China’s rise was never going to be entirely peaceful. But recent disputes pitting Beijing against its neighbours and against Washington and Europe have shown that the forces that drive China remain poorly understood in the West.
If the United States is a global policeman, then China is a young, street-smart global tearaway, kicking against a Âsystem it had no part in creating.
China’s furious reaction to the Nobel peace prize awarded to the dissident, Liu Xiaobo, smacked of hurt pride as well as insecurity.
China Daily said it was “part of the plot to contain China”, a sign of a “deep and wide ideological rift”.
The standoff between the US and China at the latest climate change talks also reflected a fundamental difference of approach.
Beijing defended its “right” to pursue its own developmental path, as other major carbon-emitters have done.
Chinese will not be dictated to
This partly explains China’s stance in another dispute with the West. Its “undervalued” currency was the focus of an inconclusive International Monetary Fund meeting recently.
Chinese leaders say they will not be dictated to on exchange rates, but also fear “social turmoil”, as Premier Wen Jiabao suggested, if prices rise sharply. Pride and stubbornness are reinforced by insecurity.
Officials concede China has a historical paranoia that influences its behaviour.
“The continuous loss of territory has been one of the deepest wounds in the Chinese psyche in the century following the opium war in 18Â 40,” said Qingli Dai, a Chinese diplomat in London.
He referred to the recent flare-up with Japan over ownership of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The ongoing tension is palpable.
At an inaugural meeting of Asia-Pacific defence ministers in Hanoi this week, including the Pentagon’s Robert Gates, China’s neighbours discussed what several saw as a worrying new assertiveness by China in the East and South China Seas.
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, angered Beijing this year by saying the peaceful resolution of disputes in the area was a US interest.
Disputes
In Hanoi, Gates urged parties to settle differences multilaterally — an approach Beijing sees as disrespectful of its sovereign rights.
By publicly siding with (and arming) China’s neighbours and insisting on what Barack Obama calls a “leadership role in Asia”, Washington risks what Time magazine called a “new cold war” of proxy struggles between China and the US.
The established Western view of China as committed to a purely defensive foreign policy while it builds up its economic strength is obsolete, François Godement suggested in “Geopolitics on Chinese Terms”.
Godement reported that China’s “cautious approach based on conflict avoidance is a temporary strategy intended to be applied while China rises. Ultimately, a China which has completed its ascent will ‘let its writ run without constraint’.” —