Sergei Karpukhin, Reuters
President Hu Jintao visited Russia, really only a fair-weather pal, this week.
Posted on 03/31/2007 11:15:36 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
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Sergei Karpukhin, Reuters
President Hu Jintao visited Russia, really only a fair-weather pal, this week. |
Like the emergence of Germany in the 19th century and of United States in the 20th, China's rapid rise to superpower status generates as much fear as admiration. The fears are most acute in its own neighbourhood.
Yet from a historical perspective, one of the more remarkable developments of recent years may be China's submission to the tiny threads of international constraint, especially in its own region.
It belongs to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, whose members span the Pacific. The East Asia Summit and the regional forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) tie it closer to its Asian neighbours. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation links it with Russia and Central Asia.
More than this, it has shown active good-neighbourliness. A generation ago, China disputed most of its borders. Almost all have been settled, with the notable exceptions of those with Japan at sea and India in the Himalayas.
Even in the case of the huge claims China and India have on each other's territory, China has acquiesced in seemingly never-ending talks allowing relations to improve in other areas.
It no longer routinely provokes its southern neighbours by flexing naval muscle around the sand-and-coral specks in the South China Sea where six countries' claims overlap. It has begun to "consult," after a fashion, the states affected when it dams its rivers, such as the Mekong and the Salween.
This political tactfulness has been accompanied by an unplanned makeover of its economic image. A decade ago, China's new role as the world's workshop was one indirect cause of regional financial crisis.
Investors began to take fright at the scale of current-account deficits in countries such as Thailand, where export growth had stalled or slowed, in part as a result of new competition from China.
Many in the region saw China's supercharged growth as a threat. Many still do, but these days just as many see it as an opportunity. Most Asian countries enjoy surpluses in their trade with China. And yet, if you scour the region for China's firm friends it is hard to find them. Even Russia, where China's president, Hu Jintao, was this week pressing the flesh, is a fair-weather friend or rather sees China as a foul-weather insurance policy. India and Japan, China's other big regional counterparts, both view it with suspicion at best and, at worst, paranoia.
That leaves as China's chums a scanty list of Neanderthal dictatorships, such as Myanmar and North Korea, and even their friendship does not amount to much. Far from being a loyal client, Myanmar plays China off against India and its fellow members of ASEAN. And China's relationship, famously "as close as lips and teeth," with North Korea spawned a mouth ulcer last October when North Korea let off a nuclear weapon.
North Korea's cruel but cunning despot Kim Jong Il exploits China's fear that, if his vile regime collapses, China might have a strong, U.S.-allied democratic Korea on its border.
Why are China's neighbours not always susceptible to its charms? Of course, any rapidly emerging big power is unsettling. Like the U.S., China can still display a penchant for unilateralism that undermines all its careful diplomacy. As it overtakes United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its cavalier disregard of the global environment will become an ever bigger issue in its foreign relations.
More traditional fears also unsettle China's neighbours. This month China's annual budget called for another big increase (nearly 18 per cent) in military spending. Most analysts believe the published budget is understated, in which case why trumpet such a big number? And why, without warning, blow up a satellite in space as a Chinese missile did in January?
A perception, therefore, persists that China's goodwill extends only so far as its interests are not affected. In its dispute with India, for example, it is the status-quo power: it is happy with the present arrangements, so what has it to lose by talking forever?
In one crucial respect, however, it is far from a status-quo power: its historically dubious and morally untenable claim on Taiwan.
This is one big reason, other than merely acting the big-power part, for the military buildup and could one day bring war with the real superpower.
A much better Taiwan policy is available to China. The "one country, two systems" formula promised to Hong Kong in 1997, which mirrored that offered to the Dalai Lama's Tibet in 1951, was aimed in large measure at the more important goal to China of coaxing Taiwan back into the "motherland."
But China has sabotaged its own strategy. Like the long history of repression in Tibet, the farcical "re-election" on March 25 of Hong Kong's British-trained, Chinese-adopted chief executive Donald Tsang by a committee dominated by China's placemen shows how little China cares to lend substance to its promises of autonomy and democracy -- even though Tsang would probably have won a real election anyway.
Giving Hong Kongers the freedoms they have demanded and talking to the Dalai Lama about the future of his homeland would do more to impress China's neighbours than a decade's worth of state visits and free-trade agreements. Yet China will not yield on either front, sternly warning critics against infringing on its internal affairs.
Why so adamant? One reason is that the Communist Party fears that allowing political freedom to flourish on its fringes would loosen its ability to monopolize power in China as a whole.
And there lies the real reason why China is so friendless. With no attractive ideas or values to appeal to neighbours, it falls back on a resurgent nationalism that scares them instead: we were a great power, should always be a great power and, by golly, look at us now, so get out of the way!
Internal reform would not change everything. A big, rising nation frightens smaller neighbours, whatever its political system. Ask those in the United States' back yard. But until China embraces openness and pluralism at home, no charm offensive is ever going to set its neighbours' minds completely at ease.
"Resistence is futile. You will be assimilated."
They do not need a friend.
I suspected that some American CEO's and foreign policy big wigs were 'assimilated.':-) There are 'American Locutuses.'
Ping!
When you get right down to it, The U.S. is about the closest thing they have to a friend.
Good Borg analogy (geek - sorry).
With one sixth of humanity, who needs friends.
Although I think A6M3 is correct that the US is pretty much the closest thing they have. I always wondered what would have happened in a Han Dynasty versus Roman Empire match.
Alas, as we look forward into a high-tech future, China's lack of oil and gas might be compensated by their 90% dominance of the rare earths market. Look it up, it really is cause for concern.
It is not a nation, but a civilization masquerading as one. And covilizations do not, and cannot, have friends.
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