Understanding China’s Global Impact
By Edward Friedman
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PlurkComplacent industrialized democracies must face up to the challenge China poses to global norms, argues Edward Friedman.
Two major biases obscure a clear understanding of the global impact of authoritarian China’s earth-shaking rise—what could be called the American and Chinese errors.
The American—or Western, or democratic—error is to simply wish away the need to really grapple with the enormous implications of superpower China and its ability to re-shape the world to the detriment of democratic and human rights concerns at home and abroad. Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs, and the far more numerous vulnerable Han Chinese will all be adversely affected, as will myriad international organizations, including the International Labor Organization and the UN Refugee Agency.
Instead of facing up to this reality, wishful thinking democracies have imagined that the challenge China poses would somehow disappear by itself—that China would democratize or learn to abide by OECD norms or else economically implode. Few in the democratic world have faced up to the real consequences of a nationalistic government in charge of a nation that has seen double-digit economic growth rates for a generation. Such extraordinary growth creates major interests among international businesses that don’t want their elected governments to do anything that could prompt the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to hurt the ability of these firms to profit from involvement with China’s economic dynamism. This is only natural. As a result, however, China’s formidable challenge to democracy and human rights is cast aside.
The Chinese misunderstanding, meanwhile, also obscures some central realities. Under this view, China has succeeded because China is China. Until supposedly interrupted by the relatively recent Opium Wars, China had for centuries been the centre of the universe—a natural role it is now returning to. Perhaps uniquely, many Chinese believe (incorrectly) that only those reared with ‘Chinese values’ could be capable of doing what it took to ensure China’s unique rise—putting the collective first, sacrificing for the long run, stressing education, being good at business, strategically outwitting all others.
In reality, China didn’t actually rise to strength over its neighbours until around 450. China wasn't always the centre of the universe and Europe’s rise, and China’s relative decline, both began long before the Opium Wars. Indeed, according to paramount reform leader Deng Xiaoping, China fell behind when the Ming dynasty closed itself off from long-distance maritime trade around 1450, a self-wounding policy of isolation revived by the economically irrational Mao Zedong. But CCP leaders, now as in the Mao era, prefer to scapegoat so-called imperialistic Western democracies for China’s own self-inflicted wounds.
Post-Mao China rose by abandoning its disregard for the market and both copying and plugging into other ‘varieties’ of Asian capitalism. For example, China copied Japan in manipulating and disciplining money to promote exports and move up the value added ladder, aided by government preferences and grabbing and absorbing new technology. From South Korea, the CCP regime learned how to turn state enterprises into globally competitive national champions. From Taiwan, China learned how to use Free Trade Zones to create jobs, transfer managerial know-how and build exports. From Singapore, Beijing learned that EDI from MNCs could serve growth and industrial up-grading, especially when combined with the talents and connections of tens of millions of diasporic Chinese.
In addition to the extraordinary advantage of being located in the most economically dynamic region of the world since the end of World War II, China (and also India, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil and other rapidly rising emerging economies) eventually benefitted from the structural forces of post-Bretton Woods globalization. The fact is that broad international political economy factors, not culture, explain China’s rise.
If CCP ruling groups make the Chinese mistake of singular cultural self-congratulation, they will fail to see the degree to which their country’s rise is rooted in the policies and practices of the industrialized democracies in a single world market. The United States early on gave the CCP government most favoured nation (MFN) trading privileges, even though China wasn’t a market economy. Indeed, Washington gave Beijing its largest quota for apparel exports to the United States under the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA) in 1974. Europe and the United States, meanwhile, also welcomed Chinese to study science and technology, all while allowing China to run up huge trade surpluses.
That foreign exchange has given China its global clout to buy commodities, make investments and offer huge loans all around the world, helped make China the world power it has become. But the CCP’s expansive territorial and military agenda, however right it seems from the perspective of China’s Opium Wars victimhood, is seen by many of China’s neighbours as aggressive and threatening. The CCP’s misunderstanding of its growth therefore contains some potentially explosive risks.
If ruling groups in Beijing act on the notion that the Chinese don’t need the industrial democracies and can simply impose an imperial agenda upon their neighbours while expecting its military assertiveness to be treated as national justice, then there’s a danger China’s leadership will behave as Wilhemite Germany did.
Of course, international forces lack the means to alter Chinese domestic politics, meaning that there’s the difficult question of what exactly the industrialized democracies can do, even if they abandon their illusions. The problem is made all the harder because it’s not clear that the industrialized democracies are even succeeding in facing up to their own significant domestic challenges. If they don’t, then they’ll be in no position to contest the global agenda of a CCP that pursues foreign policies aimed at ‘restoring’ regional predominance and global centrality, all while checking democracy and human rights globally.
Such Chinese policies, energized by enormous economic clout, would construct facts on the ground. They would make the world safe and secure for China’s ruling groups, who would no doubt be infused by a self-blinding nationalism in which the core interests of CCP foreign policy come to seem moral—and become virtually unstoppable.
Edward Friedman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, specializing in Chinese foreign policy, international political economy and democratization.
Image credit: Flickr/liddybits
bruce hope
Tails from the saddle, a conversation I had with a fellow cowboy on a 3 day horse drive 4 yrs ago. First, Reason is absolutely right. China is covering
itself in the same shit the US is covered in. Just in Latin America, US friends disappeared 10s of thousands in Chile, Argentina & Brazil; the presidents of Ecuador & Panama died in plane crashes
(the President of Panama’s sin was getting their canal back); Bolivia & most of Central America has endured similar interference. Apparently the US still hates Venezuela because their president is smart enough to count. He figured out there are more votes in the poor barrios than the rich ones, & the tea party disinformation campaign failed there.
China has genocide in Sudan on its hands, they backed that nut in Libya for killing Muslims the same way they they do in Western China, until they figured the rebels will ultimately win. They back Assad in Syria, hoping he wins so
the Chinese Muslims will learn from Syria instead of Libya.
Back to the saddle, us “cowboys” were the fathers of 10 & 12 yr old daughters
who suffer from horse lover’s disease. We became buddies because our kids became friends, the 2 youngest among 20 adults. On the 3rd day us dads where talking as we rode near each other & we got to talking about China. I told him corporate greed in the US & Europe gave China the technology in the last 15 yr to defeat us militarily. They gave them this technology that took the West 50 yr to develop at a cost of trillions for free, just give our corporations a piece of the action for enslaving millions of Chinese in OSHA free factories without those expensive pollution controls. I told him the Chinese could take less than a trillion of the US dollars they have sitting in their bank to develop satellite killers to go after our gps & military satellites to make our high tech military blind & inaccurate. They get some military parity & save trillions. The other cowboy changed the subject, he said he didn’t want to talk about it.
Craig Purcell
It seems to me the Chinese are not really thinking about the west and have their own world that is big enough where they can feel satisfied without rubbing up against the west except to sell us stuff and loan us money. The dominate by trade and not war.
Leonard R.
Bill wrote the Chinese are long-term strategists. I have to disagree. The actions of the PLA have been very ‘in your face’ and belligerent during Hu’s tenure. Arguably, the PRC has opted for short-term assertiveness at the expense of China’s long-term interests. Without question, China’s relations with several of it’s neighbors have been damaged because of its recent behavior.
It is a fundamental error to assign rational motives to a warped system. China will react impulsively and irrationally, because that is its true nature.
John Delius
I tell my Chinese and other friends who think that the US is the source of all the world’s problems to compare them with other superpowers in history.
The USA is the only superpower in world history that could expand its frontiers without fear of retaliation from any other power, but doesn’t. All other superpowers have expanded until stopped by other powers’ military action, or threat of military action (unless they ran out of steam). For example, the Roman, the Turkish and the British empires.
The US could take over the whole of the Caribbean and South America if they wished. No other power could interfere substantially. If they want oil, they could invade the oil state Venezuela, with much less trouble than Iraq. But they don’t. Why not?
Reason
I have to agree with angelus512
cachemira – you didn’t address the article… what you addressed were your perceived inconsistencies in US foreign policy – which are all perfectly reasonable to believe.. The US has and does support a whole bunch of distasteful dictators in the name of the Cold War economic stability, globalization and oil…
BUT…… so does China, so it can’t extract itself from the same shit that the US is covered in… which is pretty much Friedmen’s point
Don
Welcome to the sinocentric world order of the 21st century. After all, the less than two-century aberration of a dominant anglosphere was just that, according to Chinese history. I’ve been afraid of this for years but even Kissinger never thought through carefully and perhaps just caved into short-term corporate interests in “opening up” China over the last three decades. History will record the folly of the world’s sole superpower giving it all away. Now you have it. The current situation is dangerous and irreversible. I totally disagree with Hillary’s bravado late last year that the 21st century will be an American century — it won’t. Military power will become increasingly irrelevant as the new arm-twisters continue to deploy cleverer strategies to neutralize what’s left. Better to digest the hard truth like the respected professor has done here and get ready to pay the price in the coming decades — there is no other choice.
angelus512
Jack and Cachemira.
None of you addressed the article at all. You just offered up US mistakes as an excuse to ignore all that was written.
Tendar Tsering
Fredman, nice article, and i felt if i am speaking in the article.
cachemira, yes we have witnessed the USA war on Afghanistan and all but the world doesn’t know the cultural genocide, and inhuman CCP rules in Tibet, and other minority communities in China. No one knows whats really going inside China like Tibet, and how many people are dying under the political jaw and suppression of CCP. So, something which you don’t know can’t clam that it is not happening there!
Jack Hatter, if you say this article is jingoistic and cultural ignorance, then you might not knowing the center ground realities which is happening in CCP occupied nations like Tibet.
Jack Hatter
1) What the CCP does in Tibet has nothing to do with American jingoism and cultural ignorance.
2) What the CCP does in Tibet does not justify American jingoism and cultural ignorance.
I understand that you’re a Tibetan activist with a desire to tie everything China-related with Tibet, but that’s a non-sequitor that ignores the neoconservative nonsense that Friedman is peddling. As an analogy, how the Islamists and Iranians act is not an excuse for Americans to be jingoistic or culturally ignorant towards the Middle East, because that’s exactly the thing that leads to messes like the Iraq War. Sinophobia is not the proper way to respond to China. Diplomacy, soft power, and mutual understanding is.
Jack Hatter
Friedman’s article is a disturbing mix of jingoism, cultural ignorance, xenophobia, and gratuitous Americentrism. It’s exactly this sort of fear mongering that will make “War with China!” a self fulfilling prophecy.
cachemira
Nice article, Mr Friedman. Now let me make a few remarks and introduce you to two common errors from my own observation. Let’s call them, oh, the Friedman errors:
1. The historically ignorant assumption that the West and more specifically, the US, has stood for democracy and freedom, for all or most of its foreign policy history. Apparently, the Americans love – absolutely love! – to talk about the evils of Cuban Castro, Iran and Ayatollah, or Communist Vietnam, among others. Quite unfortunate, then, that few will honestly discuss that right before your Castros, Ayatollahs, and Ho Chi Minhs, there were equally if not worse authoritarian, corrupt, illegitimate governments hated by its people, but artifically supported by – yes, you guess it – US or its Western allies. You think Egypt or Tunisia were the only exceptions? Ha. So much for freedom and democracy.
2. Now the next Friedman error: that China wishes to militarily dominate the world, or even Asia, or even just East Asia. Replace “China” with “US” and you have the truth. Otherwise, I am afraid you got your countries wrong, Mr. Friedman! the CCP cares about only one bottom line, and that is: maintain legitimacy with the Chinese people. Failing to secure natural resources threatens this bottom line. Letting Taiwan go is the same. So does letting the US encircle it with hidden military bases.
3. Assuming the rising newcomer is the agitator, with the established incumbent as the benevolent stabilizer. Hm, so i suppose the Vietnam war or the Iraq war did wonders for keeping the peace, huh? I suppose US’s repeated threats to beat down any who threaten its military hegemony is totally stabilizing for the world? let me ask you this: ever since the year 2000, which nation has killed more people in the world? Or are you too shy and evasive to answer that?
4. Abuse of the “history repeats itself” motif by making the wacky and unsupported assumption that the CCP will act like Wilhelm II (or even Hitler- gasp!). Hey, everyone can play that game! Here, lemme try: Spain, the pre-eminent power of the 1500s and 1600s, went all-out aggressive on newcomers UK and France to prevent their rise….ergo, the US = Imperial Spain, and China = UK/France! Yay, now where’s my AdSense click revenue $$$?