China’s stringent response to the Covid-19 pandemic led to a view that Beijing would become more inward-looking. But this analysis misses a salient point that China has been making consistently – China wants to play a disruptive role in international politics and transform the world order based on an old idea of State sovereignty.
China wants to condition the current world order to its volition with no questions asked about its core sovereignty interests – including Taiwan and territorial integrity.
Pushing China into the league of ‘major countries’ would be one of the critical goals of President Xi Jinping in his third term.
Ahead of the 20th Party Congress, the People’s Daily published a series of He Yin (harmony) commentaries on major country diplomacy, which seek to underscore the importance of Xi’s ideas in guiding China’s foreign policy and diplomacy. The ‘Xi Jinping thought on Diplomacy’, sometimes described as ‘Xiplomacy’, doesn’t get as much attention as the leader’s views on ecological civilisation and a strong military – the former being a controversial subject with the world’s eye on it.
“Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy shows a profound understanding of historical rules and the trend of the times. It charts the course for advancing major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,” said a People’s Daily Online commentary.
‘Xiplomacy’ isn’t another verbose Chinese concept but is backed with a strategic vision to elevate China’s international status.
“Chinese ideas and solutions answer the world’s questions, the questions of history and the questions of the times, and effectively promote the evolution of the world’s unprecedented great changes towards the direction conducive to the progress of human civilization,” said He Yin commentary published in People’s Daily on 2 October.
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Scandalous player
Without repeating a foreign policy writer’s cliché, gone are the days of tao guang yang hui – China likes to be the scandalous ‘major country’ player.
“Guiding other states will replace the policy of ‘never taking the lead,’ which is a policy suitable for weak states, or a policy that signals weakness….China needs to be more assertive and proactive, to take a stand more often, and to take on greater responsibility,” write Xu Jin and Du Zheyuan in the Chinese Journal of International Politics.
Beijing believes that the country has started to play a prominent role in international affairs, negative or positive, and the course forward is to increase the efforts – not to become closed off to the world.
The Chinese character ba (霸) is often translated as ‘hegemony’ in scholarly discourses on the Chinese version of a new regional order. The Chinese understanding of hegemony may not explicitly state the hierarchy between nation statues, but the relational notion built into ba doesn’t discount China’s supremacy in its version of ‘benign hegemony’. The idea of ba is far more complex but relevant to the current order than the notion of tianxia, cited by many experts. Tianxia is the tributary system between China and other East Asian states that prevailed over various Chinese dynasties. The Belt and Road Initiative shouldn’t be viewed as a revival of tianxia but as a relational notion of hegemony which pushed China into the league of ‘major countries’ – or even hegemon.
The Economist’s Beijing bureau chief David Rennie argues that China’s disruptive approach to international politics seeks to revive some old ideas – and may even succeed at changing the world order. At the heart of these old ideas are the sovereignty of the state and less intrusiveness of global politics in the affairs of the state. The primary target of staunch support for state sovereignty is an attack on what Beijing describes as a vague promise of the West’s ‘universal values’.
“When its efforts meet resistance, it pushes for vaguer rules whose enforcement becomes a question of political bargaining. All too often, it seeks to revive old, discredited ways of running the world that put states first, at the expense of individual freedoms,” writes Rennie.
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Clear actions
Beijing’s disruptive actions have been clearly expressed during the Russia-Ukraine war.
“China’s goal, say diplomats in Beijing, is to see Western unity crumble and sanctions fail to make Mr Putin pay a price for his war of aggression,” writes Rennie in a special report for The Economist.
It sounds like an oxymoron – a contradiction in terms – because it is just that. China doesn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries while playing a central role in shaping a new type of world order. Beijing has no qualms with the contradiction and has a whole tome articulating its diplomacy and foreign policy ideas.
The contradiction can be explained by Beijing’s desire to preserve parts of the current order that have helped its rise in international relations and revise other institutions to serve Zhongnanhai’s vision. The disruptive role Beijing plays at the United Nations can be understood by examining the UN groups where Chinese diplomats invest most of their time.
China is only the second-largest contributor to the UN on nominal terms but based on the GDP, Beijing lags far behind the UK, France and Russia. China’s capture of the UN World Food Program by getting Qu Dongyu appointed as its head, and subsequently downplaying Russia’s role in the food crisis is one example of capturing UN organisations.
China has a similar strategy for getting nation-states to sign up for its revisionist agenda.
“China has a genius for spotting countries unhappy with the international status quo and looking for an alternative. Such balancing does not always undermine norms: when Central Asian countries consider a Chinese-built cargo railway to offset dependence on Russia, they are swapping one autocracy for another,” Rennie summarises in The Economist.
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New ideas
To accomplish the vision of disrupting and revising the current order, China is now ready to offer a new set of ideas under the Global Security Initiative. The GSI is a set of ideas articulated by Xi Jinping to seek security cooperation of other countries by focusing on non-traditional security issues like the pandemic response and terrorism.
“As Chinese diplomats and analysts close to the government have made clear in the months since, the GSI marks a significant shift in Chinese foreign policy. It directly challenges the role of US alliances and partnerships in global security and seeks to revise global security governance to make it more compatible with the regime security interests of the Chinese Communist Party,” writes Sheena Chestnut Greitens in Foreign Affairs.
Though the exact nature of the GSI is unclear, the early signs suggest China will seek to export its version of domestic security and surveillance apparatus to ‘friendly’ countries as part of the initiative.
Beijing isn’t going on vacation anytime soon. Instead, the Chinese diplomats want you to mind your business while they promote ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’. China’s revision to the international order intends to bring back an old idea of State sovereignty and weaken the ‘values based’ international order.
The author is a columnist and a freelance journalist, currently pursuing an MSc in international politics with a focus on China from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was previously a China media journalist at the BBC World Service. He tweets @aadilbrar. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)