The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (15 page)

What does God have to do with foreign policy? Historically, countries influenced by Christianity and Islam have developed an impulse to spread their views and convert people to their faith. That missionary spirit is evident in the foreign policy of countries as diverse as Britain, the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In the case of Britain and the United States, perhaps because they have been so powerful, the Protestant sense of purpose at the core of their foreign policies has made a deep mark on global affairs. China, in contrast, may never acquire a similar sense of destiny. Simply being China, and becoming a world power, in a sense fulfills its historical purpose. It doesn’t need to spread anything to anyone to vindicate itself. So when Beijing seems bloodless in its stance on human rights, it is not simply that the regime is oppressive or takes a ruthlessly realpolitik view of its interests—though that certainly plays a role. The Chinese see these issues differently, not with a set of abstract rights and wrongs but with a sense of the practical that serves as a guiding philosophy.

Western businessmen have often noted that their Chinese counterparts seem to place less stock in rules, laws, and contracts. Their sense of ethics is more situational. If a Chinese businessman or official thinks the law is an ass (to quote an Englishman), he will ignore or go around it or simply suggest making up a new contract. The veneration of an abstract idea is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set. Social relations and trust are far more important than paper commitments. Microsoft could not get Beijing to enforce its intellectual-property laws for years—until the company spent time and effort developing a relationship with the government and made clear that it wanted to help develop China’s economy and educational system. Once Microsoft had convinced the Chinese government of its benign intentions, those same laws began to get enforced. Few Chinese have really internalized the notion that abstract rules, laws, and contracts are more important than a situational analysis of a case at hand, which means that Chinese political and legal development is likely to take a more circuitous and complex path than one might predict.

China’s cultural traditions also affect its approach to negotiation. Boston University’s Robert Weller argues, “The Chinese base their sense of cause and effect around the idea of qi energy. Qi is the stuff of fengshui, and the element in the body that is manipulated by acupuncture or Chinese herbs. It is part of a broad way of understanding the structure of the world as a set of interacting forces, complexly interrelated rather than working through a simple and linear cause and effect.” “It could also have an effect on foreign policy,” Weller says.
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Such speculation can sometimes be overdone and even sound silly. But in talking to Chinese about their ways of thinking, one quickly recognizes that concepts like qi are as central to their mind-set as a moral Creator or free will is to Westerners. Foreign policy is driven by many universal forces, but there’s no doubt that a basic worldview organizes the way people perceive, act, and react, particularly in crises.

Culture, however, does not exist in a vacuum. China’s past and its own DNA are shaped by its modern history—the impact of the West, communism’s decimation of tradition, the resulting vacuum in Chinese spiritualism, and, perhaps most of all, its recent efforts to reconcile its traditions with modernity. When you talk to Chinese economists, they don’t proclaim a Confucian way to generate economic growth or curb inflation. China’s Central Bank seems very modern and (in that sense) Western in its approach. That it does not jump when the United States asks it to revalue its currency may tell us more about nationalism than about culture. (After all, when was the last time that the United States changed its economic policy because a foreign government hectored it into doing so?) The Chinese have adopted Western rationalism in many areas. Some Chinese foreign policy analysts call themselves “Christian Confucians”—meaning not evangelical converts but Chinese people with a Western outlook, seeking to imbue Chinese policies with a greater sense of purpose and values. Like every non-Western country, China will make up its own cultural cocktail—some parts Eastern, some parts Western—to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Too Big to Hide

China’s biggest problem has to do not with the particularities of culture but with the universalities of power. China views itself as a nation intent on rising peacefully, its behavior marked by humility, noninterference, and friendly relations with all. But many rising countries in the past have similarly believed in their own benign motives—and still ended up upsetting the system. The political scientist Robert Gilpin notes that as a nation’s power increases, it “will be tempted to try to increase its control over its environment. In order to increase its own security, it will try to expand its political, economic, and territorial control, it will try to change the international system in accordance with its particular set of interests.”
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The crucial point here is that, throughout history, great powers have seen themselves as having the best intentions but being forced by necessity to act to protect their ever-expanding interests. And as the world’s number two country, China will expand its interests substantially.

Ultimately, China’s intentions might be irrelevant. In the messy world of international politics, intentions and outcomes are not directly linked. (No country was expecting a world war in 1914.) It’s like a market in which all companies are trying to maximize profits by raising prices: the systemwide result is exactly the opposite—a fall in prices. Similarly, in international politics, another system with no single, supreme authority, the intentions of countries do not always accurately predict the outcome. Hence the Roman aphorism “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

Just how peacefully China can rise will be determined by a combination of Chinese actions, other countries’ reactions, and the systemic effects that this interaction produces. Given its current size, China cannot hope to slip onto the world stage unnoticed. Its search for energy and raw materials, for example, is entirely understandable. China is growing fast, consumes energy and all kinds of commodities, and needs to find steady supplies of them. Other countries buy oil, so why shouldn’t Beijing do the same? The problem is size. China operates on so large a scale that it can’t help changing the nature of the game.

China’s perception of its interests is shifting. Men like Wu Jianmin come from an older generation of diplomats, and the younger generation is well aware of China’s new power. Some China watchers worry that, in time, power will go to China’s head. In a delicately phrased set of warnings delivered in China in 2005, Lee Kuan Yew described his concerns not about China’s current leadership, or even the next generation, but about the generation after that, which will have been born in a time of stability, prosperity, and rising Chinese influence. “China’s youth must be made aware of the need to reassure the world that China’s rise will not turn out to be a disruptive force,” he said in a speech at Fudan University. Lee implied that what has kept Chinese leaders humble since Deng Xiao-ping is the bitter memory of Mao’s mistakes—fomenting revolutions abroad, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, which together resulted in the deaths of about forty million Chinese. “It is vital,” Lee went on, “that the younger generation of Chinese who have only lived through a period of peace and growth and have no experience of China’s tumultuous past are made aware of the mistakes China made as a result of hubris and excesses in ideology.”

For now, China’s foreign policy remains entirely commercially focused, though that, too, casts its shadow. In Africa, for example, China is working to build economic ties. The continent has natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas, that China needs in order to grow. Both Beijing and African governments have welcomed new trade relations—in part because there is no colonial past or difficult history to complicate matters—and business is booming. Trade is growing around 50 percent a year, Chinese investments in Africa even faster. In many African countries, economic growth is at record highs, a fact that many attribute to their new connections with China. Some on the continent see the relationship as exploitative and resent China’s new power, so Beijing has taken pains to demonstrate its good intentions. In November 2006, President Hu Jintao held a summit on Sino-African relations. All forty-eight African countries that have diplomatic ties with China attended, most of them represented by their presidents or prime ministers. It was the largest African summit ever held outside the continent. At the meeting, China promised to double aid to Africa in two years, provide $5 billion in loans and credits, set up a $5 billion fund to encourage further Chinese investment in Africa, cancel much of the debt owed to China, provide greater access to the Chinese market, train fifteen thousand African professionals, and build new hospitals and schools across the continent. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, gushed, “China is an inspiration for all of us.”
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What could be wrong with building such ties? Nothing—except that as China moves into Africa, it is taking up economic, political, and military space that was occupied by Britain or France or the United States. This will necessarily mean friction as each great power struggles to promote its own interests and its own conception of doing the right thing in Africa. China’s interpretation of its actions is that it doesn’t interfere in these countries’ domestic affairs—that it is, in a sense, value neutral. But is it? Moisés Naím, the former editor of
Foreign Policy
magazine, tells a story about the Nigerian government negotiating a $5 million loan for train systems with the World Bank in 2007. The bank had insisted that the government clean up the notoriously corrupt railway bureaucracy before it approved the loan. The deal was almost done when the Chinese government stepped in and offered the government a $9 billion loan to rebuild the entire train system—with no strings, no requirements, no need for any reform. The World Bank was sent home within days. Needless to say, much of that Chinese money will go into the bank accounts of key government officials rather than toward better train service for Nigerians.

Beijing has found it useful to deal directly with governments, because they almost always maintain ownership of the resources that China needs. Transactions are simpler when dealing with one centralized authority, particularly if it is an outcast and has nowhere to turn but to China. So China buys platinum and iron ore from Zimbabwe and in turn sells Robert Mugabe weapons and radio-jamming devices—despite a U.S. and European Union ban—which he uses to intimidate, arrest, and kill domestic opposition. Beijing is Mugabe’s most important supporter on the UN Security Council.

In Sudan, China’s involvement runs even deeper. It has invested billions in the oil fields there since 1999. Chinese companies are the majority shareholders in the two largest oil conglomerates in the country, and China buys 65 percent of Sudan’s oil exports. It maintains a military alliance with Sudan and, despite UN restrictions, appears to have provided arms that end up in the hands of progovernment militias in Darfur. Chinese officials often confirm that they have a close military relationship with Sudan and intend to keep it that way. Explaining his country’s position, China’s deputy foreign minister was frank: “Business is business. We try to separate politics from business. Secondly, I think the internal situation in Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to impose upon them.”

If China were a bit player on the global stage, it wouldn’t matter much what it was doing in Zimbabwe or Sudan. Cuba, for all we know, has extensive dealings with both governments, but no one cares. Beijing, on the other hand, cannot hide its light under the bushel anymore. China’s dealings with these countries give them a lifeline, retard progress, and, in the long run, perpetuate the cycle of bad regimes and social tensions that plagues the African continent. This kind of relationship also ensures that while Africa’s governments might view China favorably, its people will have more mixed views—as they have had of Western governments through the years.

Beijing has been slow to recognize its broader responsibility in this region, arguing that it is simply minding its own business. But in fact, it isn’t even doing that. Beijing has often shown itself to be well aware of its power. One reason it has focused on Africa is that the continent has long included a number of countries that have been friendly with Taiwan. Although four of the twenty-three governments in the world that have relations with Taiwan today are in Africa, eight countries—including South Africa—have switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing over the last decade and a half thanks to judicious offers of aid.

China has been more skillful and used better diplomacy and soft power in Asia, the region where Beijing devotes the most time, energy, and attention. Through skillful diplomacy, it has helped orchestrate a revolution in attitudes over the last two decades. In the 1980s, China did not even have relations with much of East Asia, including South Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore. By the summer of 2007, it was holding joint military exercises with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). When asked in polls in 2007 whom they trusted to wield global power, respondents in countries like Thailand and Indonesia, traditional U.S. allies, chose China over the United States. Even in Australia, favorable attitudes toward China and the United States are evenly balanced.