referred almost exclusively to the three issues of
Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang: “where the secessionist momentum challenges not only China’s
territorial integrity, but also the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party
as the ruling party of China”,12 Chinese leaders expanded the core interest issues in 2009 to
include the
maritime territorial claims in South China
Sea, where China confronts a mosaic of disputes over islands and seas also
claimed by Southeast Asian nations.13 Deploying more personnel and installing new
equipment to carry out regular sea patrols and more frequent and forceful law
enforcement in the South and East China Seas, China made strong reactions against
a chain of incidents during 2009 to 2012, including China’s repeated attempts
to prevent Vietnamese and
Philippine vessels from exploring oil and gas
in disputed waters in the South China Sea, and China’s punitive
actions during the Sino-Japanese stand-off over Japan’s detention
of a Chinese trawler captain and the Japanese government’s decisionto
nationalise the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.These
incidents provoked diplomatic crises during which China displayed its naval
warships to support its sovereignty claims. As a result, China’s relations
with
the Asia-Pacific countries have come to a low
point not seen in many years.
It
is a combination of confidence,frustration, and uncertainty that resulted in
China’s newfound assertiveness.
China’s toughness also
played out in the renewed dispute with India over what India claims to be its
northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and China claims to be its territory of
Southern Tibet. During the 1962 Sino-Indian Border War, China had advanced deep
into this region and withdrew after a brief occupation. Although Arunachal Pradesh
achieved statehood in 1987, China has continued to lay claim to this territory
and objected to any Indian assertion of sovereignty over the area, expressing
this in increasingly strident language in recent years. In the summer of 2009,
for instance, China blocked the Asian Development Bank from making a US $60
million multi-year loan because the loan was for infrastructure improvements in
the state.14 Indiathen moved to fund the projects itself, prompting China to
send more troops to the border. A trip by the Dalai Lama in November 2009 to
the state led Sino-Indian relations to deteriorate even further. Beijing was
angered because the Dalai Lama did not just visit Itanagar, the state capital,
but Tawang, which is the main bone of contention between India and China and
was described by Indian officials involved in the border negotiations with
China as ‘the piece of Indian real estate that China covets the most in the
border dispute’.15 In Indian eyes China has become increasingly
provocative over their long-running territorial
disputes in the Himalayas. As tensions intensified, India was awash with
predictions over China’s impending attack by 2012.16 Sources of China’s Changing Foreign
Policy Behaviour There are many factors that help explain China’s changing
foreign policy behaviour. One is China’s increasing confidence
in its ability to deal with the
West and the territorial disputes with its neighbours.
The second factor is China’s frustration over the perceived anti-China forces trying to prevent
Chinas rise to its rightful place. This frustration sustained the nationalist
sentiment to assert China’s core interests and prevail. The
third factor is that the possible slowdown of
China’s economic growth and the ongoing leadership transition brought uneasiness
among Chinese leaders, who had to meet any perceived threat to the regime’s legitimacy
with an unusually harsh reaction. It is a combination of confidence,
frustration, and uncertainty that resulted in China’s
newfoundassertiveness.
In
parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the China model or ‘Beijing consensus’became more
popular than the previously dominant‘Washington consensus’.
China’s confidence is derived mostly from
its enhanced power capacity, particularly its relative success in shrugging off
the global financial crisis and maintaining a strong growth trajectory. ‘Chinese
leaders are in essence realists. Their making of Chinese foreign policy often
starts from a careful assessment of China’s relative power in
the world’.17 As a result of China’s
perception of the global balance of power
tilting in its favour, Chinese leaders became increasingly confident of its
ability to deal with the West and settle territorial disputes on its own terms,
and are more willing to shape proactivelythe external environment rather than passively
react to it, to safeguard forcefully China’s national interests rather than
compromise them. For many years, the Chinese were on the receiving end of patronizing
lectures from Western leaders about the superiority of their brand of
capitalism. Now the tables have been turned. At the April 2009 Boao Asia Forum,
an annual high-level gathering of political and business leaders from
Asia-Pacific countries held on China’s Hainan Island, a Western journalist
reported that “there seemed scarcely a moment when a top Chinese official wasn’t
ridiculing the world’s financial institutions, demanding major concessions from the
United States, proposing new Asia-centric international architecture, or
threatening to turn off the taps of Chinese capital which the rest of the world
so desperately needs”.18 Indeed, the power transition from President George W. Bush to
President Barack Obama, and political gridlock in Congress, delayed adoption of
a stimulus bill until February 2009, shortly after President Obama took office,
too late to prevent the deep economic contraction. In comparison, the Chinese
government was much more effective in deploying its enormous state capacity to
ward off the economic recession. After Lehman Brothers fell in September 2008,
a two-day CCP (Political ConsultativeConference) Politburo meeting in early October
2008 was devoted to battling the global economic tsunami.19 After the meeting,
the State Council announced a four-trillion-yuan (US $586 billion) economic
stimulus package on 9 November. Thereafter, state-run banks were busy pumping
money throughout the economy. This huge fiscal stimulus package and expansion
of state-owned bank lending quickly pushed China’s economy out of the downturn.
For the first time in history, Chinese spending, rather than the U.S.
consumers, became the key to a global recovery. As a result, many Chinese were
convinced that a ‘China model’ that could strike a balance between economic growth and political
stability, and between a market oriented economy and an authoritarian state,
worked better for China than the Western model of modernisation. China’s
economic success made the
China model an alternative to the Western
model.20 In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the China model or ‘Beijing
consensus’ became more popular than the previously dominant ‘Washington
consensus’. As many developing countries looked for a recipe for faster growth
and greater stability than that offered by the neoliberal prescriptions of open
markets and free elections, the China model became an intellectual symbol of
national pride in China. With increasing confidence in
its rising power status, China became frustrated by what it perceived as
anti-China forces seeking to prevent China from rising to its rightful place. A ‘Middle Kingdom’ for centuries, China began a steady decline in the late 19th
century after it suffered defeats and humiliation at the hands of foreign
imperial powers and was plunged into chaos, involving war, famine, isolation,
and revolution. Struggling for national independence and modernisation, China
was now rising to regain the glorious position it enjoyed over two centuries
ago. This great power aspiration, however, was met with suspicion and
resistance by the perceived anti-China forces in the West, serving as an
uncomfortable reminder of the historical humiliation when China was weak.
Committing to overcoming humiliation and restoring its great power status, ‘the Chinese
have sometimes used the term ‘international status’ as if it were their only foreign policy goal’21 and were
therefore frustrated, at the least, by the following three perceived barriers to
China’s achievement of international status. The first is the so-called
structural conflict between China as a rising power and the United States as
the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world. Beijing was therefore convinced
that the U.S. would never give up the policy ofcontaining China. As a Chinese
foreign policy analyst stated, ‘with China’s rapid rise, the nature of the (China-U.S.) bilateral ties may
evolve from the “sole superpower against one of multiple other great powers” into “Number One
and Number Two powers”, and this may lead to a rise in tensions and conflicts’.22 Obama’s
presidency during a deep financial meltdown provided an opportunity to test
this thesis. Many Chinese assumed that a weakened U.S., heavily in debt to
China, would have to make more concessions to China’s core interests.
This assumption seemed to be confirmed by the first overseas trip in late
February 2009 of a duly penitent U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who
once boasted how strongly she had emphasised human rights during her 1995 visit
to Beijing, but who now suggested that China’s human rights records
should not get in the way of cooperation on the financial crisis and security
issues. As a Chinese scholar noted, after this visit, many Chinese thought that
the U.S. ‘should respond nicely to China’ because China did‘favours for
the U.S. on a couple of fronts – such as investing in its bonds and jointly stimulating the world
economy’. These Chinese were, therefore, frustrated at the end of the year
by ‘the rigid U.S. position’ that ‘does not
reflect the nature of the new Sino-U.S. symbiosis and fails to recognise
Beijing’s growing international clout’.23 For these
Chinese, the troubled relationship with the Obama Administration once again
confirmed that due to the structural conflict thesis, the U.S. engagement
policy is simply another face to cover its hidden agenda of preventing China
from rising as a peer power. Although many Americans cited China’s illiberal
political system as one of the main points of friction and pressed China on the
issues of human rights and democracy, the Chinese have wondered whether or not
conflict would remain and grow starker even if China became democratic, as the
U.S. would not want to see China, democratic or not, to be richer and stronger.
Second, many Chinese policymakers were frustrated by what they perceived as a
Western conspiracy to slow down China’s rise by blocking
China’s global search for natural resources and acquisition of foreign
assets. China’s rapid economic growth brought about an unprecedented resource
vulnerability. In 2003 China overtook Japan as the second largest oil consumer
next to the U.S., and in 2004 overtook the United States as the world’s biggest
consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel. China, therefore, had to search for
resources overseas to sustain its rise. Chinese policymakers, however, were
frustrated by the perceived attempts by the U.S. and other Western countries to
block China in its global search for resources. One of the most often cited
examples is the failure of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)’s US $18.5 billion
business takeover bid for the California-based oil firm Unocal Corp in early
2005, because of unusual political intervention from the U.S. Congress, which
considered that the CNOOC takeover of Unocal would make it a state-run entity,
and constitute a threat to U.S. national security. As a result, the Chevron
Corporation, the second largest U.S. petroleum company, acquired Unocal for US
$17 billion, US $1.5 billion less than CNOOC’s offer.24 This setback,
perceived as ignominious by the Chinese leadership, was repeated in 2009 when
the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto walked away from a tentative
agreement reached in 2008 with China Aluminum
Corp (Chinalco), which had offered to pay US $19.5 billion to increase its
stake in the global mining giant. The deal would have ranked as the
largest-ever foreign corporate investment by
a Chinese company. But to Beijing’s frustration, Rio Tinto rejected the deal, citing fierce
shareholder opposition and the skepticism of Australian regulators because “‘there are
lots of Aussies in high political places who don’t want [...] land
and resources sold to China’.25The rejection was ‘a blow to China’sambitions to buy access to raw materials crucial for its economic
growth’.26
Beijing
was increasingly frustrated over whether China could match the heightened Western
expectations, because positive responses could invite greater demands upon
China to follow Western expectations that China could not or should not meet.
The third frustration was the intensified international
scrutiny of many of China’s awkward domestic and external challenges, such as human rights,
media freedom, Tibet, Taiwan, pollution, and relationships with some allies in
the Global South whom the West considered questionable. For example, when China
was celebrating its success in preparing the showcase of the Beijing Olympics Games,
the Chinese government was caught by surprise when in March 2008 angry Tibetans
burned non- Tibetan businesses and attacked Han migrants. Seeing the riot as
organised
by foreign forces featherbedding China on
human rights, including ethnic minority rights in Tibet, to embarrass China
ahead of the Olympics, Beijing dispatched a large number of troops to suppress
the protests. The suppression China’s human rights and ethnic
problems and led not only to wide Western media condemnation but also to
demonstrations by international human rights groups and Tibetan exile communities
that plagued the Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco. The
perception that much of the foreign media took a clear anti-
China stance on the issue not only frustrated
but also angered the Chinese government and the Chinese people. The Chinese
leaders were also embarrassed by the announcement by
the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg of
his quitting as an artistic consultant to the Olympic Games to protest Beijing’s Sudan
policy. This was followed by nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates who signed a
letter to President Hu, urging China to uphold Olympic ideals by pressing Sudan
to stop atrocities in Darfur. The international scrutiny of China’s Sudan
policy was related to the rising expectation of China’s
responsible behaviour in relations with many of its friends in the Global
South. Many Western countries criticised China for undermining their efforts to
promote transparency and human rights as China vied for energy resources in
some of the most unstable parts of the world. They were particularly critical
of China pursuing deals with countries such as
Iran and Sudan that were off-limits
toWestern companies because of sanctions,
security concerns, or the threat of
bad publicity. To respond to Western
concerns, China joined the U.S. and
voted to impose and tighten sanctions
on Iran, supported the deployment
of a UN-African Union force in
Darfur and even sent its own military
engineers in 2007 to join the force.
But Beijing was increasingly frustrated
over whether China could match the
heightened Western expectations,
because positive responses could invite
greater demands upon China to follow
Western expectations that China could
not or should not meet. In an angry
response to the intensified international
scrutiny, Vice-President Xi Jinping, the
heir-apparent to President Hu Jintao,
used extraordinarily strong language
at a meeting with representatives of
the Chinese community during a visit
to Mexico City in February 2009 to
accuse ‘well-fed foreigners
with nothing
better to do than keep pointing fingers
at China, even though China is not
exporting revolution, poverty, hunger, or
making trouble for other countries. So,
what else is there to say?’27
This peculiar sense of frustration
sustained a popular nationalist sentiment,
which the Chinese government also
exploited to compensate for the declining
appeal of communism. With a deeply
rooted suspicion of the United States