As the world’s second-largest economy and the major regional power in Asia, China has taken a place at the center of world politics. It is a global actor, with a voice on every world issue. But China is not yet what the Soviet Union once was and the United States is today, a true global power—that is, a country with comprehensive strategic interests and influence in every corner of the world. In Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Canada, China’s interests and influence are limited to two spheres, economic and diplomatic.
We have labeled these widely disparate regions the Fourth Ring because they lie beyond China’s immediate neighborhood. As long as local regimes in the Fourth Ring accommodate Chinese economic and diplomatic interests, China has no stake in their ideological character, domestic politics, military posture, or strategic alignments. The one strategic interest China has in the Fourth Ring is stability, because war or regime change threaten to disrupt its economic access and diplomatic ties. But Beijing does not need to care what kind of stability prevails—democratic or authoritarian, military or civilian, theocratic or secular, tribal or class based—so long as it is not an arrangement that excludes China. Nor can China afford to care about such issues, because China does not have the resources that would be required to promote a specific ideology in the Fourth Ring, support client regimes, or build a significant military presence.
China’s emergence as an actor in the Fourth Ring has been recent and dramatic. Under Mao Zedong, Beijing’s ties outside of Asia were limited to a few governments and political parties that had put themselves at odds with Moscow and often with Washington as well. In Eastern Europe, the PRC maintained relations with two of the three countries that had broken from the Soviet bloc, Albania and Romania (but not with Yugoslavia, whose regime was too liberal for Mao’s taste). In the Middle East, China both recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization and cultivated ties with Iran in the late years of Shah Reza Pahlevi’s regime in an effort to increase its influence in a region dominated for decades by the two superpowers. In Angola, Rhodesia, South-West Africa, and elsewhere in Africa, China aided governments and insurgencies that were anti-Soviet, even if they were right wing (chapter 3). China supported a variety of small pro-China Communist parties worldwide, including one in the U.S. In Western Europe, the PRC got diplomatic recognition from the four Nordic states and two major American allies—Britain in 1950 because it needed a channel to Beijing in order to manage Hong Kong and France in 1964 because it wanted to make a point of its foreign policy independence.
China’s role in the Fourth Ring increased after 1971, when the PRC took the China seat in the UN. Along with its Security Council seat, Beijing acquired diplomatic recognition from most governments, but it was still a minor presence outside Asia. Only after the PRC entered the WTO in 2001 and began to reach across the globe for commodities and markets did it acquire extensive interests and influence beyond its own neighborhood.
China’s policy agenda in the Fourth Ring today focuses on three economic issues and three diplomatic issues. In the economic category, first, Beijing is engaged in a quest for secure sources of petroleum to help satisfy its growing need for energy. Second, more generally, it seeks access to other commodities and to markets and investments around the world. Third, Beijing is engaged in arms sales, chiefly for profit rather than for strategic reasons. On the diplomatic front, fourth, China seeks cooperative relations with as many regimes as possible in order to protect economic access. Fifth, Chinese diplomats work country by country to maintain China’s policy of diplomatically isolating Taiwan and the Dalai Lama. Sixth, China seeks support from Fourth Ring governments for its position in a range of multilateral negotiations over international norms and regimes.
To shift from this specialized agenda to a more comprehensive role as a global power would require more than incremental change. The Fourth Ring is too large, too far away, too politically complex, and still too much dominated by the traditional colonial and neocolonial powers to come easily under the sway of a remote Asian power, even one as large and dynamic as China.
THE QUEST FOR PETROLEUM SECURITY
China’s growth as a manufacturing hub for exports and its citizens’ rising living standards caused a huge increase in its energy use starting in the 1990s and with it a growing reliance on imported oil.1
Fortunately from its own security standpoint, most of China’s energy—71 percent in 2008—comes from domestically produced coal, which is used to produce electricity. This makes China the world’s largest coal consumer. Coal has environmental disadvantages because it is dirty to mine, transport, and burn, but it has a security advantage because China does not have to import much of it. (Some is imported, more when prices are low and less when they are high.) China also produces energy domestically from nuclear power, hydropower, and wind power. But oil provides a large and growing proportion of its energy. Oil is irreplaceable under current technology because no other source can be used on a large scale for road transport. It is also a key input in many of China’s most important industrial products, including petrochemicals, fertilizers, and plastics. China became a net oil importer in 1993 and by 2007 imported almost half its oil, making it the world’s second-largest oil importer after the United States. According to various estimates, China will import 70–80 percent of its petroleum by 2030, becoming the world’s largest consumer of imported oil. The major sources of Chinese oil imports have been Saudi Arabia, Angola, Iran, Oman, Russia, Sudan, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Brazil, and Libya, with their rank varying year by year. Oil comes to China from many other countries as well.
Dependence on imported oil leaves China, like other oil-importing countries, vulnerable both to price fluctuations and to interruptions in supply. China’s situation is not as bad as that of Japan, Germany, South Korea, India, and many other countries that import even higher proportions of their energy resources. Nevertheless, an oil disruption would severely damage China’s economy, political stability, and military preparedness. Chinese strategists believe that oil supplies might be disrupted for several reasons, including instability in oil-producing states, terrorism, piracy, and war. In such contingencies, they worry that Western governments and Western-dominated international oil companies might use their ownership of much of the world’s oil reserves and their cozy relations with major suppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico to give priority to Western consumers. Or if China–U.S relations were to deteriorate, Washington might squeeze China’s oil supplies to hold back the country’s economic growth.
To reduce this vulnerability, China has adopted a multipronged approach that is similar to that of other petroleum importers. Policymakers have pushed for more efficient use of petroleum (for example, by raising mileage standards for cars and gradually raising the price of gas). They have tried to increase the use of other energy sources, such as natural gas, nuclear power, hydropower, solar power, and wind power. China has defended its claims to what it believes are large oil and gas reserves in the East China and South China seas (chapter 6). Starting in 2000, it created a strategic petroleum reserve, aiming for the capacity to store a ninety-day supply of oil by 2020. A strategic petroleum reserve helps a government control the domestic price of oil by filling the tanks when oil is cheaper and emptying them when prices surge, and it provides a cushion to deal with interruptions in supply. China has helped to construct oil and gas pipelines in Central Asia that provide access to supplies of hydrocarbons that would not be accessible otherwise. If proposed pipeline projects in Pakistan and Burma come to fruition, they would provide land routes to move oil from the Middle East and Africa into the Chinese interior along pathways that would be less exposed to disruption than seaborne supplies in certain wartime scenarios. But pipelines are expensive and time consuming to build. In 2006, China established the Energy CLSG in the CCP center to coordinate energy policy (chapter 2).
As part of the push for energy security, Beijing decided in the late 1990s that its state-owned oil companies should “go out” to get oil. It would not be enough just to buy oil on international markets: the oil companies should also seek ownership stakes in foreign oil reserves (referred to as “equity oil” in distinction to “commodity oil”). The three major Chinese national oil companies are the China National Petroleum Corporation (known as PetroChina on foreign stock exchanges), the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Propelled by generous credit from Chinese state banks, these latecomers to the international oil game moved into countries where political conflict with the West or difficult natural conditions left resources open for acquisition, and they made some sizable investments in oil operations. Some analysts criticized this policy, saying that China overpaid for equity stakes and should have relied on the international oil market, which is open to all. But Chinese policymakers saw the West treating oil as a strategic asset and believed that they should do the same. For example, Beijing was impressed by the visceral U.S. political reaction that derailed the attempted purchase of an American oil company, Unocal, by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation in 2005. Besides, China had a great deal of foreign exchange that it needed to invest. And equity oil investments served the Chinese oil companies’ business interests because oil production was profitable, and stakes in foreign oil reserves bulked up the companies’ asset values. As of 2010, about 20 percent of the Chinese national oil companies’ production came from fields outside China.
China’s equity oil investments are located in nearly fifty countries, some in Asia, but most in the Fourth Ring. For the most part, these investments are modest in comparison to the large stakes held by the local national oil companies and the international majors. They entail no more than the usual political complications that attend large business deals in most emerging markets.
In two cases, however, China became more than usually politically entangled. It was no coincidence that the Chinese companies, as latecomers, made some of their largest investments in countries whose political environments were among the world’s most forbidding. They were able to do so because other outsiders were cautious about investing in these countries or had pulled out.
One such country was Sudan. A vast, underdeveloped country, Sudan contains hundreds of ethnic groups and tribes that often engage in armed conflict. Its two largest civil wars were those between the Arab North and the Christian South and between the Arab-dominated central government and the non-Arab (black African) tribes of the Darfur region. The North–South war went through two phases, the second of which ended in a peace agreement in 2005 that led, in turn, to the creation of the independent Republic of South Sudan in 2011. The Darfur conflict broke out in 2003 and went through several phases of intense conflict, which many observers labeled a genocide. To press the Khartoum government to end its attacks in Darfur, the U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions, the UN imposed an arms embargo, the African Union proposed reconciliation and offered a peacekeeping force, and in 2008 the International Criminal Court indicted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity. The conflict also spilled over into neighboring Chad, whose government was hostile to the government of Sudan.
It was in this environment that China had by 2006 invested an estimated $10 billion in Sudanese oil fields, mostly in the South, pipelines between South and North, and refineries and port facilities in the North. Sudan became one of China’s half-dozen or so top oil suppliers overall and by far the largest source of oil that China’s national oil companies produced in Africa. This status made China Sudan’s largest trading partner and investor, so China could hardly avoid entanglement in the country’s internal and external conflicts.
China’s interest, however, was not in the outcome of these battles, but in maintaining relationships with all contending parties so as to protect its economic assets and diplomatic relationships. Beijing needed good relations with the national government in Khartoum because Sudan’s pipelines, refineries, and port facilities were in the North; with the southern authorities because most of its oilfields were located there or along the North–South border; with the Darfurian rebels to the extent possible because they had the capability to attack certain Chinese installations; with Chad because China also had oil investments in that country; with other concerned African states because of its ties with each of them; and with the West. These multiple needs resulted in a complex policy, which Beijing improvised in response to shifting pressures from different actors. On the one hand, Beijing treated the regime in Khartoum with all the respect it gave to any national government. It sold arms until the UN imposed its arms embargo (and some say, even after that) and showered President al-Bashir with state visits, high-level protocol treatment, and aid projects. This largesse continued even after al-Bashir’s indictment by the International Criminal Court. China was not bound to honor the indictment because it was not a signatory of the treaty that established the court.
On the other hand, China bent its principle of noninterference by supporting the 2005 North–South peace agreement, contributing police and troops to the UN peacekeeping operation in the South, and lobbying the Khartoum government for peaceful settlement of the conflict in Darfur. Hu Jintao pressed Sudanese president al-Bashir on the Darfur issue face to face during al-Bashir’s visit to Beijing in 2006 and during Hu’s return visit to Khartoum in 2007, and the Chinese government made a point of announcing publicly that he had done so. In 2007, Beijing appointed an ambassador with the special mission of promoting peaceful resolution of the issue. China allocated several million dollars of humanitarian assistance for the region. Also in 2007, it voted in the Security Council to support the African Union’s policy of sending a joint UN–African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur, on condition of Khartoum’s acceptance of the mission. Beijing allocated a contingent of engineers to the mission and pressed Khartoum to agree to its deployment. These moves were in part a response to pressure from international human rights groups who linked the Darfur genocide to the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics. But the timing and nuance of Beijing’s actions revealed its primary emphasis on avoiding damage to its investments.
The second country where large hydrocarbon investments imposed a complex political calculus was Iran.2 Here the issue was not internal strife (although there was plenty of that), but the international crisis caused by Iran’s attempt to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. As the West intensified pressure on Iran to stop its program in the early 2000s, Western oil companies began to pull out as contractors (although they continued to buy Iranian oil on the market), but at the same time Chinese companies moved in to help the Iranian national oil company explore and exploit Iranian oil and gas fields. With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005 Iran’s confrontation with the West sharpened. The UN Security Council imposed a series of sanctions, which China supported. At the same time, driven by its growing energy needs, China increased its investments. Iran became China’s third-largest oil supplier.
On the one hand, Beijing did not support Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Like the U.S., France, Russia, and several other countries, China had previously given assistance to Iran’s nuclear energy program. This assistance was provided ostensibly for peaceful purposes, but it also reflected Beijing’s tolerant attitude in the 1980s and early 1990s toward nuclear proliferation. Once China joined the nonproliferation regime (chapter 10), however, and acquired a large stake in oil supplies from Iran and its neighbors, it worried that a nuclear Iran would destabilize the region. It urged Iran to cooperate with the IAEA and not to pursue weapons-grade uranium enrichment.
But Beijing did not give the same priority to stopping the Iranian nuclear program as the Western powers. For one thing, the Chinese did not believe the program was as far advanced as Western policymakers claimed. Beijing even considered the possibility that the West exaggerated the crisis in order to contain Iran and, as a side benefit, to complicate China’s search for energy. Second, China believed that confrontational sanctions would only make the Tehran regime feel more insecure and thus strengthen rather than weaken its determination to resist the West. (Beijing perceived this same flaw in Western sanctions policies toward North Korea and Burma.) Third, as a promoter of nuclear energy, China did not want to see sanctions framed in such a way as to erode the principle that all states have the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes (chapter 10). Fourth, China wanted to maintain good relations with Tehran so that Iran would continue the hands-off policy toward Xinjiang that it had pursued since the early 1990s. To encourage this attitude, China invited Iran in 2004 to become an observer member of the SCO. Fifth, China wanted to protect its sizable export market in Iran, which included consumer goods and military equipment. Finally, the protracted struggle between Iran and the West helped tie down American forces that might otherwise have been deployed closer to China. So long as Tehran was not on the very brink of developing a nuclear weapon, therefore, China was content to let the crisis simmer.
Coordinating closely with Russia in order to avoid diplomatic isolation, Beijing used its position at the UN Security Council to allow but to delay and weaken sanctions against Iran. It never used its veto on the issue, both because it wanted to maintain good relations with the U.S. and other Western powers and, more fundamentally, because it did want Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons.
In Sudan, Iran, and elsewhere, China’s search for energy security did more to align its interests, however imperfectly, with those of other industrial economies than to set them apart. Its investments contributed to supply and price stability on world markets by producing oil from sources that Western companies were not using. When crises broke out in particular oil-producing countries, China wanted them resolved with minimal disruption of supply as much as the West did. In Libya, for example—an important oil supplier to China and many Western countries—once the Qaddafi regime was faced with a widespread uprising in 2011, China shared the European and American interest in a quick resolution to the crisis even though it was reluctant to see the fall of a government with which it had good relations. Beijing therefore used an abstention to allow the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force, ostensibly to prevent attacks on civilians, but in effect to hasten Muammar Qaddafi’s exit from power. The cases of Sudan, Iran, and Libya all illustrate a broad convergence of China’s interests with those of the West, along with the desire to project an independent policy stand, disagreements about what policies would work, and Beijing’s relative paucity of means to influence the situation on the ground on its own. The Western powers still took the lead in these cases. China was able to benefit from Western interventions without entirely endorsing them.
COMMODITIES, MARKETS, AND INVESTMENTS
In the 2000s, Chinese policymakers became engaged in protecting the supply of other commodities from the Fourth Ring besides oil and in gaining access to markets for exports, services, and investments. China’s economic boom in the 1980s and 1990s had been Pacific centered, depending on the import of semifinished products from the rest of Asia and their assembly and export to the U.S. But as the economy surged in the twenty-first century, China acquired important economic interests in the Fourth Ring. It has become a major importer of a wide range of minerals and agricultural products, besides oil, that supply both its export industries and its growing domestic consumer market. Some of its most important mineral imports are copper, iron, manganese, lead, chromium, silver, and zinc, and among its most important agricultural imports are soybeans, cotton, and wood. At the same time, Chinese exporters developed new markets in the Fourth Ring for their manufactured products. And cash-rich Chinese enterprises and government agencies looked for places to invest where they might earn better returns than from U.S. government Treasury bills.
By buying, selling, and investing, China emerged as a major—in some cases, the major—economic partner of several countries in the Fourth Ring. To consolidate these ties, China has followed a path well worn by other outside powers, involving a mix of diplomatic flattery, development aid, political relations with elites, and—to an unknowable degree—corruption. China has not, however, acquired a strategic stake in particular regimes or regimes of a particular type. It stands ready to transfer its friendship to whomever emerges in power.
In Africa, China’s major economic partners are Angola, Sudan, Chad, Libya, the Congo, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Cameroon. All supply oil. In addition, many are major suppliers of copper, iron ore, other minerals, and cotton. China has made some spectacular investments, such as in copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In return, Africa is a growing market for Chinese electrical appliances, light-industry products, and mechanical and electrical products. Perhaps a million Chinese have moved privately to Africa in recent years to set up small businesses.3 China has become the continent’s largest trading partner, followed by the U.S. and France.
Compared to other outside powers in Africa, China has both advantages and disadvantages. It has no colonial history there; it offers development aid and business contracts without political or moral strings attached; and local leaders are comfortable with the Chinese way of doing business. But this comparative advantage is more marked in the more corrupt and less stable countries, precisely the countries in which business relationships are riskiest and most difficult to manage and where Chinese staff and workers are least safe. In more stable countries in Africa, elites maintain closer ties with former colonial powers, and it is harder for Chinese enterprises to compete. China has worked to develop closer cultural ties with the continent, welcoming several thousand African students to China each year and opening twenty-five Confucius Institutes in Africa by 2010. But English and French remain the main foreign languages spoken throughout the continent; few Africans immigrate permanently to China; and many Africans see the Chinese as a new neocolonial power, no less exploitative than the Europeans and Americans who preceded them. China has no military presence on the continent that can help it support its clients in the way France and the U.S. have sometimes done.
In Latin America, China’s role is built chiefly around trade, which has grown rapidly but still accounts for only about 5 percent of the region’s foreign trade. The continent’s largest economy, Brazil, is China’s most important trading partner there. It is an important source of iron ore and agricultural products such as soy beans, grains, and meat, a large market for Chinese goods, and a partner in high-tech pursuits, including aeronautics and space satellite launches. The two have pioneered the use of currency swaps—settling certain trade deals in Chinese renminbi and Brazilian real in order to reduce the need to deal in U.S. dollars. Chile and Peru are among China’s major suppliers of iron ore and copper. To broaden economic ties, Beijing signed free-trade agreements with these two countries in 2005 and 2009, respectively. In its trade with Argentina, China imports soybeans, meat, and other farm products and exports manufactured goods. In Venezuela, it invested and loaned tens of billions of dollars to oil exploration, oil production, and transportation projects, which helped to buttress the efforts of the Hugo Chávez regime to establish economic independence from the U.S. Even trade with Cuba has grown dramatically, reversing the traditional hostility rooted in Cuba’s support for Moscow in the Sino–Soviet dispute. By 2007, China was Cuba’s second-largest trading partner.
Latin American countries have welcomed China’s economic presence as a counterweight to traditional U.S. dominance, but there have also been frictions. As in Africa, concern has been raised that China is developing a neocolonial relationship with Latin America based on imports of raw materials and exports of manufactured products. After suffering a trade deficit with China, Argentina undertook investigations of alleged Chinese dumping of manufactured goods (selling at below-cost prices to drive local competitors out of business). In Mexico and Central America, competition from manufacturers in China has hurt industries that exported to the U.S. The U.S. remained the dominant outside power in the region, with stronger economic, political, and cultural ties than any other country and an exclusive military presence.
In the Middle East, China paid for its oil imports by selling a variety of goods and services, among them manufactured products and military supplies (discussed in the next section). China also undertook large construction projects in the Persian Gulf states, supplying technicians, workers, equipment, and supplies. Because of the importance of oil supplies, China runs an aggregate trade deficit with the region. Beijing maintains good relations with all Middle Eastern countries, including Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but China has no military presence there and can be considered a strategic partner of only one of these countries, Iran.
The EU in 2004 surpassed the U.S. to become China’s largest trading partner. Europe sells advanced manufactured goods such as automobiles and aircraft to China, and China in return sells computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, and textiles. The Eurozone financial crisis of 2011 brought China more heavily into the market for European government bonds, earning goodwill for Beijing for purchasing the bonds of governments in trouble, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, even though these purchases fell well short of the bailout some Europeans hoped for. Growing economic relations have generated some issues. Some Europeans charge China with predatory economic behavior that enables it to corner European markets and acquire European enterprises at low cost. Such views led the EU to resist Chinese pressure to grant it full “market economy status” (which carries fuller privileges of economic access) sooner than 2016, when it was scheduled to achieve such status automatically under its WTO accession agreement. The Chinese have offered to buy sophisticated military equipment from European suppliers, but the U.S. has pressured the EU to maintain an embargo on high-end weapons that was imposed after the Tiananmen crisis in 1989.
China has no vital interest in the security issues that most engage Europe—the stability of East and Central Europe, the problem of how to assimilate growing populations of Muslims, dealing with refugees and illegal migrants from North Africa, and preventing terrorism. Europeans are anxious about Chinese inroads into their traditional zone of influence in Africa but have done nothing to counter it. Europe has no defense commitments in Asia. Without armed forces in each other’s region, Europe and China present each other with neither a military threat nor a possibility of significant military cooperation.
The primary political issue between the two sides concerns human rights. European leaders and EU diplomats keep the issue alive in relations with China as part of their values-based security strategy. But as China’s economic importance grows, the Europeans have pursued the human rights issue less consistently (chapter 12).
ARMS SALES
A subset of China’s commercial relations in the Fourth Ring consists of arms sales. When China joined the world economy in the 1980s, military-owned arms enterprises looked for markets overseas to supplement their incomes. This approach broke an earlier pattern under which Chinese arms transfers were limited to a few partners and had strategic rather than commercial motivations. At different times in the late twentieth century, China aided North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran with the development of nuclear weapons and missile technologies (and in the case of Iran, chemical weapons capabilities), in each case seeking to buttress a key ally and complicate rival powers’ defense calculations (chapter 11). But by the late 1990s, China had joined international arms control and nonproliferation regimes and had—so far as is publicly known—eliminated its transfer of weapons of mass destruction.
China remained, however, active in the commercial arms market, selling all interested buyers weapons and technology not proscribed by the arms control regime. Some of these sales drew U.S. opposition even though they were legal under the treaties China had signed; the U.S. argued that the sales had a destabilizing effect on local military balances. For example, in the 1980s, China’s sale of shore-to-ship Silkworm missiles to Iran created a new threat for U.S. warships sailing in the Persian Gulf, and the sale of CSS-2 missiles to Saudi Arabia, M-9 and M-11 missiles to Syria, and a nuclear reactor to Algeria posed threats to U.S. allies and the risk of fueling local arms races. After strenuous negotiations, the U.S. prevailed on China to stop these sales.
These agreements left China by the mid-1990s with a market in small arms, light weapons, aircraft, armored vehicles, artillery, small ships, and the like. It briefly became the world’s fourth-largest exporter of conventional weapons. Most of its major customers, except for Pakistan and Burma, were in the Fourth Ring; they included Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Demand for Chinese weapons declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The reasons varied but included the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988—a war in which China had sold large quantities of arms to both sides—higher demand for more advanced U.S. technology following the spectacular performance of U.S. forces in the first Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991, and greater availability of Russian arms on the world market following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, China is among the top half-dozen or so arms-exporting countries (the rank varies from year to year) but stands well below the U.S. and Russia—consistently the two major arms-exporting powers—in the quantity and technological level of the weapons it sells, and usually lags Germany, France, and the United Kingdom as well.
Arms sales relationships are in part political because they support friendships with local regimes, as in Pakistan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. But in no case have China’s arms sales been used to nurture a deeper defense relationship in the way U.S. arms sales often are. Chinese arms sales of the recent past were not made on a concessionary basis. They came without training. China made no effort to encourage other states to use weapons and equipment compatible with those of its own armed forces because it does not anticipate operating side by side on the battlefield with forces from other countries.
FRIENDSHIP DIPLOMACY
After economic interests, the second category of Chinese interests in the Fourth Ring is diplomatic. China seeks friendly relations with as many of the world’s governments as possible in order to contribute to three specific goals: to maintain access to Fourth Ring economic resources, to gain other states’ cooperation in the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and the Dalai Lama, and to win support for Chinese negotiating positions in a range of multilateral forums. Absent from China’s Fourth Ring agenda are the kinds of interlocking political, territorial, and security issues that shape its relations with key Second and Third Ring neighbors such as Japan, Vietnam, Burma, Pakistan, and the SCO states. In the Fourth Ring, Zhou Enlai’s principles of peaceful coexistence fully apply, especially noninterference in internal affairs, equality, and mutual benefit. The strategy is transactional: China provides material and symbolic support and diplomatic backing, and it expects to receive economic access and diplomatic cooperation in return.
To create goodwill, foreign leaders invited to the Middle Kingdom are given royal treatment no matter what the size or significance of the country from which they hail, and they always return to their countries with scholarships, loans, development projects, and trade agreements. In return, Chinese leaders travel tirelessly to promote their country’s image as a loyal member of the developing world, bringing gifts wherever they go. In 2006, the Chinese president, premier, and foreign minister visited a total of seventeen countries in Africa. According to a South African analyst, this activity was “unprecedented.” He continued: “I can’t think of any other head of state, including [South African president] Thabo Mbeki, who has visited as many African countries as that.”4 With especially important regional powers such as Egypt, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil, Beijing has declared the creation of “strategic partnerships.” The West shuns certain governments as rogue states; China treats them with the same pomp and circumstance it treats other states.
China has become an active joiner in multilateral forums and institutions throughout the Fourth Ring. Among other roles, it is an observer member in the Organization of American States, a donor member of the Inter-American Development Bank, and a member of the Asia–Europe Meeting. Beijing has organized its own multilateral dialogue mechanisms, including the China–Latin America Forum, the China–South American Common Market Dialogue, the China–Andean Community, the Sino–Arab Cooperation Forum, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, and the China–Caribbean Economic and Trade Cooperation Forum. Their carefully choreographed meetings flatter and impress foreign officials. For example, the 2006 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation hosted some seventeen hundred delegates from forty-eight African countries amid warm hospitality and luxurious accommodations. Each such organization showcases Chinese aid, trade, and investment amid a rhetoric of mutual respect and cooperation.
In the Mao period, China was a small aid donor to a short list of Asian and African countries, most famously helping Tanzania and Zambia build a railway to link the two countries’ interiors to the sea. In the first decades of the post-Mao years, China was an aid recipient, receiving support especially from Japan, the UN Development Program, and the World Bank. Starting in the 2000s, aid flowed back out, focusing on those countries in Southeast Asia where China sought to calm suspicion of its rise and to increase economic interdependence (chapter 6), in South Asia where it sought access to port facilities (chapter 6), and in Africa and Latin America where it sought diplomatic support and natural resources.
Although Chinese aid in the Fourth Ring remains far less than what is offered by the U.S., European countries, Japan, and the World Bank, its funds are given without political conditions, often for stadiums, office buildings, roads, bridges, and other projects that enhance local regimes’ prestige. Regime type is not a factor. Chinese aid has helped democracies such as Brazil and Chile; partly democratic regimes such as Mozambique, Nigeria, and Colombia; and dictatorships such as Angola, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea.5 The common feature of China’s main aid recipients outside Asia is their importance as suppliers of oil or other commodities. Chinese aid has often been criticized because it comes in the form of loans that have to be repaid, because the loans are tied to the use of Chinese companies and workers, and because aid goes either to prestige projects or to infrastructure that benefits Chinese resource extraction. Nonetheless, such projects give impetus to the image of China as a global power and a generous friend.6
Also a resource for friendship diplomacy is China’s position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Although seldom wielding a veto, China has been able to serve the interests of Fourth Ring states by delaying or softening sanctions resolutions. It did so not only in the cases of Sudan and Iran, but also at different times in the cases of Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. Beijing made rare use of its veto power in 2008 to protect the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe against an arms embargo and other sanctions.7 China also gained gratitude by supporting the elections of controversial countries such as Iran and Venezuela to seats as nonpermanent members of the Security Council.
China earned diplomatic goodwill by participating in UN-sponsored peacekeeping operations. These multinational forces are deployed under UN Security Council authorization, normally with the host government’s approval, to help create or support the conditions for peace after an episode of internal conflict. Although the first such mission dates to 1953, the use of peacekeeping expanded greatly after the Cold War. China became heavily involved in the 2000s and by 2011 had deployed more than seventeen thousand peacekeepers on nineteen missions, including those in Kosovo, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Western Sahara, and Haiti. Besides providing learning opportunities for Chinese military and police personnel, these deployments created channels of cooperation with both government and opposition forces in the host countries and with other countries that contributed forces to the mission, often from the same region.8
China’s soldiers have contributed further to friendship diplomacy since the 1990s by conducting exchanges with other militaries. As of 2008, China had military attachés posted in 109 countries, and 98 countries posted defense attachés in Beijing. In recent years, the PLA has sent hundreds of soldiers to study abroad while hosting thousands of foreign officers in China. It has also held a biannual international seminar on security, the Xiangshan Forum, in Beijing since 2006 as well as several iterations of an international symposium on Sun Zi’s Art of War. It has participated in a range of bilateral and multilateral military exercises with the armed forces of a variety of countries, including Australia, France, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Russia, and the other SCO members. It has hosted foreign soldiers in military education institutions and conducted military-to-military exchanges with armed forces from a wide range of countries. Since 2008, Beijing has deployed three-ship flotillas to the Gulf of Aden to help protect ships transiting the Suez Canal.
CONSTRICTING THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE OF TAIWAN AND THE DALAI LAMA
The second purpose of Chinese friendship diplomacy, besides opening the door for economic relations, was to help maintain China’s diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and the Dalai Lama (chapters 8 and 9). Beginning in the 1980s, the Dalai Lama pursued a strategy of seeking support for Tibet’s autonomy in the international arena; Beijing countered this strategy by discouraging friendly countries from offering the Dalai Lama visas or high-level meetings. For the most part, this diplomatic battle unfolded in the U.S. and Europe, where the Dalai Lama commanded wide public respect. In 2008, China pulled out of an EU–China summit meeting when the occupant of the EU’s rotating presidency, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, held a meeting with the Dalai Lama. In 2011, Beijing successfully pressured the South African government to refuse a visa to the Dalai Lama to join a meeting hosted by fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu.
As for Taiwan, after South Korea switched diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC in 1992, the primary battleground for Beijing’s strategy of isolating Taiwan diplomatically shifted from Asia to the Fourth Ring. At that point, some thirty countries still recognized the ROC. On the one hand, Beijing was able to win some of them to its side, including such relatively important ones as South Africa, Malawi, and Costa Rica. On the other hand, from time to time a country that recognized the PRC switched relations back to the ROC, often after receiving a big aid and trade package from Taipei as well as—it was later revealed—in some cases under-the-table private payments. These countries included Niger, Liberia, Lesotho, Chad, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Macedonia. In a see-saw battle, Beijing would then mount expensive efforts to win these countries back to its side. In 2007, for example, to help recover recognition from Grenada and consolidate relations with neighboring states, China built cricket stadiums in Grenada, Jamaica, and Antigua with imported Chinese laborers at no cost to the governments concerned, so they could host that year’s Cricket World Cup.9
Foreign ministries outside Asia were often confused about the protocol technicalities and “name games” that characterized the struggle over Taiwan’s international status. The ROC maintained trade or other representative offices in many countries that formally recognized the PRC, staffed by diplomats who worked to get the highest possible protocol treatment in order to emphasize Taiwan’s international standing. PRC diplomats had to intercede with governments to make sure that ROC representatives did not receive the kind of treatment that would be accorded to a delegate from an independent state. At the UN, the PRC mission had to brief Fourth Ring diplomats on the logic of its opposition to a proposal that some of the ROC’s diplomatic partners put forward annually starting in the 1990s to study some form of UN participation for Taipei. At the WHO, PRC diplomats had to lobby with other members against an American proposal for Taiwan’s admission as a member, until 2009 when Beijing acceded to observer status for Taiwan.
The PRC did allow Taiwan to enjoy membership under various special names in more than two dozen intergovernmental organizations (chapter 9). However, Chinese diplomats had to remind representatives of other member states about the distinction between Taipei’s being represented in the organization in some nonstate capacity (varying for each organization), which Beijing allowed, and its being a state, which Beijing forbade. In all these efforts, good relations with the home government were essential to achieve cooperation.
If China relied mostly on positive incentives to win cooperation for its Taiwan policy in the Fourth Ring, it could also be tough on occasion. In 1995, it used its position on the UN Security Council to reduce the size of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti because the Haitians had invited Taiwan’s vice president to attend the inauguration of their new president. (China later took a more positive attitude and sent police and judicial experts to participate in the Haiti mission.) In 1997, the PRC vetoed a Security Council resolution to deploy military observers to monitor a cease-fire in Guatemala because Guatemala maintained diplomatic relations with the ROC. (It allowed the resolution to pass on a second vote after Guatemala agreed to stop supporting Taiwan’s bid for participation in the UN.) In 1999, China vetoed an extension of the UN Preventive Deployment Force in Macedonia because of that country’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Beijing to Taipei.10
A tacit truce settled over this diplomatic battleground during the cross-strait rapprochement that started with Ma Ying-jeou’s accession to the ROC presidency in 2008 (chapter 9). Around that time, Paraguay was reportedly prepared to switch recognition to the PRC, but Beijing postponed seizing the prize. President Ma pledged that his administration would not practice “checkbook diplomacy.” But the issue of Taiwan’s status has not disappeared, and Chinese diplomats continue to guard against any erosion of China’s position against Taiwanese statehood.
INTERNATIONAL NORMS AND REGIMES
Finally, China uses friendship with Fourth Ring governments to cultivate support for its positions in the many systems of international norms and institutions that govern interactions among states in the age of globalization (see also chapter 10). These regimes cover almost every field of international interaction—trade and finance, navigation, dispute resolution, arms control, migration, human rights, climate change, and so on, as well as a host of specialized yet important subjects such as fishery rights, species diversity, and intellectual property rights. The regimes evolve constantly in the course of interactions among the member states. Some of these interactions take place through dispute-resolution tribunals such as the International Court of Justice and the WTO Dispute Resolution Mechanism; some are bilateral negotiations; some take the form of tests of strength. But with increasing frequency, major international norms are developed in multilateral contexts involving large numbers of countries, where decisions are made by consensus. China’s friendly relations with smaller powers helps it to build coalitions in these negotiations.
Starting in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1990s and 2000s, the UN convened a series of world conferences and summits that had great influence on evolving international norms. Among the most noteworthy were the 1992 Earth Summit, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the 1996 Habitat Conference, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society, the 2000 Millennium Summit, and the 2005 World Summit. The meetings’ outcome documents not only codified broad aspirations for the world community but also set down specific policy guidelines and norms in areas as consequential as peaceful settlement of disputes, humanitarian intervention, migration, refugees, transnational crime, the world trading system, disarmament, the environment, poverty and development, reproductive health and women’s rights, children’s rights and welfare, public health, human rights, democracy, Internet freedom, and the structure and functions of the UN itself. Even though these documents were not legally binding in the way that treaties are, they were important as benchmarks by which states’ behavior would be judged by other states, global media, and global civil society. They also set the floor from which future international negotiations would proceed, which might in turn lead to legally binding outcomes such as treaties or UN Security Council resolutions. And most of the meetings led to follow-up conferences that kept up the pressure on member governments. For all these reasons, these conferences were important.
The meetings generated feverish lobbying both among states and on the part of civil society organizations, whose representatives attended by the thousands. The smaller states often had less settled positions than the larger states either because they had less at stake or because they lacked the staff to gain expertise on the issues. Working with Fourth Ring friends helped Beijing’s diplomats influence the outcome documents in many areas. For example, they tried to restrict the conditions under which a government’s failure to exercise its “responsibility to protect” its people might lead to an international intervention; established the principle that all states should be subjected to the same human rights review, not just selected states (nonselectivity); and fought for each government’s right to regulate its own domestic Internet.
China also lobbied for its friends’ support in more technical negotiations. For example, in the WTO, where it sought the earliest possible recognition of its “market economy status,” it was able to gain such recognition on an accelerated basis from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and other friendly states. Also in the WTO, China formed a common front with countries in Africa and Latin America to oppose richer countries’ use of agricultural subsidies to protect their farmers against competition from third-world farmers. In the IMF, China and some other developing countries opposed a strengthening of the organization’s mandate to criticize governments’ exchange-rate policies. In climate change negotiations, China (along with India) led the developing countries in pushing the principle that advanced industrial economies should compensate the rest of the world for the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In the UN-linked Conference on Disarmament, China pushed for the establishment of nuclear-weapon-free zones, argued that major nuclear powers should disarm before smaller nuclear powers, and pushed to ban the deployment of weapons in outer space.11 In the UN Human Rights Council, China played a leading role in developing the mechanism of Universal Periodic Review, which treats all states in the same way instead of singling out human rights violators for special attention (chapter 12).
Success in multilateral negotiations builds on the common interests China shares with many other countries as a developing country, a non-Western culture, a nondemocracy, a country without an imperial past, and a country opposed to intervention in other states’ internal affairs. It is facilitated by the transactional character of Chinese diplomacy, which opens doors and makes it easier to bridge differences. China’s growing presence in the Fourth Ring has given it new resources to influence the future evolution of international regimes.
LIMITED ASPIRATIONS, LIMITED MEANS
The arrival of a new economic and diplomatic power in the Fourth Ring provides a counterweight to these regions’ traditional domination by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. But China has not displaced Western influence. Even as the Chinese presence grows, the other major powers have sustained and sometimes increased their stakes.
China’s role in the Fourth Ring in some ways resembles that of Japan, which also has major investments and trading relationships throughout the world, gives development aid, and pursues cooperative diplomatic relations, but takes little interest in issues of regime type, ideology, development model, ethnic relations, interstate rivalries, or great-power alignments. To be sure, China’s trade and investment in the Fourth Ring are outpacing Japan’s as the Chinese economy grows. But its interests there, like Japan’s, remain segmental. For China to become a strategic actor in the Fourth Ring will require more than an expansion of its economic presence. It will require China to cultivate ideological and cultural influence, build military bases, sign defense treaties, and find ways to project significant military power thousand of miles from its own shores. Because such actions are expensive, China is unlikely to undertake them without good reasons. Such reasons will emerge only if it cannot achieve its limited aspirations for Fourth Ring economic resources and diplomatic support by the use of economic and diplomatic means.