Under President Hu Jintao, China has emerged as an increasingly polished diplomatic actor, but its foreign performances are often marred by the failure of a rickety bureaucracy to meet international expectations.
Accompanied by a throbbing media soundtrack about a ”rising China”, Beijing’s go-between role in crises from Darfur to North Korea has drawn criticism from Western powers wanting tougher steps, but also praise for a maturing power willing to compromise and even broker solutions.
Yet as Communist Party leaders prepare to meet in October and give Hu five more years as party chief, tensions over export safety, competition for resources and environmental threats have shown Beijing ill-prepared for the complex pressures of world-stage stardom.
Those tensions have underscored how China’s rival ministries and institutions often cannot match ambitious foreign expectations of the country’s capabilities.
”This is a governance problem, this is weak institutions,” said Susan Shirk, a former United States diplomat and author of China: Fragile Superpower. ”I think China’s governance problem will continue to be a problem as it grows in power.”
China’s leaders have recently discouraged cocky talk, stressing anew that their nation’s poverty and its weak spots call for a more modest international stance that will excuse it from many heavy burdens for a long time.
Finding a balance
Finding the balance between expanding international influence and spending power and a reluctance to assume unwelcome responsibilities will be one of the defining tensions of Hu’s foreign agenda in coming years.
”The problem is that China’s system is so fragmented and decentralised, so how China can coordinate itself in the face of international expectations is the big question,” said Zheng Yongnian of the University of Nottingham in Britain.
”The central leadership is aware of this, but the difficult question is how to deal with it.”
Over the past five years, China’s diplomats have become increasingly adept in set-piece skirmishes at negotiating tables.
US envoy Christopher Hill has praised the deftness of China’s diplomats in engineering a nuclear disarmament deal with long-resistant North Korea.
Beijing has claimed credit for persuading Sudan to accept United Nations. peacekeepers in troubled Darfur. Tensions with neighbour Japan have eased since last year with mutual visits by then-prime minister Shinzo Abe and Premier Wen Jiabao.
In Africa, Latin America and other regions, China has developed a pitch that relies on swarms of leaders visiting with the doggedness of door-to-door salesmen, offering business deals, free-trade talks and lasting friendship.
Hu and Wen dutifully charm regional forums sometimes slighted by other top-flight leaders.
But even as US pundits have poured out anxious commentary about China’s diplomatic offensive, Beijing has become worried that its high profile is generating ”excessive responsibilities” the government cannot or should not meet.
”Some people are placing every problem existing and arising in the world at China’s doorstop,” Ma Zhengang, head of a think tank under the Chinese Foreign Ministry, wrote recently.
Cooling the rhetoric
In February, Wen sought to cool rhetoric about the country’s rise by stressing that China remained in the early stages of economic development.
”Precisely by not raising our banner or taking the lead internationally we’ve been able to expand our room for manoeuvre in international affairs,” Wen said in what the Foreign Ministry has called a key policy statement.
Wen asked rhetorically whether that stance should change as other countries piled demands on China.
”The answer is emphatic — there is no reason whatsoever to alter this policy”.
On cue, China has been struck by a string of product quality scares and disputes that have exposed the brittle domestic underpinnings of its confident international image.
Officials have been playing catch-up after a torrent of international complaints and Washington warnings about unsafe foods, toys, tyres and other exports.
Tensions over lax intellectual property protection and environmental pollution harming neighbours have also underscored the mismatch between rising international influence and sluggish or incompetent domestic regulation.
More than most big countries, the leaders of China must navigate a maze of top-down bureaucracies which are divided between party and government wings and are often reluctant to work together, share information or cede power.
Where foreign analysts may see a clockwork plan to win new sources of oil and resources, China’s own experts see an often muddled scramble to hop on a policy bandwagon, said Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
”Too many problems depend on ad hoc solutions, not regularised and systematic processes,” said Shi Yinhong, of the People’s University of China. ”That worked somehow when we were less prominent, but it’s outdated.”
Hu recognises the problem.
In August 2006 he convened an unusually large ”work conference” focused on how to better meld domestic and foreign policy — a meeting Chinese diplomats now call a watershed.
But it may take the kind of deep political reorganisation Hu has so far resisted before the country’s domestic institutions begin catching up with its international profile.
”This may be a stage that China has to go through,” said Zheng. ”Moving out requires real reform domestically. That could be good in the long run but change like that takes time.” – Reuters