China’s way of ‘Emerging’

In the opinion piece I had in the CSM on August 22, I described the Olympic opening ceremony held in Beijing on August 8 as China’s “stunning coming-out party as a world power.” On that very same day, though in a very different way, Russia was also “coming out”– almost literally– or “coming back” as a world power.”
Of course, if you take a long, Chinese-style view of history then China was also coming “back” to the status of major world power.
It is important to note the very different ways these two powers have been emerging (or re-emerging) in recent years. Russia has done so primarily by wielding instruments of hard power– military strength, and “hard” economic power in the form of control over oil spigots. China has done so primarily with instruments of soft power, including a strong commitment to the “rules” of international politics, a generally strong preference for negotiation over military force, and the building of broad webs of relationships and influence through the “softer” economic levers of trade and financial dealings, culture (of various forms), and the smart enrollment of the broad global diaspora of Chinese ethnics.
Some differences between the approaches used by these two powers have been on show during this week’s meetings in Dushanbe, Tajikstan of the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” which unites the two of them, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, and Uzbekistan. (Of the Central Asian Stans, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are not members. But Pakistan, India, Mongolia, and Iran all have observer status. And yesterday it was extremely significant to see that Afghanistan’s Prresident Hamid Karzai had slipped his NATO leash for long enough to attend the SCO as a visitor.)
The Russian leaders had evidently tried somewhat hard– not clear how hard– to get the SCO to express corporate backing for their recent moves in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But they failed– and the reasons for their failure are probably instructive.
Nabi Abdullaev of The Moscow Times wrote

Moscow fell short of the diplomatic support it was looking for Thursday, as Central Asian states and China failed to back its recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, offering instead only qualified praise for Russia’s actions in the Georgian conflict.
… The hope of winning significant support from the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization… vanished with a joint statement at a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, calling for the respect of all countries’ territorial integrity and denouncing the use of force in local conflicts.
Russia has steadfastly rejected the territorial-integrity argument in Georgia, saying Tbilisi lost such a right by attempting to establish control of South Ossetia by force…
It was unrealistic for President Dmitry Medvedev to expect the organization, in which China plays a leading role, to support Moscow’s position on South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, given Beijing’s own concerns over its own separatist Tibet and Xinjiang provinces, said Masha Lipman, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center.
“Medvedev might have had some chance to win support from some individual Central Asian states after bilateral talks but never in the format of the whole alliance, which acts by consensus and where most members view China as the major partner,” Lipman said.

There are a number of interesting points there. First, it is significant that the well informed, and Moscow-based, Lipman judges that the four “Stan” members of the SCO view China as more powerful than Russia.
The IISS’s Oksana Antonenko has a nuanced description of the decidedly ambivalent feelings that the citizens of these four Stans– many of whom are ethnic Russians– have toward their former overlords in Moscow, here. I have noted elsewhere that the roads and rail links that link these landlocked Stans to the world economy have nearly all, until now, run through Russia. The Chinese have been working hard to complete a couple of nodal new rail connections to key Stans. But already, Masha Lipman is telling us, most of them view China as more powerful than Russia. Interesting.
There is probably also another reason, in addition to the one given by Lipman, why China (and also, probably, many of the other SCO members) might be wary of supporting Moscow’s position on Ossetia and Abkhazia. Yes, as mentioned by Lipman, the whole idea of opening up a “national independence” option for national minorities is an absolute can of worms for Beijing. But in addition, Moscow’s in-your-face policies toward the US and NATO threaten to inflame global tensions and tear up the fabric of international economic cooperation that the Chinese have benefited so strongly from in recent decades. So we might expect– and certainly hope– that they will use their influence with Russia and other actors to work hard to de-escalate the tensions that have been arising between Russia and the west.
I cannot emphasize this new role that China can m(and imho should) play in international relations strongly enough. Certainly, China’s very existence as a third significant big-power actor in world affairs– alongside Russia and the US– makes the present era of world politics very different from the decades of the overwhelmingly bipolar Cold War.
But China doesn’t play only the “balancing” role that any third big power might play. It plays an even more special kind of potentially leadership role, because of the way it has emerged as a big power over recent decades and the values it has pursued along that path.
China has not emerged through military conquest and arms-racing. It has emerged overwhelmingly through a focused pursuit of national consolidation (in many different ways, good and bad… none of them very different from the ways other nations have been consolidated elsewhere), smart diplomacy, and integration into the US-led world political and economic order.
Yes, there were military confrontations with western forces and pro-western proxies in Korea and Vietnam. But even those confrontations were far from being as violative of the international order as they were portrayed to be in the west. But then, by the design of both Beijing and Nixon’s Washington, the ending of the war in Vietnam coincided with Beijing’s full reintegration into the (still firmly US-led) international order. And since then, Beijing’s rulers have been careful not to use military force beyond their own borders. Since 1974, they have pursued even what they see as their remaining goals in the field of national consolidation– in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan– through diplomatic means… That, while during the last decade of the Cold War the arms of Washington and Moscow and their proxies continued to battle each other openly throughout much the “Third World.”
China’s rulers are the ultimate “softly softly, catchee monkey” players in the international game. They are patient. They play by the existing international rules. They slowly stack up the chips of goodwill that they acquire through their growing economic might and their growing webs of international relations. They don’t waste huge amounts of money investing in large-scale military goods as a way of out-performing the US’s massively bloated arms production industry. Instead, they are probably quietly happy, at some level, when the US makes ill-considered military moves like the ones into Afghanistan or Iraq that lead to, effectively, the self-destruction of its own massive military might. Ultimate in ju-jitsu! Eat your heart out, Putin!
The Chinese wait, and wait, and then–
June 3, 2008, China wins,

a $3.5 billion contract to develop Afghanistan’s Aynak copper field, the largest foreign direct investment project in the history of Afghanistan.
The size of the bid — almost double the expected amount — surprised other potential foreign investors.
By some estimates, the 28-square-kilometer copper field in Logar Province could contain up to $88 billion worth of ore. But there is no power plant in the area that can generate enough electricity for the mining and extraction operations. And Afghanistan has never had the kind of railroad needed to haul away the tons of copper that could be extracted.
That is why a large part of the Chinese bid includes the cost of building a 400-megawatt, coal-fired power plant and a freight railroad passing from western China through Tajikistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan.

No wonder Pres. Karzai hurried off to Dushanbe yesterday to meet with Chinese Pres. Hu Jintao– even though the security situation at home in Afghanistan is in chaos!
And then, August 28, 2008, China and Iraq sign,

a $3 billion deal … to develop a large Iraqi oil field, the first major commercial oil contract here with a foreign company since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The 20-year agreement calls for the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. to begin producing 25,000 barrels of oil a day and gradually increase the output to 125,000 a day, said Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry…
Western oil companies came close this summer to reaching agreements with the ministry to return to Iraq. Those smaller technical service contracts involved giving advice on how to boost production. The China deal is a service contract, which is more lucrative and involves large-scale development of the field.

Do we see a pattern here? Do we see China stepping in to these two countries reeling from years of war and foreign occupation and starting to replace the US’s own deeply unsuccessful forms of economic and reconstruction aid, in some important ways, with its own?
What, in fact, is it we’re seeing? Is China stepping in to prop up the US role in these two countries, or to replace it? Can China avoid being seen by the war-battered and fairly distrustful peoples of these countries as “just more foreign exploiters”?
These are both high-stakes ventures for Beijing’s rulers to engage in. Particularly, perhaps, the one in Afghanistan, some of whose people have a lot in common with the often restive, Uighur people of Xinjiang.
What arrangements will be made– in either Iraq or Afghanistan– for assuring the security of the massive new Chinese economic ventures. Can they be, simply, “economic” ventures without also having a broad social, political, and security impact? (No, they can’t.)
So maybe China’s real coming-out party as a new kind of world power was not the one that was held August 8. Maybe instead it has been a two-act party, with the first act held June 3, and the second held earlier this week.
Or maybe there are further acts of similar impact, to follow? Stay tuned.