On 27 November 2015, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) declared that it was establishing, for the first time ever, a naval installation beyond its shores, in the impoverished eastern African state of Djibouti. ‘These facilities will help Chinese vessels to better carry out Chinese missions like escort and humanitarian operations,’ spokesperson Hong Lei declared.1 In practical terms, the project being envisaged was minuscule, and focused purely on Chinese naval assets. But this did not stop some commentators from reading much more into it. In the British Daily Telegraph, one writer stated that
China’s decision earlier this month that it is to build its own naval base in Djibouti, the first time Beijing has sought to establish a permanent military presence beyond the country’s borders, has been greeted with deep concern at the [US] Pentagon.2
For much of the Western media, this was a tangible sign of Beijing’s ambition, its desire to become a new kind of superpower, one with the ability to project far beyond its borders, a force to be reckoned with way beyond its traditional theatre of influence, Asia.
Even with a story as simple as this, however, there are no easy conclusions, and China’s new planned facilities can be read as much as a sign of reluctance and weakness as one of assertiveness and strength. That the world’s second largest economy had no military assets abroad is the first anomaly. US capability stretches to almost every corner of the earth, with over 640 installations in more than 120 countries.3 China is the main trading partner for about 130 countries across the globe. And yet, it has one aircraft carrier (an old, retrofitted one bought from Ukraine in the early 2000s). The United States has more than 11, France two. China may well have showed off a lot of new-looking weaponry when it held its grand parade marking the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Sino–Japanese War in September 2015. But, as analysts were quick to point out, almost all of this was untested. In nearly four decades, since the Reform period started in 1978, China has seen only one war, a brief skirmish with Vietnam in 1979 from which it came out badly. It is therefore a vast, important country with a huge military (some 2 million active servicepeople) and almost zero experience.
Djibouti was therefore remarkable because of the amount of interest and speculation such a minor facility drew. In the same tiny country in eastern Africa, the United States has a major site with 4,000 people (almost two and a half times the number of people that China planned to deploy). They have intelligence-gathering assets to hand, and a runway to accommodate aircraft. China simply aimed to have a port. It has a simple reason for this, too, linked not to neo-imperialist designs but to trade. For a country led by a political movement which had made economic development the core pillar of its legitimacy since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, it was odd that China did not have, at the very least, some local capacity to look after their interests – especially considering its growing reliance on oil imports from the restive Middle East region and the fact that oil transportation along stretches of the Indian Ocean is becoming increasingly vulnerable to US control or piracy. Nor was this situation new. For over a decade, it had been participating in United Nations anti-piracy operations. Within this context, Djibouti made eminent sense. It was strange, in fact, that China had not gone along this route earlier.
China’s foreign policy in this era, the era of its material enrichment, has become a battleground. As this book aims to show, there is plenty of disagreement outside the country about who calls the shots over specific policies and issues on international relations, and also within the country over just how to influence and feed into its foreign policy. Outside the country, speculations about Chinese intentions have reached fever pitch. Half the world feels that it is only a matter of time before China controls the whole planet like some modern-day Roman Empire, especially in view of the parlous state of the United States and European Union after their harsh experiences in 2016. But the other half believes that China will remain a low-key, inward-looking, self-interested player who looks more like a mouse than a tiger, timid and cautious in its approach to the world around it and constantly wary of irritating or angering the United States beyond issues that directly relate to it.
This external schizophrenia is exacerbated by two issues. One is the lack of transparency within China over who has real powers, and what the objectives of these power-holders might be. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is an organization with a history of privileging covert behaviour and playing its cards close to its chest. But this is only a modern manifestation of a proclivity throughout China’s long imperial history to place secrecy on a higher plane than other modes of behaviour. In the third century BC, the great legalist Han Fei declared that trusting others only allowed them to control you. The best attitude was to be remote, hidden, observing unseen, and to never allow others the privilege of quite divining what you were up to. ‘Undertakings,’ Han Fei declared, ‘succeed through secrecy but fail through being found out.’4 Opacity has remained a strong characteristic of the current leaders of China, modern followers of Han Fei to a man (as of 2017 there are no women in the summit of power, the Standing Committee of the Politburo). This has only been reinforced by the Soviet-style system of governance adopted by the CCP after coming to power in 1949. Such a style of behaviour is not well suited to making those outside the country feel wholly relaxed and trusting when they interact with it. The lingering feeling that foreigners are not being told the full story – that there is some hidden agenda or some trick they are having played on them – has never entirely been dispelled, no matter how much the People’s Republic itself has talked in recent years of being a peace-loving, trustworthy and cooperative actor.
The second issue is not so much China’s fault as a result of circumstances. In the Maoist era, from 1949 to 1976, the country had barely any trade with the outside world, and was largely inward-looking. Between the year of its foundation and 1978, there were estimated to have been less than a million individual journeys across the country’s borders. This is symbolized by the fact that in 1966, during the opening turmoil brought about by the Cultural Revolution, only one ambassador from Beijing remained in post abroad – Huang Hua, in Egypt.5 In 2014, the situation had transformed beyond recognition. More than 100 million cross-border journeys were recorded in a single year, with China becoming a major part of global investment, tourist and trade flow figures. In the space of half a century, the country has gone from being an intrinsically parochial, introverted entity to one where every aspect of its new reality has an international dimension. It is a global power, influential in environmental policy (albeit largely because of its own colossal problems), financial issues and global economic developments. The US Treasury has to factor in China’s growth projections in order to work out how their own economy is likely to fare. And a slowdown in Shanghai and Beijing from 2013 had an immediate, visible impact in the Australian cities Sydney and Melbourne. A country with an opaque decision-making system is a major global player in most areas, apart from hard military activity. This combination more than any other explains why getting to grips with China’s foreign policy attracts so much interest. It is a conundrum that we all need to solve, whether we work in business, government relations or the cultural arena. This remains true today, and will remain true for the next century or more.
In the past, the foreign policy of the PRC was a specialist, under-exposed and under-studied area. That era is well and truly over. In the 1960s, and even into the 1980s, it was more important to put effort into understanding the Soviet Union, and most diplomatic careers tended to be built either by specializing in the United States, Europe or the USSR. China was an exotic sideline. Those sent from Western foreign services to do their time in Beijing (or Peking, as it was called back then) usually did this in order to tick the box saying they had done at least one posting classified as ‘hardship’, and then could go on to bigger and better things. Being a US or British ambassador to the PRC ranked surprisingly low. China’s diplomatic position was either regarded as wholly dictated by its alliance with the USSR (at least up to the late 1950s) or as being bound by narrow definitions of self-interest as it continued its era of inward-looking reconstruction (up to the mid-1980s). It was seen, in US expert on Chinese international relations Robert S. Ross’s terms, as predominantly a land power, one with no real interest in projecting its powers in the waters around it, one haunted by a sense of its past greatness but which had had a terrible experience of modernity and was still emerging from the trauma that the modern world had given it. Indeed, through much of the 1990s and 2000s, the challenge was to get China to become involved in issues beyond its borders, rather than trying to contain it and hedge it in.
All of this has now changed. This book will look at the foreign policy of China under its president since 2013, Xi Jinping. It forms the final part of a trilogy of works I have published on the leadership of China since 2014. The first of these, The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China (2014) looks at the political elite, their backgrounds, networks and the ways in which they managed to reach the summit of decision-making in the country in the period from 2007 to 2012, when the 18th Party Congress held in Beijing that year elevated them. The second, CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping (2016), focuses on the eponymous general secretary and president – the figure at the heart of contemporary political life in the People’s Republic – and the sources of visible and invisible power around him, from institutions, to ideology, to narratives and stories. That segues into this work. While The New Emperors and CEO, China place the field of domestic policy in the foreground and look peripherally at the world beyond China’s borders, this work looks predominantly at China’s current view of the outside world, and how the outside world links to its own internal dynamics and preoccupations.
There is a simple reason why this deserves special attention. While showing residual characteristics from an earlier era (strong support for sovereignty, observance at least rhetorically in the non-interference in others’ internal affairs, a desire to keep a low profile and not opt for unilateral action in issues that do not directly concern it), China’s diplomatic behaviour is undergoing the same kind of revolution that its economy has seen in the last three and a half decades. Suddenly, it has become deeply involved in the Middle East, taking part in the negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons in 2015 and, at the end of the year, even hinting at becoming a mediator over the interminable and terrifying civil war in Syria. With the United States it has set the global pace in terms of climate-change accords, but it is also creating entities like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt Road (new Silk Road) Initiative (BRI), which seem to be creating a network away from the United States. This area of greater diplomatic ambition is striking because it brings to the surface all the ambiguity and reservations about what sort of power China is. What makes the country’s leaders tick? What do they want to gain? What is their final vision, and how does the rest of the world fit into this? In the last few years these questions have become more pressing and more urgent to answer than they were even in the mid-2000s, or when China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002. They have become even more salient with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, pushing China towards taking the lead on even more issues, ranging from climate change to free-trade deals, as the world’s remaining superpower looks like it is retrenching and withdrawing from these areas to a more back-seat role.
While focusing on the Xi period, this book will locate current Chinese foreign-policy thinking and behaviour in an historic context, which will predominantly be spelled out in Chapter 1. As with foreign policy everywhere, there are issues that involve emotions, aspirations and moral standing, which run alongside hard-nosed strategic thinking about easily quantified political and economic goals. Beyond these issues, there are nationally constructed narratives of empowerment and victimhood and the ways they betray desires to have status and global standing. These are very hard to quantify and describe. Xi Jinping himself has stated that he wants Chinese leaders to tell the story of their country well, which means that the outside world needs to start listening to this story, and to see what sort of framework they can fit it into. Is China a usurper, a rule-breaker, disruptive and ultimately destructive of the hard-won post-World War II order? Or is it something more benign, a rule-observer, more reliant on the predictability and benign stability of the global political and economic order, rather than one seeking to undo it and remake it in its own image? If it is a usurper, does the world, led by the United States, seek to contain it, thwart it and change it, or is it doomed to see some kind of final conflict, as has happened so often in the past, where a new power seeks to topple the old and create its own form of dominance? If it is power-seeking to defend the status quo, does the current international settlement do justice to the sort of contribution that China could make? Should it be granted more space, more ability to operate in the global financial and political system? And does it offer new models and ideas on how to function as a country in the twenty-first century, a country without a history of colonization, one which comes from different philosophical roots to that of the main players until now – the United States and, before that, Europe?
Answering these questions is important, because once the world knows what sort of China it is dealing with, it can formulate the right policy response. Gearing up on containment policies if China is a rule-keeper and not a rule-breaker would be like fighting with an ally – a waste of energy and opportunity. But ceding space to China would also be wrong if its ultimate plan is to thwart the intentions of the West and remake the world in its own image and for its own purpose; the United States and its allies would be collaborating in something that would be aimed at seeing their demise. Sleepwalking towards a conflict between China and the United States and the latter’s allies would also be a needless and terrible tragedy. But trying to stifle and frustrate China’s ambition, and the ambition of its 1.4 billion people, would be morally and politically indefensible. It would also prove impossible to restrain such an immense human wave of expectation, creating immense resentment were it to be attempted.
Thinking about modern Chinese foreign policy therefore means considering several vexatious questions that come close to the issue of working out what in essence this country – the People’s Republic of China, with its unique ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ political model but its ancient thought, traditions and attitudes – is. The first chapter will therefore outline some of the underpinnings of the Chinese foreign-policy story: the narrative of national humiliation, the strong desire for sovereignty and autonomy, the emphasis on self-determination and the move since 1978 to enjoy relations with the outside world that benefit it while keeping out its less benign forms of influence. These fundamental principles of Chinese diplomatic behaviour will then be brought up to date with the Xi style of foreign relations, showing where they remain the same and where there are differences.
To illustrate the points made above, the rest of the book will look at the zones of influence around China, running from its most important set of relationships with the United States and its regional neighbours, partners it shares a wide range of interests with, to those more peripheral to it where its concerns focus on its need for resources and economic partnership. There will therefore be specific chapters covering the United States, Asia (the world of the ‘Belt Road Initiative’), the EU, and finally the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. Surprisingly, very few scholars have attempted to explain the full range of China’s relations. While there are superb studies on the various discrete aspects of its currency diplomacy, from Pakistan to North Korea to the United States and the United Kingdom, there are far fewer non-theoretical grand overviews. This book cannot go into minute detail on such a vast subject, but it does attempt to do as Xi Jinping himself said he did in governing China: to rise to a high vantage point and get a good look over the whole terrain, trying to see how it all fits together. Only from this point is it likely to answer the thorny questions posed in this Introduction about what sort of power China is, and how it might behave in the coming decades. This work will hopefully give some suggestions as to how these questions might be answered.