President Joe Biden is so far maintaining his predecessor’s harsh policy towards China, which aims to contain China’s international power both economically and politically.
In the United States and Europe, China is widely recognized as a rising star that threatens Western power.
But my research on the country suggests that China may no longer see itself that way.
Rise of China
In the three decades that I have studied and taught Chinese foreign policy, I have witnessed three different eras in China’s approach to international relations.
After the death of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976, Mao’s successors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, introduced economic reforms that launched China on a path of phenomenal economic growth. The country rose from 11th to the second place in the ranking of global GDP between 1990 and 2020.
The prevailing view in western capitals in the 1990s was that China’s economic transformations would inevitably culminate in a rich, peaceful and democratic country.
To guarantee this result, the main economic powers were prepared to embrace China as a full member of its club of open market societies, admitting it to international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and integrating it into global markets. The West made a point of bringing him into this network of international political institutions built after World War II to promote cooperation and peaceful conflict resolution.
And China was happy to join the club, at least when it comes to trade and investment. The foreign relations strategy of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s was to “hide capabilities and wait”, adopting a “tao guang yang hui” policy – maintaining a low profile.
In the early 2000s, President Hu Jintao took some modest steps towards greater Chinese assertiveness on the world stage, strengthening the Chinese navy and initiating a series of port projects in Pakistan and beyond. For the most part, however, Hu still pursued a “peaceful rise” policy.
China dream
That changed when China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, came to power in 2012.
Xi projected nationalism and power. Your China would not wait any longer. Xi proclaimed the “Dream of China”, imagining the country as a great power with growing influence not only in Asia, but throughout the world.
Under Xi, China took a much more aggressive stance towards the world, exercising its military strength in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and combining diplomacy with heavy investments in infrastructure development in Latin America and Africa.
Over time, many Western foreign policy leaders, including Barack Obama, have come to see China inclined to overturn, rather than sustain, the economic order they had created and to welcome China with enthusiasm.
In 2015, the United States embarked on a “strategic pivot” towards Asia and away from the Middle East, the focus of Washington’s attention since 9/11.
In an effort to contain – or at least restrict – China, the United States has strengthened alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, formed a coalition of countries neighboring China and increased defense cooperation with India, Australia and Japan.
American Anxieties
In October 2017, at the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi confirmed Western fears. He publicly stated his goal of putting China on the “center stage” of world affairs.
Xi said that China does not seek global domination, but warned that no one “should expect China to swallow something that would harm its interests”. He also suggested that China’s rise would create a world order with “Chinese characteristics”.
In December 2017, an updated U.S. national security strategy officially declared the rise of China as a threat, citing the theft of intellectual property and the development of advanced weapons capable of nullifying America’s military advantage.
China against the world
But China’s dream is not guaranteed to come true. As President Xi told Communist Party members at a meeting in January 2019, the country faces serious challenges
Beijing faces a US-led coalition that is committed to resisting China’s economic, military and diplomatic power games in Asia. China also has rising debt, a stagnant GDP growth rate and declining productivity.
Then there are the worrying demographics of China: the population is shrinking and aging.
China’s population declined in 2018 for the first time since the deadly famine induced by Mao’s “Big Leap Forward” in the 1960s. The Chinese Academy of Sciences predicts that if fertility continues to fall from its current rate of 1, 6 children per woman to 1.3, China’s population will be reduced by about 50% by the end of this century.
China ended its policy of limiting families to one child in 2015, but its population is still aging, leaving fewer workers to support an increasing number of elderly people.
Together, these predictions have raised concerns within the Chinese Communist Party that the nation “will age before it gets rich”. This situation can create serious social unrest.
Xi and others in China’s communist leadership no longer project unbridled confidence. Instead, they telegraph the concern that global leadership is out of reach.
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Diverging views
These concerns are already reshaping China’s foreign policy, leading to increasingly direct military action against neighboring India – where it is involved in a territorial dispute in the Himalayas – and close to Taiwan. China is also redoubling its military efforts to assert its territorial rights in the disputed islands, the South China Sea, and repressing democracy in Hong Kong.
Xi adopted a new form of global confrontational diplomacy that more actively undermines US interests abroad. Some call this “wolf-warrior diplomacy”, in honor of two successful Chinese films about Chinese special forces defeating American mercenaries in Africa and Asia.
This is the first time in six decades that China and the West have fundamentally different views on China’s global trajectory.
The results can be destabilizing. If a weakened China feels threatened by Western containment, it could double its nationalist displays in India, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.
The post-World War II international order, built to promote economic cooperation and prevent war, may not be able to withstand the stress of China’s growing internal challenges. A war between the West and China is still a remote possibility, but perhaps not as remote as it seemed before.
This article was republished from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Andrew Latham, Macalester College.
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Andrew Latham does not work, consult, own shares or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article and did not disclose relevant affiliations other than his academic appointment.