BEIJING – China’s rise over the last generation has been impressive, withthe country moving from the periphery to the center of the global system,and climbing from impoverished backwater to a position of substantialwealth and power. But the strategic environment in which China’s “lay low”approach to international affairs has helped to make it the world’ssecond-largest economy is changing – and a broader backlash against Chinais beginning.
Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has been pushing an increasinglyaggressive and high-profile foreign policy, attracting the sort ofattention that Xi’s predecessors had carefully avoided. Now, countries thatonly a few years ago welcomed Chinese investment and engagement arebeginning to mobilize against Chinese influence.
The global conditions that favored China’s rise began at the end of theCold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the West in general and theUnited States in particular were eager to bring additional countries intothe world order they felt they had created.
Throughout the 1990s, faith in the liberalizing power of commerce, and inFrancis Fukuyama’s thesis that the West’s triumph over Soviet socialismheralded the “End of History,” was at its height. As a consequence,concerns about China’s autocratic model were largely shelved in Westerncapitals.
The United States in particular pushed for China’s accession to the WorldTrade Organization, which ultimately served as an inflection point inChina’s economic growth.
In the 21st century, Washington has focused most of its strategic attentionon Islamist terrorism, the Middle East and Afghanistan, while Europe hasbeen preoccupied with the euro and the growth of the European Union. OnlyJapan has maintained solid strategic focus on Chinese power ambition overthe last generation.
While this was happening, Beijing played its hand skillfully. Decadesearlier, when China first embarked on its economic reform project, DengXiaoping, China’s leader until his death in 1997, urged subsequentgenerations of leaders to maintain a low international profile. Espousingthe dictum of “taoguang yanghui,” (literally “Hide Brightness, CultivateObscurity,” but typically translated in English as “Lay Low and Bide YourTime,”) Deng advocated avoiding flashy shows of power in order to shieldChinese efforts from outside scrutiny while the country wasn’t positionedto handle them properly.
Eschewing high-profile diplomacy, China kept its bilateral focus oncommerce and investment, with a consistent emphasis on “win-win”cooperation, which helped win friends. At the United Nations, Chinesediplomats generally allowed Russia to take the lead in disputes overWestern activities. During the global backlash against the Iraq war,Beijing was able to present itself favorably, even launching theChina-Europe Strategic Partnership in 2003, allegedly to create analternative to American unipolar power.
The creation of the BRIC Forum for emerging economies in 2009 extended thisargument of “China the Reliable Partner” to developing countries outsidethe West. Throughout this period, and despite its growing wealth and power,Beijing was able to cultivate just enough ambiguity about its intentions tofrustrate skeptics in its partner countries. From Australian mines toConfucius institutes in Western universities, the expansion continued.
The last five years upended nearly all of this in very short order.Indirect diplomatic suggestions have been swapped for attention-grabbingproposals, strategic ambiguity has been abandoned for internationalmilitary bases, high-profile drills, showy parades and standoffs withneighboring countries.
Fueled by large state-subsidized loans, large Chinese firms were sent oninternational buying binges, scooping up the Waldorf Astoria in New YorkCity and a series of famous brands such as GE and Volvo, promptingfears among some Western legislators that the acquisitions might give theChinese government influence over crucial commercial assets.
In Africa too, there is increasing concern that China’s investments on thecontinent are less about partnership and investment than they are aboutBeijing trying to win naked political influence – and importing unfairlabor practices – in resource-rich countries.
After solidifying his control over the Chinese Communist Party in late2017, Xi appears to have accelerated these changes. The Communist Party’sUnited Work Front division has begun to enforce guidelines on the behaviorof Chinese university students studying overseas.
In September, Chinese scholars at the University of California, San Diego,said that a branch of China’s Ministry of Education had frozen theirfunding after the university invited the Dalai Lama to speak at itscommencement ceremony – a measure interpreted as part of Beijing’s effortsto suppress viewpoints contrary to Communist Party dogma.
And finally, Xi Jinping’s signature “One Belt, One Road” infrastructureinitiative, a catchall term for hundreds of billions of planned outboundinvestment, has recently led to China seizing ownership of a port in SriLanka after local entities defaulted on the extremely onerous terms thatChina had demanded. The local outcry was substantial, putting further China– Sri Lanka cooperation in the crosshairs and serving as a warning to othercountries receiving Chinese investment.
Where China had chosen for the last generation to cultivate an image ofitself that stood for partnership and resistance to ‘Western imperialism’,Xi Jinping has now tossed it out in favor of an image of a proud,swaggering Great Power that evinces little concern for how its actions areperceived abroad. Clearly, he judges this to be in the political interestof the party, which often uses nationalist rhetoric to bolster its domesticstanding. Anti-China trade sentiment has now bubbled up high enough in theUnited States that Washington’s new strategic directive admits China to bean adversarial “revisionist power,” where softer language had beenpreferred in the past. Canadian and Australian politicians are starting toshow substantial skepticism about Chinese involvement domestically. InAustralia, a recent scandal involving payments made to a senator from aChinese-connected businessman has led to Canberra announcing plans to banforeigners from donating to Australian political parties.
Even usually-close ally Pakistan – itself part of the broader One Belt, OneRoad program – has been on the receiving end of Chinese over-promising andunder-delivering, with Beijing reported to have abruptly stopped fundingfor three major Pakistani roads in the project known as the China-PakistanEconomic Corridor. And just this week, French President Emmanuel Macrontook the unusual step of cautioning China publicly that the Belt and Roadprojects “cannot be those of a new hegemony, which would transform thosethat they cross into vassals.” Other pushback to Chinese projects is likelyonly beginning.
Modern China has never faced simultaneous suspicion of its motives andobjectives in both the West and the developing world. Beijing’s diplomatsare more experienced at sidestepping or deflecting critics than at engagingthem, and the party’s domestic politics demand a near-absolute protectionof “core interests.”
This does not bode well for a country that will have to start addressinglegitimate diplomatic concerns around the world. How Beijing handles thisbacklash will reveal what kind of a country it plans to be, and how it willhandle this new role in the world.