From The Age
China’s approach to economic statecraft is typified by the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive project sweeping across Asia, the Pacific and Europe to connect trade, transport, digital networks and infrastructure. Although Chinese officials would never say so publicly, their expectation was that the largesse would help convince recipient nations to take its side in geopolitical disputes.
That’s what happened. In recent years nations such as El Salvador, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati have severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as they cosied up to China.
An emblematic example came in 2019 when 22 nations – including Australia, Germany and Britain – issued a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council condemning China’s mass detention of Uighur Muslims and other minorities in the Xinjiang region.
China responded with a letter of its own, signed by 50 countries (including the Palestinian Authority), deriding the supposedly “groundless accusations” and expressing “firm opposition to relevant countries’ practice of politicising human rights issues, by naming and shaming, and publicly exerting pressures on other countries”. Notably, 23 of the countries backing China were Islamic-majority nations and three signatories – Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia – host US military bases on their soil.
“China has enhanced its global presence tenfold since Xi Jinping has come to power,” says Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Meanwhile, she said “president Trump didn’t value alliances, didn’t value multilateral institutions, didn’t value American leadership on global challenges”.
In 2019 Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, spoke for other leaders in the region when he said that if forced to choose between China and the US, he would take the “rich” former over the “unpredictable” latter. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen was even more blunt, asking: “If I don’t rely on China, who will I rely on?”
And yet, as Trump was driving perceptions of the US to record lows around the world, something else was happening. China was sabotaging its diplomatic ambitions and, in some cases, driving countries back into the arms of the US.
Xi’s claim that China does not seek hegemony or a sphere of influence is one that many citizens around the world now regard as laughable.
Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says: “I don’t think China really took advantage of the opportunities the Trump administration presented to it.”
Elizabeth Economy, author of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, says: “It’s actually incredibly surprising the extent to which China’s trade and investment has not translated into greater popularity for Xi Jinping and China writ large.
“China has essentially shot itself in the foot.”
In his 2020 book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions, Luke Patey argues that China’s economic empire building, aggressive diplomacy and military expansion is undermining its ambition to dominate world affairs.
While low-income countries have mostly welcomed Chinese investment, the resulting Belt and Road projects have not necessarily enhanced goodwill towards China. The projects are often built using temporary Chinese migrants rather than local workers and many have been ensnared in bribery scandals. The quality of the resulting infrastructure is not always high: 26 people died in Cambodia in 2019 after a Chinese-owned building collapsed in Sihanoukville, a Chinese special economic zone.
The Sri Lankan government’s experience with a Chinese-financed shipping port – which it had to turn over to China via a 99-year lease after failing to make repayments – led other nations to downsize or cancel their own BRI projects to avoid the pitfalls of “debt-trap diplomacy”.
Not all analysts agree that Belt and Road is designed to bait and trap developing nations. Shahar Hameiri from the University of Queensland argues that Sri Lanka’s own financial mismanagement was the root cause of its debt distress, not avaricious lending by Beijing.
In the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter magazine, he writes: “This is the BRI’s reality – messy and fragmented. It is also often problematic, but not because of China’s strategic planning. To paraphrase Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”
Then there has been China’s increasingly confrontational approach to spreading its message, often described as a turn to wolf warrior diplomacy.
China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, typified this approach by saying in 2019: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns.” Gui was speaking after PEN Sweden awarded a prize to Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher who has been sentenced to a 10-year jail term in China.
China tried to use its muscle to stop Swedish officials from attending the prize ceremony, a campaign that drew a defiant response from Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven: “We are not going to give in to this type of threat. Never.”
Sweden – famous for its commitment to neutrality – is now arguably Europe’s most hawkish China critic. It has ended all agreements with Confucius Institutes and scrapped sister city relationships with China. A Pew Research poll found unfavourable perceptions of China in Sweden soared from 49 per cent in 2017 to 85 per cent in 2020.
In Australia, which felt China’s wrath for calling for an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19, negative perceptions of the country’s biggest export destination jumped from 32 per cent to 81 per cent in three years. In Canada, negative perceptions jumped from 40 per cent to 73 per cent following a trade row and the arrest of Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig in Beijing on espionage charges.
It seems to me that China saw that the USA was weakened by Trump, and decided to take advantage of this weakness by exercising its muscle. Because China is a dictatorship, they believe that if power relationships shift, governments can just order things and they happen.
The unease extends to China’s own backyard, where it has antagonised neighbours with its military adventurism in the South China Sea. A poll of citizens in 13 south-east Asian countries released this year by the ASEAN Studies Centre found that 63 per cent of respondents have little to no confidence in China to do the right thing, up from 52 per cent two years earlier. If forced to align themselves with one of the superpowers, 62 per cent said they would choose America.
“The Chinese government has a fiercely hierarchical world view that believes south-east Asian nations and other small countries should basically be vassal states that do what Beijing says,” says Charles Dunst, an associate with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro practice.
“That causes immense frustration.”
He adds: “If China’s goal is to integrate south-east Asia into a clear Sino-centric system they are falling short.”
China saw the power vacuum and stopped pretending to be benign. Their behaviour when Trump was in office shows just how they would behave in a world where they were the only superpower. The velvet gloves are off. It is remarkable that despite Trump's dysfunctional governance, China actually lost influence and approval.
No comments:
Post a Comment