Beyond the United States, the Asia region and the EU, there is a group of other relationships that China has. As an intrinsically global power, it is active in particular as an investor and resource procurer in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Each of these regions has developed specific relations with China, but the story is not a straightforward one. Across the 54 countries of the African continent, Chinese influence promised to intensify in the decade after 2005. But this proved a mixed story, with issues looming from 2008 onwards over poor governance of Chinese projects, involvement in arms dealing and evidence of Chinese complicity with local human rights abuses. For the Middle East, China engaged in a delicate balancing act, dependent for much of its imported oil on the region and yet desperate to evade its endless, complicated politics. For Latin America, China’s main interests were in securing resources, with huge deals signed during a visit by Li Keqiang in 2015 and by Xi in a follow-up visit in late 2016. This was also a place where Huawei and other Chinese companies were allowed less fettered access than in North America, Australia or Europe. Finally, right on the periphery, there was the question of Chinese emerging interests and activities in the South and North Poles. If nothing else, its figuring in the geopolitics of these remote regions was truly a sign that the era of Global China had well and truly arrived.
Speaking about China’s emerging role in the developing world, many commentators regarded this as a new phenomenon. But it was something that had been present, with varying levels of intensity, for many decades. In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated for the second time, he attended a UN conference where he outlined one of Mao Zedong’s pet theories, that of the Third World. Using language that would have sounded very strange coming from his mouth a few years later after the reforms he first sponsored in 1978, he declared that:
At present, the international situation is most favourable to the developing countries and the peoples of the world. More and more, the old order based on colonialism, imperialism and hegemonism is being undermined and shaken to its foundations. International relations are changing drastically. The whole world is in turbulence and unrest. The situation is one of ‘great disorder under heaven’, as we Chinese put it. This ‘disorder’ is a manifestation of the sharpening of all the basic contradictions in the contemporary world. It is accelerating the disintegration and decline of the decadent reactionary forces and stimulating the awakening and growth of the new emerging forces of the people.1
In the following paragraph, he went on:
Judging from the changes in international relations, the world today actually consists of three parts, or three worlds, that are both interconnected and in contradiction to one another. The United States and the Soviet Union make up the First World. The developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions make up the Third World. The developed countries between the two make up the Second World.
Although it was not explicitly stated, China promoted itself as taking the leadership role for the Third World. Delegations of left-wing groups from Africa and Latin America trooped through Beijing, granted aid and largesse, and often were received by the Chairman himself (see later in this chapter). For a country that had, at least on the level of rhetoric, resolutely set itself against all forms of hegemony, there was a clear need to avoid acting like it aimed to be dominant in any way. But critics did find echoes of a new Chinese colonial mentality, with smaller, poorer countries almost figuring as vassal states.
Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Chinese approaches to what was once called the Third World became more variegated and complex. The 1980s were an anomalous decade, one in which the spotlight was shone on developed countries like Japan, the United States, European nations or Singapore. A look at the top-level leadership delegations over this period testifies to this. Xi Jinping himself first visited the United States in 1985. He was in good company. Deng and almost every other top-level Communist leader took the opportunity to go and take a good look at a country once branded as a die-hard enemy. There was little interest at that time in wandering around Africa or South America. The key objective in these years, instead, was to secure capital – but, more importantly, know-how and technology. The developed world was the clear repository for that.
During the 1990s, however, with its wealth increasing, China figured increasingly as an exemplar, a potential model of development. As one official at the World Bank in Beijing reported to me in 2009, since 1978 China had accrued a huge amount of knowledge about how to develop an economy, and what sort of tactics might work, and it therefore had ways of sharing this with others. The question was, though, whether there was any associated political agenda. The clearest answer to this was in the battle to get diplomatic recognition shifted from the Republic of China on Taiwan to the PRC. In the 1990s, the situation developed into a multi-nation game of table tennis, where countries vying for support from either Taiwan or China would play one off against the other, shifting allegiance almost overnight. Liberia in 1993, Lesotho and Burkina Faso in 1994, Niger, Senegal and Chad in 1996 and 1997, all ceased recognizing Taiwan. In 2004, Vanuatu managed to maintain diplomatic links with Taiwan for all of seven days before reverting to the PRC, and Dominica shifted allegiance away from the disputed island the same year, with its South American cousin Grenada following in 2005. The net result of this was that by 2009 only 23 countries still recognized Taiwan, although they were mostly tiny. Only Paraguay figured as a significant country in terms of geographical size and population. A diplomatic thaw across the Strait under Hu Jintao and Ma Ying-jeou meant that the jockeying for links ceased, at least until 2013, when Gambia also decided to recognize the PRC instead.
The idea that a cashed-up China was able to buy allegiance from smaller developing countries was one seized on by critics in the United States and elsewhere. Was this a new, more subtle way of the PRC exercising influence and power and bending the world to its own aims during its era of renaissance and re-emergence onto the global stage? Was this a place where evidence could be found of China shaping external relationships in ways which accorded with its own self-centred objectives and preoccupations?
When European countries and the United States express consternation about Chinese strategies in Africa, they have to confront a sharp problem: their own lamentable history of colonization, enslavement, brutal exploitation and violence across the continent. This meant that when China established the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000, with meetings held every three years thereafter, the primary approach was to create a set of relationships between China and the attending heads of state or government from approximately 40 countries which were freed of colonial history and the heavy sense of obligation, with all its associated political issues, that existed when Europe or North America had attempted to convene large meetings in this way.
China’s resurrection in Africa is a fascinating story. Academic Donovan C. Chau’s study of the Maoist era and its strategy towards the continent covers ambitious aid projects to gain political interference, the importation of as many as 70,000 Chinese to work on the Tanzanian railways in the late 1960s, the visits by senior Chinese leaders to court African ones and vice versa, all of which was occurring from the late 1950s onwards and all of it foreshadowing behaviour that China was then accused of using 40 years later, in the twenty-first century.
Things were very different in the mid-twentieth century, though. Much of its engagement in the past was driven by the PRC’s desire to get enough votes at the UN to acquire the seat occupied by the Republic of China on Taiwan, which was occupying it at that time. It achieved this in 1971. China was also far more heavily and explicitly engaged with internal politics in some of the countries in which it was present, being linked to support for internal revolutions in Algeria, where it funded and provided logistics and training to support the anti-French colonial struggle, and less happily in Ghana and Tanzania, where it got dragged into clashes between post-colonial competitors in the 1960s. Perhaps the unhappy memory of these involvements explains China’s current wise distancing from most overt contemporary political engagement in Africa. In the twenty-first century, it is insistent that it is all about material help and commercial partnership rather than supplying ideological support. As Li Keqiang said during his 2014 tour of several African countries, China is a partner that does not lecture. This prior era of closeness in African–Chinese relations, with all the headaches it led to, must be the basis behind that principle.2
China’s engagement post-2000 could be described as amoral and largely driven by self-interest. Whatever the appetite elsewhere, the promotion of some kind of illusive China model was not something officials from the Chinese government tended to mention. To them, the continent was a source of resources, a potentially important market, and an ally in the UN when their backs were against the wall. Howard French, a journalist with experience in both China and several African countries, referred to an extended visit to the northern and central part of the continent in 2013–14 where he came across many Chinese communities who had come to live, work and do business. The sense conveyed by his book was more often than not about individuals pursuing commercial opportunities, though some of them were linked to the state companies, particularly in the energy sector. Perhaps as many as 750,000 Chinese were resident. The majority of them were unknown to the Chinese government back home.3
The state enterprises – in particular, ones like Sinopec, PetroChina and the CNOOC – had appeared on analysts’ radars from quite early on. Around 2008, there was talk of a Chinese takeover of Africa. This was reinforced by the language used by some leaders. The then president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, in an article in the Financial Times, referred glowingly to his meetings with Chinese leaders:
China’s approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronising post-colonial approach of European investors, donor organisations and non-governmental organisations. In fact, the Chinese model for stimulating rapid economic development has much to teach Africa.4
This did not stop fierce criticism of Chinese involvement in Sudan, where a vicious civil war was going on and the local leadership were accused of genocide. Nor did it help when a Chinese ship reportedly bearing arms for the pariah state of Zimbabwe was stopped at the dock in South Africa and prevented from making its onward delivery. And the claim that China had tried to influence the 2006 elections in Zambia added fuel to the criticism. By 2007, the situation had become such a reputational problem for China that Liu Guijin was appointed as Special Representative of the Chinese Government on African Affairs. Someone deeply experienced in African diplomacy, Liu had served in the continent and back in Beijing on Africa-related affairs for many decades. But his position was an unenviable one, with the 2008 Olympics and claims that it was a ‘genocide games’ because of China’s African ventures proving particularly taxing.
Human Rights Watch, in a hard-hitting report from 2011, looked at the behaviour of Chinese state mining companies in Zambia. The picture was not good. Long shifts and poor to non-existent safety regimes painted a picture of the Chinese as neo-colonial in their mindsets and acting little different to imperialists from another era. Those that did protest were dismissed by their bosses, or had intolerable pressure placed on them. ‘While Zambians working in the country’s Chinese-run copper mines welcome the substantial investment and job creation,’ the report stated, ‘they suffer from abusive employment conditions that fail to meet domestic and international standards and fall short of practices among the copper mining industry elsewhere in Zambia.’5 British-based academic Stephen Chan, who had himself lived in Africa for a number of years, refers to a Chinese approach to the continent that is often inward-looking and culturally insensitive. Chinese investments in Botswana, with its stable legal system and good levels of governance, or those in South Africa, are a different matter to those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Liberia. In that sense, Chinese economic interaction and behaviour are opportunistic, rather than being led by some grand strategic vision from Beijing.6
Chinese leaders have certainly spent quality time in Africa. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao went there often enough to earn the label ‘frequent flyers’. In 2014, Wen’s successor Li Keqiang made one of his most ambitious tours, with an eight-day, four-country trip covering Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria and Kenya. Showering the usual trade and aid favours liberally as he went, Chinese aid was lifted to US$ 12 billion and a US$ 3.6 billion deal was signed to construct a railway line from Nairobi to Mombasa. Xi Jinping himself visited a year later, attending the FOCAC meeting in Johannesburg, where he grandly announced US$ 60 billion of aid, and the supply of 200,000 technicians. He also embraced a visit to Zimbabwe, source of so much criticism for China only a few years before. ‘China supports the resolution of African issues by Africans in the African way,’ he stated, promoting the notion of a non-judgemental, sympathetic alternative partner to the West with its moralizing, conditions and demands, even over small amounts of aid.7
Some years ago, however, during a conference on EU–China–Africa relations held in Oporto, Portugal in 2006, a European analyst had warned Chinese partners attending that they should beware: ‘Africans will use you for Africa’s purpose. So don’t get too taken in by the warm words and talk of deep partnership.’ Xi’s approach to the continent can be typified in 2016–17 as more cautious, the harsh lessons of the mid-2000s taken on board and a more pragmatic tone dominating. The ageing leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, made a visit to Beijing in August 2014, seeking investment and support at a time when the domestic economy was still ailing badly. For all the talk of friendship and close alliances, the message that Zimbabwe was sent home with was a harder-edged one: to make friends with the West and develop his economy; China could not sign blank cheques. Expectations of up to US$ 27 billion of trade and deals signed while he was courting Chinese leaders did not come through. In the words of one analyst, ‘In the end, Mugabe and his team coaxed a less-than-expected deal out of the Chinese authorities, apparently on terms largely set by China.’8 Soon after, Zimbabwe adopted the US dollar as their national currency, a further sign of trying to look a little less to the East and a bit more to the West, despite the years of antipathy and ill feeling.
Nor was it all roses within Africa itself. China had to contend with suspicion and ill feeling among Africans, who felt that cheap Chinese goods were flooding the local market and that their workers were coming and taking local jobs. Chinese aid projects often stipulated that Chinese workers had to come in and do the labour. There was little visible benefit for ordinary Africans, nor much sign that the two communities intermixed much. And as with so many other areas of the world, the excited talk from 2005 onwards of an imminent Chinese takeover and burgeoning Chinese investments ran alongside a more prosaic story. It was true that in the decade up to 2014, the net annual flows of Chinese money across the continent had skyrocketed to US$ 3.2 billion per annum. And by 2014, it was also true that the stock of Chinese investment had shot up to US$ 32 billion, a 20-fold increase.9 But despite all this sound and fury, by 2015 Chinese investment only accounted for 3 per cent of total foreign capital being deployed in the continent. It was still overwhelmingly American, French and British actors that were active there.
Perhaps the most significant long-term move over this period has been the appearance of a stronger security dimension in the Africa–China dialogue. Bearing in mind all the previous comments about China historically not being a naval actor, and not wanting a prominent role outside its own region, the announcement that it was proceeding with establishing a naval logistics facility on the east coast of Africa in the impoverished state of Djibouti, mentioned in the Introduction, aroused huge interest: ‘by establishing an outpost in the Horn of Africa – more than 4,800 miles away from Beijing and near some of the world’s most volatile regions,’ the New York Times commented, ‘President Xi Jinping is leading the military beyond its historical focus on protecting the nation’s borders.’10 Here was something that could prove truly groundbreaking and significant, especially as this facility was close to a much larger and more comprehensive US one.
The Chinese government themselves were keen to stress, however, that the core driver behind Djibouti was to service its civilian ships taking oil from the Middle East, the largest external source of supply, down towards the Straits of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Ships here were vulnerable to attack by pirates, and China had worked with the UN and EU in supplying forces to anti-piracy patrols. Its explanation for a presence in the region therefore was a viable one: solely looking after its own interests, not as some meaningful marker of greater regional dominance. This example demonstrates how tough it was proving for the Chinese to avoid being viewed with suspicion when doing anything outside their region.
To the proposition ‘China is promoting a new colonial strategy’, a balanced assessment of the country’s decade of renaissance and renewed activity across Africa up to 2017 would have to deliver a ‘case not proven’ verdict. Its trade and investment links, while expanding, have proved modest. Its political role has become more cautious since 2007. Involvement in poorly managed projects was soon recognized as bringing it big reputational losses and was largely addressed. No Chinese state company went into Africa with a cast-iron ambition to exploit and ride roughshod over the local populations. They shared the same hunger for driving hard bargains and getting the best for themselves as anyone else, but the main difference is that they were unrestrained in going full-out for this by opinions back home, which meant they acted impulsively and sometimes without due caution, making mistakes that way. Some Chinese may well have had a sense of superiority and arrogance towards local cultures and populations – but once again this reprehensible behaviour was not without precedent, with North Americans and Europeans having done far worse things in the last century and a half. Interestingly, for Xi Jinping there were no grand new narratives and stories about the continent. It seemed like it intrigued and interested him far less than his own region, the United States or Europe. African countries did not figure in the Belt Road Initiative, nor in the AIIB (except for the membership of South Africa), and only really once again through South Africa in the BRICS bank that China had set up jointly with others in this ‘imagined community’ and then located in Shanghai. By early 2017, however, BRICS has become less prominent than during its hot phase only a few years before, and currently China’s role in Africa still seems to be a story in search of a plot. The earlier excited talk of China being guilty of bullying and hegemony has been replaced by a more nuanced one, where it is often more about mutual confusion.
If confusion is the order of the day for China in Africa, in the Middle East it is far more about Beijing seeking desperately to avoid being sucked into commitments and the quagmire of politics in the region. Unlike the United States or the EU, China does not have a specific Middle East policy as such at the moment. It relies on the standard parameters for its foreign policy elsewhere: respect for sovereignty of others, non-interference in the domestic affairs of foreign countries, and support for a multipolar world order opposing great-power hegemony. Unlike the situation in Africa, while China has been diversifying its links across the Middle East region, the political complexity of the area and the ongoing conflicts there have made a risk-averse Chinese leadership even more wary of taking any initiatives.
All this was clear to see when Xi Jinping made his first ever visit to the region in January 2016. As has become the habit under his leadership, a White Paper was issued while he was setting foot in the first country of his three destinations – Egypt. This contained the usual rhetoric about going for ‘win–win’ outcomes. ‘China firmly supports Arab national liberation movement,’ the paper’s preamble stated, ‘firmly supports Arab countries’ struggle to uphold sovereignty and territorial integrity, pursue and safeguard national interests, and combat external interference and aggression, and firmly supports Arab countries’ cause of developing the national economy and building up the countries.’ But the rest of the document is light on specifics, despite this bold start, stating that
China will continue to carry forward China–Arab traditional friendship, enrich and deepen our all-round, multilayer, wide-ranging cooperation, promote sustainable and sound development of our strategic cooperative relations featuring all-round cooperation and common development, and safeguard peace, stability and development of the region and the world at large.
This simply piles up largely meaningless stock phrases. On the most important and vexed issue of all, security in the region, the paper simply states that
China calls for a concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security in the Middle East, and supports Arab and regional countries in their efforts to build an inclusive and shared regional collective cooperation security mechanism, so as to realize long-term peace, prosperity and development.12
The Middle East in itself is a complex and disunited region, and this complexity is mapped in the modes of engagement between China and its partners there. There is a China–Arab States Cooperation Forum, founded in 2004, and China has relations with the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council. But these are currently low profile and probably not geared up for more ambitious engagement. No Middle East powers sit in the BRICS grouping. In the G20, only Saudi Arabia and Turkey are members. China has not talked, as it does with the EU, of anything approaching a ‘strategic partnership’ in the existing region, although it has recently started to initiate the desire for this. Its dominant discourse has been almost wholly in terms of economic cooperation, as the 2016 White Paper evidences. And while it has expended time and effort on some of the major countries, it has not, as Russia did over Syria at the UN in 2012, stuck its neck out and defined a policy position which might isolate it. It has followed the lead of others, as it did with the veto at the UN over action in Syria, where it followed Russia’s lead.
Where the Chinese–Middle Eastern relationship is unique is in both partners’ dependence on China’s domestic energy policies and its energy needs. This means that Chinese policy in the region is almost solely driven by the imperative to preserve its access to resources there by maintaining close relationships with its core suppliers in the Middle East. It is likely that unless China finds alternative sources of energy, it will need to deepen its political and security role in the region for this reason alone, and that the management of this will require considerable diplomatic skill. However reluctant, therefore, China is likely to become an increasingly important player for the Middle East, with a potential knock-on effect in its relations with other key players there – particularly the United States and Russia. As Xi Jinping moved through the region in January 2016, his tour captured this, going from the firmest and most long-standing of Beijing’s allies, Egypt, the earliest Arab state to confer recognition on the PRC, to Saudi Arabia and Iran, which were embroiled in a furious argument over the execution by Riyadh of a Shia cleric the month before. China’s Middle East relations are best described as a resolute attempt to keep things simple, focus on one specific area and avoid the temptation to make things more complex by getting involved in other problems which Beijing is unwilling, and unequipped, to cope with, focused on one specific area, and avoiding the intrusion of other problems which Beijing does not feel it should get involved with, nor believe it has any specific measures or ideas to cope with.
For all the sporadic frustration that the outside world might express towards China on this position, there are sound reasons for holding to it. For it, the Middle East is high-risk territory. It is largely as a zone under the influence of either the United States or in some cases Russia, a place which had highly problematic internal politics, and where there is the lack of a grand overarching narrative for relationship with China. The main forum for discussions between the two is the Gulf Cooperation Council and the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), low-profile multilateral gatherings. This is despite all the grand talk in the 2016 White Paper of relations having a history going back two millennia. Foreign Minister Wang Yi, for instance, at the sixth ministerial meeting of CASCF held in Switzerland in January 2014, simply stated that both sides needed to ‘enhance communication and cooperation’. With the Gulf Cooperation Council, China has largely been discussing a free-trade agreement. But this is a long way from the coherence and ambition of the bold narrative frameworks mentioned previously in this book, of ‘great power relations’ with the United States and ‘civilizational partnership’ with the EU. Whatever solidarity China gains from its status as a post-colonial survivor now on the trajectory to being a major power again, the Middle Eastern post-colonial legacy has been marred by continuing disunity and state breakdown, from the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s to the first and second attacks on Iraq by the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, to the wave of protests from 2010 which created the Jasmine Revolution. For the Chinese, the Middle East post-colonial response is one of failure and instability.
Were the Middle East to have no oil reserves, China would almost certainly steer clear of any significant commitment at all. But it is in this one area at least that the region is of great strategic importance, and it has to be given higher priority. So while Chinese policy makers in many ways operate according to the historic template discussed above in terms of traditional diplomacy, relegating the Middle East to the outer zone of their interest, it is prioritized as a partner when it comes to oil supply. This perhaps explains some of the slightly schizophrenic behaviour of Chinese policy in the region – sometimes close and enthusiastic, but sometimes tepid and risk-averse. The region belongs to two places in the Chinese conception of its world, and there is no fresh consensus on where precisely it should be located.
Bluntly stating that the region is important as an energy supplier is, understandably, not that satisfying. But the provision of something deeper and more ‘shared’ between both regions is hardly assisted by the great cultural distance between the two, and the disparity among China’s specific bilateral bonds in the region. Up until now China has guided its actions in the Middle East on the principle of not wanting to expend precious geopolitical capital there, particularly against the United States, when it has other areas to prioritize such as its own regional neighbourhood. Avoiding getting sucked into obligations that tie its hands, and engaging in a mission to limit itself to rhetorical commitments without being recruited to support any of the opposing parties in the area, is hardly an exciting and dynamic framework within which to operate.
China’s energy links have become increasingly important, however, due to rising domestic demand and a need to diversify its supply partners, and this now gives it a new imperative to revitalize and refresh this framework. Its preferred position of neutrality is being challenged, and it will in the future need to make larger and bolder commitments to partners in the region, even if only to preserve its self-interest. This is not just about oil, however. China also looks upon the terrorist ideology and mission of more extreme actors in the Middle East with real concern, as this reflects the increasingly unsettled situation in China’s western regions, particularly in Xinjiang. Ominously, late in 2015 a Chinese national, Fan Jinghui, was taken hostage by Daesh, the insurgent force controlling large swathes of Syria, and brutally executed in November. So far, the links between extremists in China and those in the Middle East are low priority for Daesh and others, but Beijing has figured in their language as a legitimate target for anger and recriminations because of its control over Xinjiang. It would be a nightmare for Xi Jinping’s China to suddenly face an increasingly internationalized extremist terrorist group, adding to the pain and panic that has already been caused by events such as the suicide bombs in Beijing and mass knife attacks in Kunming over 2014.
In the area of economic cooperation, at least, things should be straightforward, and statistics bear that out. Up to 2016, the most that Chinese leaders were willing to say was that they were ‘eyeing the establishment of a strategic partnership, using the FTA as a driving force to boost pragmatic cooperation in all fields’ (the words of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in January 2014). During Xi Jinping’s visit, trade and economic links figured high in the agenda as usual. US$ 55 billion was offered in aid, with bilateral trade with Iran scheduled to reach US$ 600 billion before 2015. In view of the fact that this only stood at US$ 54 billion in 2014, this was an ambitious target. The difference was that after 2016, China could enjoy the lack of US-imposed sanctions on a denuclearizing Iran. The region also figures in the Belt Road Initiative universe, at its edges.
In the last three decades, China’s greatest feat has been political: its maintenance of good relations with almost all Middle Eastern countries, who on the whole have sought to reciprocate this. It has experienced none of the conflicts over human rights, Tibet or Taiwan that tend to complicate its relations with the EU, the United States and other partners. In Latin America and Africa, for example, a number of countries still recognize Taiwan, whereas none do in the Middle East. The Middle East countries, in addition, are not likely to discover a deep interest in the issue of Tibet or to put pressure on China over human rights, as many of them have been repeatedly castigated by international agencies for having even worse records.
With the Israel–Palestine conflict, China has maintained a position where it enjoys good links to both parties – and indeed was a strong ally of the Palestinian Liberation Front under Arafat in the 1980s – yet avoids being sucked into taking sides. It has friendly relations with Israel, even to the extent that Israel was accused in the 1990s of supplying it with sensitive radar equipment, offending its key ally, the US. Some have even speculated about whether China can fulfil a peace-brokering role because of its unique position, but so far it has resisted this, simply standing by its rhetoric of preserving peace and stability.
The Jasmine Revolution period, which began in 2010, posed a difficult moment of uncertainty and offered the strongest test to its pragmatic, largely non-committal stance. Beijing banned discussion of the revolutions on the internet domestically, and clamped down on any activists after 2010 who attempted to draw parallels with the situation in Egypt and Libya and what was happening in China. Some Chinese officials simply stated that the Jasmine protests were against inefficient governance, and in China’s case no such charges could be laid against it. Despite this, the removal of Mubarak in Egypt, the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and the uprisings in Syria deeply unsettled China. In Libya, it simply abstained from the 2011 UN vote supporting military involvement, feeling when the full NATO actions occurred that it had been short-changed into something far greater than it had originally expected. It had to ship out more than 36,000 citizens from the area in its largest ever repatriation, revealing just how extensive its energy and economic interests had grown in the region.
The Libya experience framed its subsequent response to Syria, where it stood with Russia despite immense pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom, and voted against any military involvement. In view of the ongoing instability in Egypt and Libya, it now probably feels vindicated in its belief that the United States and its allies were naive in thinking that political reform along the lines originally envisaged was really going to offer quick and sustainable solutions. As a pragmatic actor, China seems to understand the highly tribal and disunited nature of politics in the Middle East area.
Since 2011, the horrendous conflict in Syria, and the subsequent emergence of ISIS, has shown the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese position. While it has been proved right in its scepticism about the effectiveness of sweeping away former regimes and replacing them with new, weaker ones, the moral bankruptcy of simply standing back and watching Syria self-destruct has shown that the world’s second biggest economy has little geopolitical imagination when it comes to trying to solve the problems of a region to which it has increasing material links. Despite sporadically promising to take a more active stance, the most that China has offered is humanitarian assistance. The ISIS challenge does link to radical Muslim action in its own country, and a spate of terrorist attacks in China has only heightened this awareness. China, therefore, whether it likes it or not, has gradually been forced to take a position because of domestic challenges arising from international issues in the Middle East. Dependence on oil imports is only likely to accelerate that trend.
Focus on oil gives coherence to the Chinese story in the region. While China’s prime source of energy is coal, 20 per cent now comes from oil. This is unlikely to change. Since 1993, China has imported more oil than it can source domestically, and now more than 50 per cent of oil imports come from the Middle East. This, more than anything else, gives China a direct interest in the Middle Eastern region. It has signed major deals with Iran, Saudi Arabia and others. Within the Belt Road Initiative rubric, revivifying logistics and trade routes between China and Europe through Central Asia and into the Middle East supplies much-needed diversification.
In terms of tangible economic links, China’s figures have grown despite the unrest since 2010, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, the UAE and Iraq figuring among its top commitments pre-2014. Middle Eastern investments into China are negligible by comparison, with only Turkey, Israel and Kuwait making any meaningful commitments, and none of these more than US$ 189 million worth of stock (Israel). The vast majority of Chinese involvement is in energy projects, with some diversification recently into tourist infrastructure. China’s most important economic actors in the region are the state energy companies – Sinopec, PetroChina and the Chinese Offshore Overseas Oil Corporation.
With Iran, China has intimated at something more substantial, flowing from the political into the economic and highlighting an area where it is able to work with partners like the United States and the EU over contentious issues. China was a significant investor in the country even during the period when it was in effect a pariah state after being named one of the three members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by George W. Bush in his State of the Union address in 2002 (the others were Iraq and North Korea). China continued to enjoy positive relations with Iranian leaders through their attendance as observers at the SCO, a Central China and Inner Asia grouping of powers. When visiting Tehran in May 2014, Chinese minister of defence Chang Wanquan alluded to something deeper when he stated that he wanted to ‘deepen defence relations’. According to the Xinhua news agency, Chang told Iranian defence minister Hossein Dehqan that the development of bilateral relations has ‘remained positive and steady, featuring frequent high-level exchanges and deepened political mutual trust’. This was in the context of US accusations that a Chinese businessman had imported arms to Iran, something which China expressed anger over and where some aspects of relations between Iran and the United States and EU showed the first signs of thawing.
In 2015, as the United States and its partners edged closer to a freeze on Iran’s nuclear production, China took a supportive role, using its leverage in Tehran. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, when visiting the country in February 2015, said, ‘Talks on the Iran nuclear issue face an historic opportunity, and striking a comprehensive deal on schedule is the trend of the times and the desire of the people,’ urging his Iranian hosts on by stating:
Reaching comprehensive agreement is beneficial to Iran upholding its own legal rights, including the right to the peaceful use of nuclear power, and for the people of Iran to throw off the difficulties of sanctions as early as possible and focus on energetically developing the economy.
This was the sort of statement that Beijing was making as a matter of course to its so-called ally in Pyongyang.13 With the successful completion of the deal in July of the same year, and the benediction of China as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China stood to gain from the lifting of sanctions and the possibility of further investment into Iran unfettered by legal constraints. It was also an example of where China could say it was supporting principled behaviour – stopping proliferation of nuclear weapons – in concert with other partners, and acting in a properly multilateralist way. The only downside was the way in which its support for Iran’s denuclearization laid it open to pressure to be more bullish towards North Korea, which, in principle, offered a very similar case.
Despite this example of proactivity, in their mission to find more diverse diplomatic partners the current leadership in China will regard Africa, Latin America and others as far more straightforward than ones in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia remains the most stable and substantial. Historic links to Egypt are good, but marred by the present instability in the country. It is therefore unlikely that Xi Jinping or his colleagues will want to take the risk of a new approach to the Middle East, unless they are forced to. The latter is made more likely by the increasingly worrying disunity in the region, and by the threat of the United States through isolationism pushing China into having to take a more proactive stand simply to protect its own interests. Sitting on the fence – China’s preferred option – has worked fine up to now. But the fence is looking increasingly wobbly, and China will, whether it likes it or not, have to think very hard of feasible actions to take once its comfortable neutral position is blown away.
South America offers a specific set of challenges to Chinese foreign policy. Rich in resources that China currently needs, it also poses sharp political issues; a number of Latin American countries still recognize Taiwan over Beijing, and it remains firmly, almost jealously, within the US zone of closest military and political influence. The last thing China would wish for would be to be accused of meddling in the region. It does not have specific forum as with Asia, Europe, Africa or the Middle East to collectively engage with Latin American countries except through the tepid, and somewhat tendentious BRICS framework. Nor does Latin America figure in the imagined Belt Road Initiative community, or take any role beyond Brazil’s membership in the AIIB. And yet under Xi, it is seeking what has been described as ‘an upgraded relationship’, something new and meaningful, backed up by an increase in high-level visits and promises of trade and investment increases since 2013. What designs does China have on an area in which it has only weak historic links, and very faint cultural and geopolitical ones?
Some analysts try to make sense of this by applying the ‘south–south’ concept. In this theory, Chinese approaches and ideas about development are taken as inspirational by countries seeking to develop their economies, manufacturing industries and infrastructure. This idea is partially behind the ‘Beijing Consensus’ model which had been discussed earlier in the 2000s. If a ‘south–south’ mentality did exist in the minds of Beijing officials, then it was an important change, signalling a clearer connection with the Latin American world. In the Maoist period, the only real link had been through support of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba, and of other workers’ movements. Che Guevara had even met with Mao Zedong as part of a delegation to Beijing in 1960. While the approach, showing solidarity and sometimes giving financial support to left-wing protest groups, was similar to that deployed in Africa, what was different was the lack of any significant aid projects.
Such paucity of clear content was evident almost three decades later when a White Paper was issued on the region and the Caribbean by the State Council in 2008. That had dealt with the relative lack of shared history by blandly stating that the region mattered to China because ‘Latin America and the Caribbean have a long history, vast territory and abundant resources, and the region enjoys a good foundation for economic and social growth and huge development potential.’ To fulfil this, the paper proposed four pillars of engagement: promote dialogue, deepen cooperation, draw on each other’s strengths to boost common progress and adhere to the ‘one China’ principle.14
This stark combination of the search for some kind of mutual cultural recognition alongside the promotion of raw-blooded economic cooperation based on self-interest has been well illustrated by high-level visits since 2013. After having no top leaders descend on their neighbourhood for over a decade, Xi Jinping came not once but thrice between 2013 and 2016, with his second visit, in July 2014, lasting an epic ten days. Quite why a Chinese premier wished to lavish such attention on the area does need an explanation, with his first trip – embracing Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico – fitted in just before his visit to Sunnylands in the United States to see President Obama, and his second taking in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba. The third was largely to attend the Asia–Pacific Economic Conference in Peru. As US analyst Michael Swaine pointed out, beyond the geopolitical fun of messing around in the United States’ backyard, returning it some of the favours it has been handing out in China’s area of strategic interest in Asia, there was something very striking. Between 2000 and 2013, Chinese trade across the whole Latin American area had skyrocketed from US$ 12 billion to US$ 261 billion, with US$ 65 billion in direct investment. These figures had made China the second largest trading partner, after the United States, and the third largest investor.15
But the focus on pursuing economic opportunity has also been cloaked in a more ameliorating language of cultural appeal and the creation of people-to-people links. In this context, the lack of any heavy history of colonial mutual involvement or victimhood serves as a liberating factor, and an opportunity. When Premier Li Keqiang made his visit to four countries in the region in May 2015 – Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Chile – the descriptions emanating from the tour had an almost dreamlike quality, a world away from the hard and fast statistics usually showered down when top Chinese leaders visited. For Colombia, the idea was ‘literature as the bridge’. ‘Li has proposed that China and Latin America strengthen not just material but also spiritual cooperation,’ the Xinhua report recorded, after his attendance at a literature summit in which Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan had been in attendance, ‘and rely on the power of literature to achieve heart-to-heart communication.’16 For Peru, the idea was ‘ancient civilizations, modern connections’. For the region as a whole, it was ‘mutual understanding’.
Is there much mutual understanding at present? If it is strengthened, then it has to take into account a number of factors impacting on it. Criticisms of China in the region focus on two main areas. The first was in claims that Chinese investment in commodities was having a deleterious impact on the environment. A report issued in 2015 by Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Initiative stated that
The Latin American commodity boom was largely driven by new trade and investment with China, and concentrated in the petroleum, mineral extraction, and agricultural sectors – sectors endemic to environmental degradation and often the source of social conflict over rights and working conditions.17
The report made clear that China should not take sole responsibility for this. As in Africa, there were plenty of issues with poor governance and corruption in the host countries. But through the 1990s and into the 2000s, it was predominantly Chinese state companies that were accused of involvement in serious environmental issues with their South American investments. These figured in the previously cited Joshua Kurlantzick study of soft-power issues, with Peruvian mines and their particularly poor safety and environmental record under a Chinese state owner coming in for particular criticism. A particularly hysterical account of the negative sides of Chinese investment into the region appeared in a further study published by two investigative reporters a few years later. For Heriberto Araújo and Juan Pablo Cardenal, the issue almost figured as a global ‘yellow peril’ phenomenon, in which masses of Chinese workers were fanning out over the planet, taking up jobs, investing in order to control and manipulate, and generally exemplifying the emergence of a new imperium.18
The second was the uncomfortable fact that, for all the talk of grand amounts of investment and new project financing going into the region from Beijing, what was promised and what was delivered rarely matched up. This issue had been pointed out earlier, and in a more general context, by economist Joe Studwell in a book on the disparity between the huge figures promised when Chinese leaders travelled abroad, and what actually happened after they had returned home.19 Even when China had been a far smaller economy, these trade deals had reached eye-watering amounts. By the 2010s, the usual figure was in the billions. Li’s trip to the region in 2015 saw US$ 53 billion signed up. A Brazil–China Business Council report sobered up excited observers by showing that in the period from 2007 to 2012, only a third of the announced figures of inward investment were actually realized.20 Those listening to Li’s announcements in 2015 who had been present during previous high-level outward visits from China might have been forgiven for having reservations.
Added to these two issues is the simple fact that, as of early 2017, of the 22 countries in the world remaining who still confer diplomatic recognition on the Republic of China on Taiwan, 12 of them are in Latin America, with countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama and Paraguay all still recognizing Taipei. Throughout the early 2000s, a diplomatic tussle took place with some Latin American countries and their diplomatic allegiances. Costa Rica was infamously ‘bought’ (according to its critics) by hefty aid and investment inducements to shift recognition to Beijing in 2007. Taiwan was able to persuade St Lucia to swap from recognition of the People’s Republic back to Taiwan the same year. A truce in seeking diplomatic recognition and swaps has largely been in place since the return of the nationalists under Ma Ying-jeou in 2008. However, the election of Tsai Ing-wen as president of Taiwan at the head of the more pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 might prefigure another era of diplomatic tussles. China will base this on the immense economic leverage that it is starting to have in the region.
One of the unique features of Xi Jinping’s CV was the fact that, by 2014, he had visited every single state and territory in Australia in the previous three decades except the remote southern island of Tasmania. That was rectified in November 2014, when, after the G20 was convened for that year in Brisbane in the north-east of Queensland, Xi took a flight first to Canberra, and then from there on to Hobart, the small city facing out to the Antarctic Ocean on the southern point of the island.
There was a good strategic reason for this brief visit. The Antarctic is the ultimate form of diplomacy in the style of Chinese ‘Go’. A 1956 treaty ratified in 1983 by China and involving 52 countries prohibits military activity and resource exploitation on the vast polar caps in the Southern hemisphere. But as a report made clear in 2013, there might be as much as 200 million barrels of oil in the region. It was for this reason that Xi Jinping was quoted as stating at a Politburo meeting that China needed to ‘take advantage of ocean and polar resources’.21 The most remarkable issue around the Antarctica region is that sovereignty over parts of it seems to be a matter of planting a flag next to an installation and laying a claim to it. As of 2017, the United States has five such structures, with the Australians operating three. China is making up for lost time, with four already functional, including the Great Wall Station on the periphery of the ice mass, another on King George Island, opened in 1985, and three other ‘research stations’ dotted across the vast territory.
The Antarctic clearly has value for everyone in terms of its untapped water, resources and fish. It is also a beautifully remote part of the earth, one which receives next to no attention while everyone’s eyes are diverted to places like the Middle East, Europe or North America. The fact therefore that in such a supremely isolated and harsh place China has upped its investments in the last few years to US$ 55 million is striking.22 The 1956 treaty is due for review in 2048, and at that stage there might be options to develop more resource exploitation with technology which is better and more suited to the unique attributes of the region than that which exists today. Meanwhile, China is staking out spaces of interest and control, in ways that almost map its general geopolitical strategy.
What is most remarkable about the Chinese strategy in the South Pole (and it clearly is a strategy, linked to Xi Jinping’s benediction from 2013 at the Politburo meeting mentioned earlier in this chapter and his subsequent physical visit so close to the area) is how Chinese thinking can now embrace a region and area which is so far from its traditional zones of focus and concern. If there was proof of China’s graduation to a truly global power, then this is it. It is supplemented by China’s interests in the North Pole, through its admission in 2013 as an observer to the Arctic Council, a forum set up by states with territory in the Arctic, founded in 1996. As with Antarctica, China’s interests are a mixture of strategic and practical. But the Arctic is a busier space, with major players like the United States, Canada and Russia all claiming large parts of the marine territory through the extent of their Economic Exclusion Zones (EEZ). While investing more in the North Pole (where it has more latitude), the South Pole has importance as a potential source of resources (though very hard to access and exploit at the moment), shipping lines (the ship Xuelong was able to make the first ever Arctic crossing by a Chinese vessel in 2012, cutting a possible 6,000 kilometres off the alternative route via the Suez Canal and through the Indian Ocean, though through waters unnavigable for much of the year) and science. The last of these should not be underestimated. Both in the North and South Poles, China has the opportunity to demonstrate that it can be on the cutting edge of research, looking to extract, for instance, buried ice which contains molecules from over a million years before, giving evidence of the earth’s climatic situation then.
For all the tepid talk about China simply being an observer, and being present through an interest in generic issues like climate change, research and environmental protection, the activities of its state and non-state companies, in, for instance, trying to buy tracts of land in Greenland for iron ore, or Iceland for tourism, arouse complaints that there is a larger strategy behind all of this. One of the anomalies of the Arctic region is that it is a place with no sovereignty, which has prompted Chinese thinkers to argue that China has as much right to be there as anyone else. Interestingly, this desire overrode its fury at Norway for giving the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. For all the splenetic rage it expressed back then, China maintained dialogue over Arctic issues – around which, of course, Norway is an important player – and also established a research base in 2014 on the Norwegian peninsula. China has travelled in the space of half a century from having one ambassador based abroad in 1966, to drawing close to having Arctic and Antarctic strategies. This is a remarkable testament to its reach and global status.23