The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn’t seen a train in years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink façade crumbling away; the local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialists founded long ago is a distant memory, victim of a civil war that lasted for 27 years. Dondo’s fortunes, however, may be looking up. This month, work is scheduled to start on the local section of the line that links the town to the deep harbor at Luanda, Angola’s capital. The work will be done by Chinese construction firms, and as two of their workers survey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his feelings. “Thank you, God,” he says, “for the Chinese.”
That sentiment, or something like it, can be heard a lot these days in Africa, where Chinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textile factories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil, where Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming export trade. And you hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand, where locals used to subsist on whatever they could make from farming and smuggling–until Chinese engineers began blasting the rapids and reefs on the upper Mekong so that large boats could take Chinese-manufactured goods to markets in Southeast Asia. “Before the Chinese came here, you couldn’t find any work,” says Ba, a Burmese immigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from his task hauling sacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for Bangkok. “Now I can send money back home to my family.”
You may know all about the world coming to China–about the hordes of foreign businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showrooms in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less about how China is going out into the world. Through its foreign investments and appetite for raw materials, the world’s most populous country has already transformed economies from Angola to Australia. Now China is turning that commercial might into real political muscle, striding onto the global stage and acting like a nation that very much intends to become the world’s next great power. In the past year, China has established itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations with North Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape the future of central Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe and Latin America and contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. With the U.S. preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terrorism and struggling to extricate itself from a failing war in Iraq, China seems ready to challenge–possibly even undermine–some of Washington’s other foreign policy goals, from halting the genocide in Darfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China’s international role has won the attention of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Tom Lantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and a critic of Beijing’s human-rights record, told TIME that he intends to hold early hearings on China, on everything from its censorship of the Internet to its policies toward Tibet. “China is thinking in much more active terms about its strategy,” says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University of Michigan, who was senior director at the National Security Council Asia desk under President Bill Clinton, “not only regionally, but globally, than it has done in the past. We have seen a sea change in China’s fundamental level of confidence.”
Blink for a moment and you can imagine that–as many Chinese would tell the tale–after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civil war, revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a date with destiny. “The Chinese wouldn’t put it this way themselves,” says Lieberthal. “But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China’s century.”
That’s quite something to believe. Is it true? Or rather–since the century is yet young–will it be true? If so, when, and how would it happen? How comfortable would such a development be for the West? Can China’s rise be managed peaceably by the international system? Or will China so threaten the interests of established powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th century and Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going to be nagging at us for some time–but a peaceful, prosperous future for both China and the West depends on trying to answer them now.
WHAT CHINA WANTS–AND FEARS
If you ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear about China–20% of the world’s population, gazillions of brainy engineers, serried ranks of soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack of doom–remember this: China is still a poor country (GDP per head in 2005 was $1,700, compared with $42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders face so many problems that it is reasonable to wonder how they ever sleep. The country’s urban labor market recently exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension system is nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia, its cities’ air foul beyond imagination and its clean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and growing. Protests and riots by rural workers are measured in the tens of thousands each year. The most immediate priority for China’s leadership is less how to project itself internationally than how to maintain stability in a society that is going through the sort of social and economic change that, in the past, has led to chaos and violence.
And yet for all their internal challenges, the Chinese seem to want their nation to be a bigger player in the world. In a 2006 poll conducted jointly by the the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society, 87% of Chinese respondents thought their country should take a greater role in world affairs. Most Chinese, the survey found, believed China’s global influence would match that of the U.S. within a decade. The most striking aspect of President Hu Jintao’s leadership has been China’s remarkable success in advancing its interests abroad despite turmoil at home.
Surprisingly for those who thought they knew his type, Hu has placed himself at the forefront of China’s new assertiveness. Hu, 64, has never studied outside China and is steeped in the ways of the Communist Party. He became a party member as a university student in the early 1960s and headed the Communist Youth League in the poor western province of Gansu before becoming provincial party chief in Guizhou and later Tibet. Despite a public stiffness in front of foreigners, Hu has been a vigorous ambassador for China: the pattern was set in 2004, when Hu spent two weeks in South America–more time than George W. Bush had spent on the continent in four years–and pledged billions of dollars in investments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba. While Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, was visiting 15 countries last year, Hu spent time in the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. In a three-week period toward the end of 2006, he played host to leaders from 48 African countries in Beijing, went to Vietnam for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, slipped over to Laos for a day and then popped off for a six-day tour of India and Pakistan. For someone whose comfort zone is supposed to be domestic affairs, that’s quite a schedule. “Look at Africa, look at Central America, look at parts of Asia,” says Eberhard Sandschneider, a China scholar who is head of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “They are playing a global game now.”
As it follows Hu’s lead and steps out in the world, what will be China’s priorities? What does it want and what does it fear? The first item on the agenda is straightforward: it is to be left alone. China brooks no interference in its internal affairs, and its definition of what is internal is not in doubt. The status of Tibet, for example, is an internal matter; the Dalai Lama is not a spiritual leader but a “splittist” whose real aim is to break up China. As for Taiwan, China is prepared to tolerate all sorts of temporary uncertainties as to how its status might one day be resolved–but not the central point that there is only one China. Cross that line, and you will hear about it.
This defense of its right to be free of interference has a corollary. China has traditionally detested the intervention by the great powers in other nations’ affairs. An aide to French President Jacques Chirac traces a new Chinese assertiveness to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying, “They felt they can’t allow that sort of meddling in what they see as a nation’s internal affairs.” But the same horror of anything that might smell of foreign intervention was evident long before Iraq. I visited Beijing during the Kosovo war in 1999, and it wasn’t just the notorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that year that outraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO’s rearranging what was left of Yugoslavia. Wasn’t the cause a good one? That didn’t matter.
China’s commitment to nonintervention means that it doesn’t inquire closely into the internal arrangements of others. When all those African leaders met in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by 2009, train 15,000 professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000 students, and help Africa’s health-care and farming sectors. But as a 2005 report by the Council on Foreign Relations notes, “China’s aid and investments are attractive to Africans precisely because they come with no conditionality related to governance, fiscal probity or other concerns of Western donors.” In 2004, when an International Monetary Fund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected corruption, China ponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and money to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused of massive human-rights violations.
Most notoriously, China has consistently used its place as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the Sudanese government to stop the ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinese state-owned company owns 40% of the oil concession in the south of Sudan, and there are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops there protecting Beijing’s oil interests. (By contrast, despite the noise that China made when one of its soldiers was killed by an Israeli air strike on a U.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there are only 1,400 Chinese troops serving in all U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide.) “Is China playing a positive role in developing democracy [in Africa]?” asks Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs. “Largely not.” Human Rights Watch goes further: China’s policies in Africa, it claimed during the Beijing summit, have “propped up some of the continents’ worst human-rights abusers.”
China doesn’t support unsavory regimes for the sake of it. Instead China’s key objective is to ensure a steady supply of natural resources, so that its economy can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lid on unrest at home. That is why China has reached out to resource-rich democracies like Australia and Brazil as much as it has to such international pariahs as Sudan and Burma, both of which have underdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There’s nothing particularly surprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave when domestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustain their economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behavior in Africa might remember their own history on the continent.) But China has never needed such resources in such quantities before, so its politicians have never had to learn the skills of getting them without looking like a dictator’s friend. Now they have to.
WORKING WITH CHINA
Assuming a bigger global presence has forced Beijing to learn the art of international diplomacy. Until recently, China’s foreign policy consisted of little more than bloodcurdling condemnations of hegemonic imperialism. “This is a country that 30 years ago pretty much saw things in zero-sum terms,” says former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. “What was good for the U.S. or the West was bad for China, and vice versa.” Those days are gone. Wang Jisi of Beijing University, one of China’s top foreign policy scholars, says one of the most important developments of 2006 was that the communiqué issued after a key conference on foreign affairs for top officials had no reference to the tired old terms that have been standard in China’s diplomatic vocabulary.
Washington would like Beijing to go further. In a speech in 2005, Zoellick invited China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. China’s national interest, Zoellick argued, should not be narrowly defined, but would be “much better served by working with us to shape the future international system,” on everything from intellectual-property rights to nuclear nonproliferation. Says Zoellick: “I’m not sure anyone had ever put it quite in those terms, and it clearly had a bracing effect.”
That would imply that China’s behavior has changed of late. Has it? A U.S. policymaker cautions, “It’s important to see the ‘responsible stakeholder’ notion as a future vision of China.” In practice, this official says, “They’ve been more helpful in some areas than others.” When the stars align–when China’s perception of its own national interest matches what the U.S. and other international powers seek–that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S. As North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.–which would have implied doing little to rein in Pyongyang–or stiffing its former protégé.
Hu’s personal preferences seem to have helped shape the choice. He is known to have been stingingly critical of Kim in meetings with U.S. officials. Michael Green, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council until December 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups of Americans his skepticism about Kim’s intentions. When the North finally tested a nuke last fall, China joined the U.S. and other regional powers in condemning Kim and supported a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Pyongyang. Says a senior U.S. official: “If you asked experts several years ago, Could you imagine China taking these actions toward a longtime ally in cooperation with us and Japan? Most people would have said no.”
But nobody in Washington is getting carried away. Beijing has been helpful on North Korea because it’s more important to China that Pyongyang not provoke a regional nuclear arms race than it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support. Contrast such helpfulness with China’s behavior on the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In December, China signed a $16 billion contract with Iran to buy natural gas and help develop some oil fields, and it has consistently joined Russia in refusing to back the tough sanctions against Tehran sought by the U.S. and Europe. “It’s hard to say China’s been helpful on Iran,” says a senior U.S. official, and there is little sense that such an assessment will change any time soon.
Within its own neighborhood, there are signs that China’s behavior is changing in more constructive ways. China fought a war with India in 1962 and another with Vietnam in 1979. For years, it supported communist movements dedicated to undermining governments in nations such as Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Yet today China’s relations with its neighbors are nothing but sweetness and light, often at the expense of the U.S. Absorbed by the arc of crisis spreading from the Middle East, the U.S. is simply less visible in Southeast Asia than it once was, and China is stepping into the vacuum.
While American exports to Southeast Asia have been virtually stagnant for the past five years, Chinese trade with the region is soaring. In the northern reaches of Thailand and Laos, you can find whole towns where Mandarin has become the common language and the yuan the local currency. In Chiang Saen, signs in Chinese read CALL CHINA FOR ONLY 12 BAHT A MINUTE. A sign outside the Glory Lotus hotel advertises CLEAN, CHEAP ROOMs in Chinese. It is not aid from the U.S. but trade with China–carried on new highways being built from Kunming in Yunnan province to Hanoi, Mandalay and Bangkok, or along a Mekong River whose channels are full of Chinese goods–that is transforming much of Southeast Asia.
Nor is China’s smiling face visible only to its south. In a cordial state visit last year, Hu reached out to India–an old rival with which it still has some disputed borders. The two countries pledged to double trade by 2010 and agreed to bid jointly for global oil projects on which they had previously been competing. Hu has also sought to mend ties with Japan, another longtime rival, with whom China’s relations have deteriorated in recent years. Last October, Hu met the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in Beijing just days after Abe took office, a visit Hu called a “turning point” in frosty relations between the two countries and which Premier Wen described as a “window of hope.”
(http://blog.sina.com.cn)
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