Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and stand in direct conflict with the American empire. However, China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world.
Whist acknowledging China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.
Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and stand in direct conflict with the American empire. However, China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world.
Whist acknowledging China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.
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Overview
Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and stand in direct conflict with the American empire. However, China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world.
Whist acknowledging China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783718245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jenny Clegg is a Senior Lecturer in International Studies, and a China specialist, at the University of Central Lancashire. She first visited China in the 1970s and has followed developments closely ever since, she is the author of China's Global Strategy (Pluto, 2009).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A WORLD TURNING UPSIDE DOWN
China is emerging as a powerful player on the world stage and the contours of another world are taking shape. The neocon vision of a unipolar world dominated by the United States as the sole superpower is starting to give way as China's rise signals the emergence of a new kind of multipolar international order with a more democratic determination of world affairs.
China, it seems, is coming out of nowhere. Just five years ago, George W. Bush launched into the war on Iraq in a bid for US supremacy which was, as Arrighi has observed, the most ambitious project of world rule ever conceived. At the time China was widely portrayed as verging on collapse, its corrupt one-Party state a hollow sham, at odds with a capitalist economy being driven to bankruptcy by the endless pumping of funds into the dying dinosaurs of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Instead, China has kept growing from strength to strength, following its own plans to quadruple its GDP between 2000 and 2020, lifting millions of people out of poverty. Today, with the United States unable to win the wars it so disastrously started and its economy riddled with bad debt, dragging the rest of the world towards recession, many are increasingly looking to China's development as a source of global economic stability.
China's international influence is growing rapidly and everyone knows that it is becoming a major international power. But what kind of a power will China be? What kind of a role will it play in shaping the world? A look back over the developments of recent years can start to provide an answer.
ANOTHER WORLD IS HAPPENING
Broadly, the anti-war movement has viewed Bush's war on Iraq as about the control of the global oil spigot. This was true, but it was also always about much more than this. For the neocons, the war was to be a first move in a long-term strategy. Some commentators realised this: for example, Dan Plesch, when in 2002 he raised the prospect, 'Iraq, Iran, and China next'.
The real significance of the decision to go to war on Iraq lay in the way the United States openly flouted the United Nations. Bush's unilateralist preemptive strike doctrine went further than any previous US interventionism in that it overtly challenged the basic principles of the UN Charter and international law. What Bush understood was firstly that, in order to preserve US dominance, it was necessary not only to defend, but to extend, the US model of 'freedom, democracy and free enterprise', and secondly that this in turn necessitated overturning the whole global consensus on non-intervention enshrined by the United Nations. The US strategy to prevent the rise of any potential challenger was to be set as the new international norm in order to pursue a 'one size fits all' model of neoliberal globalisation. The concern of the neocons to prevent the emergence of any 'peer competitor' to the United States was a tacit admission that they saw the main threat as coming from the growing multipolar world trend.
Discussion about a 'unipolar versus multipolar' world came to the forefront of world debate in 2003 as the US decision to go to war on Iraq produced a rift across the Atlantic. As the European Union, Russia and China drew closer, Condoleezza Rice struck out, warning that multipolarity was a 'theory of rivalry'. 'We have tried this before', she declared. 'It led to the Great War....' Clearly in her eyes, multipolarisation presaged violent interimperialist struggles for the redivision of the world. Her words were to be echoed shortly afterwards by Tony Blair when, speaking of multipolarity, he proclaimed that there was 'no more dangerous theory in international relations today'.
China's leaders have long grasped the significance of multipolarisation as the counter-hegemonic trend breaking superpower monopoly on world affairs. Discussion by Chinese analysts since the mid-1980s has focused on the emergence of multipolarity with rifts between the major developed powers potentially opening political space for new initiatives from within the developing world to reflect the world's diversity and allow a multifaceted approach to development.
When Bush first took office he made China policy a top priority but 9/11 changed that. With the United States preoccupied with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the major powers increasingly divided, the massive anti-war opposition from governments and people around the world, helped to unleash a new mood of Third World solidarity, presenting China with a huge opportunity to step up its strategic diplomacy worldwide.
While Bush used the 'war on terror' as a pretext to increase US military and diplomatic engagement in Asia, causing China concern for its own security, China itself began to promote South-South cooperation in a big way.
Pursuing mutually beneficial win-win economic exchange agreements and security dialogues, China found considerable success in deepening its relations in the developing world. In 2004, high-profile tours by China's most senior leaders to Latin America took in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, Trinidad and Jamaica. 2005 saw Chinese President Hu Jintao mark the 60th anniversary year of the Bandung Conference by visiting India as well as a number of African states. The China-Africa Summit was held in Beijing in November 2006, with representatives from 48 African countries including many heads of state. China also initiated negotiations on trade agreements with ASEAN, the Gulf States and Pakistan as well as with Australia and New Zealand. It is in this context of the upsurge in Third Worldism that the recent rapid strengthening in China's global position must be situated.
China conceives its own future to be as one power amongst an increasing number of others within a wider multipolar context, as it develops alongside other developing countries and their regional organisations. Its leaders have recognised that their country cannot be developed in isolation from the rest of the world, and have sought integration into the existing international order, not as a one-way process of adaptation, but rather as a means to influence it from within. Where others see uncertainty and propensity for chaos, for China the multipolar trend potentially opens the way for a more democratic organisation of world affairs, one of equal partnerships holding power rivalries in check, so creating room to develop South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue to shape a fair globalisation.
With its own development driving world development, and its internationalist stance of support for a multipolar world, China's rise seems inevitably to bring it into conflict with the US hegemonic project. As Lanxin Xiang has wryly noted, it is just as China considers joining in the current international system that the United States decided to force changes in the international rules. In 2006, China was for the first time openly named by the second Bush administration as the future potential competitor with which the United States was most concerned.
CHINA THREAT OR US THREAT?
The absence of discussion about China's development in the West has created a vacuum of knowledge in which fears of a China 'threat' can freely take hold. In recent years China's rise, with its seemingly endless supplies of cheap labour, has been blamed for the loss of jobs especially across the developed world, and China is now readily seen to be emerging as a coercive superpower with scant regard for people's wants and needs. Stereotyped notions, however, draw more on nineteenth-century images of the 'Yellow Peril' than on actual conditions in China. Huntington's notion of a 'clash of civilisations', it should be recalled, was as much about the conflicts between 'the West' and Confucianism as about the 'the West' and Islam.
'China threat' theories emanate from a neo-McCarthyite, neocon vision which compares China's rise with that of Germany and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. The United States then should 'do what it can to slow the rise of China'.
The portrayal of China as a serial human rights abuser provided a constant backdrop as 'humanitarian intervention' evolved into the central theme of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. Now as the West seeks to use the 'democracy' agenda as the latest tool to maintain its weakening control over the rest of the world, China is construed as the main obstacle to progress.
In the Sinophobic view, China is in the grip of an ideologically bankrupt communist dictatorship, which, clinging to power through xenophobic aggressive nationalism, pursues internal and foreign policies that are actively hostile to human rights and upholding international law. China's new diplomacy is characterised as a selfish pursuit of national interests, backed by a growing military power, as its voracious appetite for resources drives it abroad in search for oil and minerals for its own exclusive use. China is seen to be rising at the expense of the wider global good. Apparently displaying no qualms in dealing with what are cited as being some of the world's worst human rights offenders in order to further its own commercial and political ends, China stands accused of frustrating the advance of UN work on issues of human rights and legitimate government, considered vital to international stability.
In this portrayal the real situation is turned on its head: it is not the rise of China but the United States and its pursuit of unipolarity that constitutes the main source of world destabilisation. War, after all, is the greatest abuse of human rights. At the same time, the United States constantly places the UN non-interventionist system under stress; dumps its junk currency on world markets and insists on pursuing a foreign policy of democratic utopianism to impose its own model on others regardless of their actual conditions, exacerbating global inequalities. The United States, and indeed most of the rest of the world, buys its oil from corrupt states in Africa and human rights abusers in the Middle East. China's long-standing willingness to deal with states that the West regards as pariahs is based in part on a reluctance to make judgements about other countries' domestic policies as well as a concern about the power politics behind the exercise of pressures and intervention.
The United States has developed 'a military apparatus of unparalleled and unprecedented destructiveness'; China, itself nearly destroyed by military interventions in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, seeks to avoid direct confrontation with the superpower.
China's power should not be exaggerated. Over the last 30 years, it has indeed been the world's fastest-growing economy, currently lying equal third with Germany in the world rankings. However, China remains a developing country, and will continue to be so for decades to come. Its average per capita gross national income in 2007 was a mere $2,360, according to the World Bank, ranking 132 in world, and tackling poverty remains its major preoccupation. Its economy is less than a quarter the size of the United States, and although it is developing as a huge manufacturing base, it lacks technological power, leaning heavily in this respect on intellectual input from outside.
As China looks to multipolarisation to open up the world progressive trend, it differs in its approach from the USSR. Rather than directly challenging the US superpower, it employs a more subtle diplomacy, aimed at reducing tensions with the West in order to create a stable and predictable world environment favourable to its own, as well as the wider world's development.
A NEW VIEW FROM THE LEFT
The Western Left offers little to counter the neocons' Sinophobia, and in some ways even subscribes to it. For some sections, China is seen as a new 'resource colonialist', and as an emerging imperialist power whose rise is bringing on an increasingly chaotic period of inter-imperialist rivalries. On the other hand, others from the Left argue that China has been recolonised and recompradorised, operating under the sway of the United States and the multinational companies (MNCs), driving a 'race to the bottom' of intensifying competition and exploitation to undermine the conditions of workers all around the world. Vanaik, for example, regards China as too wishy-washy – anything but a serious pillar of resistance to US global ambitions, while Roden argues that China is falling into line with US policy goals, serving to enhance US structural power in the global economy, reversing the superpower's decline.
However, from within the more mainstream debate, analysts such as the neo-Keynesian Stiglitz and the world sociologist Arrighi reject the widespread assumption that China's development has followed the neoliberal paradigm. Ramo, too, has posited the notion of a 'Beijing consensus', following a more equitable, high-quality growth path using both economics and government to improve society, as the antithesis of the much-discredited 'Washington consensus'.
This book follows the view that China's strategists have far from 'allowed imperialist circles to think for them'. However, it differs from the above mentioned theorists by addressing questions of strategy, drawing in particular on the work of Samir Amin. The strategic perspective is taken as essential in evaluating the significance and potential of China's rise in the changing world order.
Focusing on China's part in the changing international order, especially over the last decade, this book seeks to highlight how its leaders have responded to US interventionism and unilateralism and to explore the ways in which China's vision of peaceful development is starting to transform world politics.
The problem generally with China's critics is that they fail to engage seriously with its realities – its historical background, its level of development and the problems of developing such a huge country, as well as the international space within which it seeks to manoeuvre. Many of China's failings identified by its critics do indeed need to be addressed. However, what is rarely acknowledged is that Chinese policymakers not only know this, but are actively taking measures to address the problems. Instead, the policies of the Chinese government are dismissed as 'empty rhetoric'.
This book, on the other hand, attempts to capture China's wide-angle view as it looks to the long term precisely by examining China's past and current policies. It draws not only on Western scholarship and reportage but also on the speeches of China's leaders and the analytical approaches of its scholars and strategists. In this way the discussion aims to throw light on China's own political perspectives and future directions as it faces new domestic and international challenges in the twenty-first century.
The argument sees the United States and China positioned at opposite poles in an international order shaped by a unipolar-multipolar dynamic, with the United States as the largest developed and China as the largest developing country. It is this difference in positioning in the international order that is seen to define the nature of their strategic conflict as one centred on the question of world development.
As this book seeks to demonstrate, China's development challenges the whole structure of global hegemony and global inequality. Where the United States attempts through intervention to monopolise world affairs to preserve the dominance of Western finance and monopoly capital, China's commitment, as it struggles to lift itself out of poverty, is to a more democratic rules-based international order with greater equity in development as the fundamental condition for its own, as well as global, security.
This then is an examination of China's pursuit of a progressive agenda for a new international political and economic order (NIPEO). The purpose is not merely to show that China's growing influence can serve as a restraint on US hegemonic action, but to look at how China tackles the realities of world power relations, how it seeks to play an instrumental role in a fair globalisation through its own widespread win–win economic diplomacy, and how it pursues equal partnerships based on mutual benefit in order to contribute to a world of multipolar stability with a strong United Nations at its centre. In these ways, by creating a new cooperative system of international relations to facilitate world development, China's strategy offers a concrete alternative to the US neocons' vision of the New American Century based on US military might.
The book is organised into three parts. Part 1 sets out to explore China's rise in the broad context of the unipolar–multipolar dynamic with the Sino–US relationship at its core. Chapter 2 highlights the role of the US 'war on terror' in encircling China, arguing that the new US militarism and interventionism is a strategic response to the multipolarisation trend opening up in the 1990s with China's rise. To reveal the Sino–US relationship as the crux of the world's structural patterning, the discussion looks back on the history of Sino–US relations since 1949, as well as examining the more recent influence of the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) on US foreign policy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "China's Global Strategy"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Jenny Clegg.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements1. A World Turning Upside Down
Part 1: The Unipolar-Multipolar Dynamics
2. US-China relations in the global dynamics
3. Historical Perspectives on Multipolarisation
4. Manoeuvring towards Multipolarity
5. Globalisation, Imperialism and Multipolarisation
6. Promoting Multipolarisation: Regional Organisation In Asia
Part 2: China's Development Trajectory
7. Maintaining Self Reliance in an Interdependent World
8. Development with Chinese Characteristics
Part 3: An International Trial of Strength
9. Towards a New International Political Order
10. Towards a new international economic order
11. A Game of Go
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Tables
Notes
Index