In official speak, it’s about ”one world, one dream”. But as the waves of patriotic pride build, this month’s Beijing Olympics are beginning to look like a globally televised, heavily choreographed celebration of advancing, muscular Chinese nationhood. One country, one team.
Using the event to showcase China’s emergence as a potentially dominant world power was always part of the Communist Party’s game plan. In this sense, the medals table, which China expects to dominate, is a metaphor for broader international competition for resources and influence.
After centuries of humiliation by the West, few could fairly deny China a self-glorifying day in the sun. But how to stop Beijing over-egging its nationalist pudding — how to prevent superpower turning to super-arrogance as has happened elsewhere — is the big post-Olympic question.
Speaking at a recent conference in London, Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, voiced concern that China could ”go the Bush-Cheney way”, forsaking multilateralism in selfish, unheeding pursuit of perceived national interest.
In a pamphlet co-authored with Katinka Barysch, Can Europe and China Shape a New World Order?, Grant highlights China’s fierce adherence to principles of national sovereignty and non-interference. Its vetoing of Western efforts to rein in Zimbabwe’s pariah regime is one recent example of a holdover non-aligned mentality.
Economic and trade tensions with Europe and the United States, the environmental impact of its rapid development, authoritarian governance and human rights abuses and its rapid military build-up are all factors feeding Western perceptions, measured in recent polls, that a resurgent China represents ”the biggest threat to global stability”.
But Grant and Barysch have argued that what American author Robert Kagan predicts will be a future ”axis of autocracies” linking China to like-minded unilateralists in Russia and elsewhere in Asia is not inevitable. Beijing was already collaborating with the West on North Korea and Iran, if less so on Sudan and Burma, they said.
An internal debate was under way between ”liberal internationalists” and ”assertive nationalists” over whether Beijing should jettison its distrust of traditionally Western-dominated global bodies.
China could yet swing either way, Grant and Barysch said. And it was up to the EU to persuade Beijing of the benefits of collaborative multilateralism, using as carrots its markets, its technological advantages and its institutional and governance experience.
Xinning Song, a Chinese academic, was less optimistic about the extent to which Europe could influence China’s future behaviour. He told the conference there were three main problems. ”The EU and China don’t know how to deal with each other. China doesn’t understand how the EU institutions work or where the power lies. Secondly, they need to define a working partnership. Thirdly, there is lack of mutual public understanding. The uproar in Western countries over Tibet and the Olympic torch showed how small events could have a very big impact.”
Simon Fraser, director-general for Europe and globalisation at the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office, said it was plain the EU could not shape a new world order with China, nor should it try, since the US, Russia and India must all have their say. But it was certainly true that ”a change in the way the world is organised is happening … economic power is shifting east and political power will follow”.
Enhanced economic integration was the way to minimise the chances of future conflict, Fraser said. But equally, friction over trade, energy and other resources could easily upset the relationship. Given that climate change was now an ”existential issue”, China’s role as a test bed for low-carbon models of future development was potentially critical. This was an area where the EU technological and regulatory expertise could help.
Other speakers said only the US could apply decisive leverage to China because of its superpower status but also because, unlike the EU, it has direct strategic and bilateral military, regional and economic relationships with China spanning the Pacific and east Asia.
The EU and US should work together to influence China’s future polices rather than compete for political influence and economic benefits, Song and Fraser said. If they did, Beijing would be more likely to accept its responsibilities as a world power operating within international institutions.
Transatlantic collaboration on China, like other issues, cannot be taken for granted, but appears highly desirable. As the Olympics spectacle may soon vividly illustrate, China’s bold new nationalism could, if mishandled or misjudged, morph into an abrasive, new-century imperialism with unfathomable consequences. —