 Sea Power: China's economic success allows it to flex its muscle
Is China the benign emerging market with limited regional aspirations
that Beijing is so anxious to portray? Or is it an increasingly
powerful, assertive economic and strategic force that will increasingly
challenge Europe, America and Asian neighbors?
The West has a
long history of crying wolf about China, beginning with the 19th century
Yellow Peril scare. More recently fears of China reflect European and
US self-doubt about their ability to maintain the current standard of
living in the face of Chinese competition.
Anxiety is also
driven by neoconservative need to have an enemy to mobilize public
support for US defense spending and continuation of American global
hegemonic influence. Moreover, such fears ignore China's daunting
development needs, including hundreds of millions of people still living
in harsh poverty.
Nevertheless, evidence in recent months
suggests growing Chinese self-confidence, with a capacity and an
unprecedented willingness to exert leverage in the world. This should
come as no surprise. History teaches that rising powers flex their
muscle and test influence Europeans, Americans and China's neighbors do
not necessarily need to be afraid. But they do need to be wary.
Beijing's
new assertiveness is fueled by its unprecedented economic success. The
Chinese economy has doubled in size during the last seven years and
per-capita income has doubled in six years. This economic performance
has led the Chinese to be the most self-satisfied people in the world,
according to the recent Pew Global Attitudes survey. Nine in 10 Chinese
are happy with their country's direction, feel good about the current
state of their economy and are optimistic about China's economic future.
And
the rest of the world increasingly sees China as the emerging economic
superpower. In that same Pew survey of populations in 22 nations,
majorities or pluralities in eight countries picked China as the world's
leading economic power, compared with people in only two nations who
felt that way in 2009. Half the Germans, Jordanians, Japanese, French
and Americans now assign the top spot to China.
Since 2009, in 13
of the 21 countries for which trends are available, the portion of the
public that views China as the world's leading economic power has grown
sharply, including increases of 29 percentage points in Japan, 23 in
Germany and 21 in Jordan.
And China seems increasingly willing to
use its rising stature to exercise leverage over diplomatic, security
and economic issues.
There is no more kowtowing to the United
States. When US President Barack Obama visited China in November 2009,
his principal public event in Shanghai, a town-hall meeting with
students, was broadcast only on local TV, not nationwide – unlike a
famous town-hall meeting that Bill Clinton held in China during his
first visit as president. Moreover, press reports at the time censored
the content, as did Chinese newspaper editors with an Obama "Southern
Weekend" interview.
At the Copenhagen Climate Summit in
December, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao failed to attend an initial meeting
with Obama, sending a lower-level official in his place. At one point,
Obama was subjected to a finger-wagging lecture by a high-ranking
Chinese official, which would have provoked an international incident
had an American treated the Chinese leader in such a manner.
Beijing
has turned aggressive on trade and investment matters, demanding that
foreign companies patent technologies in China and adopt Chinese
standards if they want to sell in the Chinese market. It has also
brought trade cases against Western producers who sell in China.
On
the political front, Chinese officials have begun an expansive
assertion of China's national sovereignty. Beijing has long claimed that
Tibet and Taiwan are "core national interests" and foreigners should
keep out of these "internal affairs." Now Chinese have begun to apply
this diplomatic term to the South China Sea, a 1.2 million square mile
area through which flows at least a third of global maritime commerce
and more than half of Northeast Asia's imported energy supplies.
Beijing's assertion threatens fishing and oil-exploration interests of
Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, and naval
transit interests of the US, Japan and South Korea.
At the same
time Beijing has reasserted old territorial claims over the Indian state
of Arunachal Pradesh and backed up that stance with stationing new
troops on India's northeastern border.
China also seeks a larger
role in South Asia. Beijing provided the Sri Lankan government with the
arms it used to quell its long-running civil war with the Tamil Tigers.
It has expanded naval operations in the Indian Ocean, while building
civilian port facilities in a number of countries in the region – from
Burma to Pakistan. It has deepened economic ties with Burma and
Afghanistan, while ramping up its close strategic relationship with
Pakistan by offering civilian nuclear assistance. It has excluded India
from the East Asian diplomatic structures that Beijing champions.
China's
neighbors will be excused if they begin to worry about linkage of core
national interest, national sovereignty and territorial integrity when
coupled with growing Chinese defense spending. Beijing now spends 4.3
percent of its GDP on defense, much more than its neighbors India,
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or Vietnam.
But China also exercises
newfound leverage through inaction. Beijing long resisted pressure to
appreciate the renminbi. A June decision to stop pegging its currency to
the US dollar has not yet led to meaningful increase in the yuan's
value. China has also been notably unwilling to exert pressure on North
Korea over its recent alleged sinking of a South Korean naval vessel.
And Beijing insisted on watering down UN economic sanctions against the
Iranian nuclear-weapons program before it would vote for them,
suggesting China's economic interests in Iran trump European and US
strategic concerns about the program.
Beijing is clearly
signaling that the international status quo is not permanently
acceptable to China. It has laid down a set of markers, and its
relations with other countries have changed forever.
Yet many
times in the past the Chinese have tested the boundaries of their
influence and the patience of the West and its Asian neighbors, only to
pull back. If all the posturing that has happened to date proves to be
the extent of China's acting out, the situation is manageable.
The
danger of increased international tension and miscalculation will come
only if Chinese assertiveness grows in the months ahead.
Are
there other regions or issues that China will define as its "core
national interest" and thus off limits to foreign criticism? Its
domestic human-rights policy? Its carbon-emissions record? Territorial
claims in central Asia?
Will Chinese companies attempt to
circumvent Iranian economic sanctions, tempting Germans, Koreans or the
Japanese to follow suit? Will Beijing use its massive holdings of US
treasury notes to leverage more directly American behavior?
It's
unrealistic to expect an economically successful, increasingly
self-confident China not to play a more expansive role in the world. But
that reality does not give Beijing license to throw its weight around
with impunity, even if other nations have done so in the past.
Europe,
America and the rest of Asia must be vigilant. China is rising. And
rising powers have a history of upsetting the status quo.
Bruce
Stokes is the international economics columnist for the National
Journal, a Washington-based public policy magazine and a trans-Atlantic
fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.This is
reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal, the publication of the Yale
Center for the Study of Globalization
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