Rather than malign China, it’s time the West listened
ust over 10 years ago, Xi Jinping, then China’s vice-president, spoke at a meeting in Mexico. “There are some well-fed foreigners,” he said, “who have nothing better to do than point fingers at our affairs.” But, he went on, “China does not, first, export revolution; second, export poverty and hunger; third, cause trouble for you.”
After Xi rose to become president, the mantra of China’s benign foreign and economic policy became a central feature of how China tries to portray its engagement with the rest of the world. Relations with individual states, indeed with the global community, were about “win-win” solutions. A sprawling vision for the future was launched to much fanfare in 2013, with the Belt and Road Initiative, promising to “boost mutual understanding, mutual respect and mutual trust among different countries” and contribute to “world peace, stability and development”.
China’s growing ambitions caused considerable alarm, above all in America, long before the Covid-19 crisis, with heavy pressure from the Trump administration, using trade tariffs, to agree measures ranging from the protection of intellectual property to reciprocal access to markets.
A lot more has been at stake, however, than resetting economic relations. As a recent State Department position paper makes clear,
America believes that it is facing a “whole-of-system” challenge from China. Washington buzzes with talk of how to deal with China’s economic growth, slow down its technological advances and counter its ever-expanding diplomatic and political reach. Crucially, China is a bipartisan issue. We have already seen Donald Trump and Joe Biden start to define their presidential election campaigns around China policy, trading barbs at each other’s weakness in dealing with Beijing.
The portrayal of China as threatening and malign is one that falls on fertile ground elsewhere. Xi, said President Emmanuel Macron recently, is “rebuilding an empire, and he is prepared to be very aggressive in terms of pushing the limits of international law”. It is a view that is becoming repeated with increasing regularity — though few question what this empire really is, what its aims might be and whether our own willingness to see patterns that look familiar from our own past might distort and mislead us too.
Nevertheless, recent weeks have seen a sharpening of antagonisms and a significant raising of pressures, to the extent that many, including in China, are talking about parallels with the Cold War. There is no doubt that the pandemic has played a role in crystallising opinions. The outbreak of the coronavirus embarrassed Beijing, leading to a determined attempt to reshape the narrative by emphasising donations of medical equipment and the containment of the virus’s spread. The people of Hubei province, said President Xi last week, “deserve to be called heroes”. Challenging the story of competence and efficiency has consequences, as Australia has found out. Calls from Canberra for an independent inquiry into the causes of the pandemic led to furious editorials comparing Australia to “chewing gum stuck to the sole of China’s shoe”, as well an 80.5% tariff on barley and a ban on some beef exports.
But views of China have also been affected by other recent steps that look aggressive, opportunistic or clumsy — or perhaps all three. Threats from a senior Chinese general to “smash separatists” in Taiwan are ominous, as is the new national security law that threatens to sharply reduce freedoms in Hong Kong — and violate the UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration.
All this serves to frame the question of what exactly China is: a rising superpower that believes its time has come and that it can change the world for the better, or one that fears being penned in and manipulated by the rich countries of the West, which feel threatened by its growth and will do anything to protect their advantages.
That latter view finds considerable sympathy in many — if not most — parts of the world, which have seen the Trump administration pantomime erode faith in the American system and reveal a country putting itself first at the expense of others. But there is more to this. It is striking, for example, that a joint statement on Hong Kong was signed only by the UK, America, Australia and Canada. How much more powerful it would have been if states in other parts of the world had signed it too. The fact they did not is, of course, revealing in itself about the realities of the 21st century.
Not everyone sees the world in the same way we do in rich, western liberal democracies. It would not hurt to realise that and to be more inclusive and diplomatically savvy too. A letter issued last weekend expressing “grave concerns” about Hong Kong was signed by 186 lawmakers from 23 countries. There was not a single signatory from Africa, the Middle East or many other regions. Either no one thought to ask leading figures in these countries to sign; or they refused to do so.
That provides China with an open goal when it talks of global leadership — as does America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, which stands in sharp contrast to China’s offer to make vaccines available cheaply in developing countries. If liberal democracy, or for that matter Global Britain, is to mean anything, it is essential to seek to bring others into the tent, rather than always fall back on old friends. China is working that out and learning some important lessons from the pandemic. We need to make sure we do so as well.
Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...gn-china-its-time-the-west-listened-cft2gh5rj
