What kind of global power will China be?

Former Philippine Ambassador and Permanent Representative to ASEAN;  former ASEAN Deputy Secretary-General

As the new year begins, we still find a troubled world afflicted by crises — recession, climate change, disasters, unrestrained militarization and nuclear proliferation, food shortage, worsening poverty and social inequality, terrorism, wars and rebellions. 

The urgency of the international condition demands a new kind of global power. We are now in the 21st century and what the world badly needs are principled superpowers with responsibility and accountability not only to their own citizens but also to humanity.

China has so much potential to be one such superpower. It has the economic wherewithal, geographic and demographic advantage, and a 5,000-year-old civilization from which to draw lessons of history and diplomacy.

Unfortunately, this potential to become a respectable and magnanimous power does not figure in its current dealings with its neighbors, notwithstanding its rhetoric to the contrary. China is still in the mold of the traditional powers — welded to the Middle-Kingdom mentality of the Han dynasty, the mercantilist colonialism and gunboat diplomacy of the 16th century, the imperialism of the late 19th century, and the Nazis’ lebensraum policy of creeping annexation during the mid-20th century.

In her paper, China’s Foreign Policy Debates (2010), Dr. Zhu Liqun, vice-president of China Foreign Affairs University, wrote that there are ongoing domestic debates among Chinese scholars on the appropriate foreign policy for their country. 

Dr. Zhu Liqun states that “the issue of identity has been crucial to China ever since it experienced a drastic fall in status from its imperial heyday as the ‘Middle Kingdom’ to becoming a semi-colonial country in the middle of the 19th century.”

When China was admitted by ASEAN as a full-fledged dialogue partner in 1986 and elevated as a strategic partner in 2003, its emergence as a power was described by its publicists as “peaceful rise” and later, as “peaceful development.” But in 2009, China shocked the international community when it submitted to the United Nations the 9-dash line map, which covered almost the whole South China Sea.

The changed perspective of the Chinese Communist Party accounted for China’s new incarnation as an aggressive power. After the successful modernization led by Deng Xiaoping, its younger generations are no longer as malleable and responsive as before to ideological conditioning. For the socialist regime to sustain its legitimacy, it needed to stoke nationalist feelings and present itself as the champion of territorial integrity.

Propping China’s pride is its perception of a declining United States. However, it remains insecure about the former’s military superiority and international influence. China has also been uncomfortable with neighbors that have democratic political systems. Hence, it has been exceptionally pugnacious in handling territorial disputes with Japan, India and the Philippines because these countries pose obstacles to its designs in the region.

It was last year, during the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ and Leaders’ Summit, that China’s divide-and-rule policy was most visible. Using the encirclement strategy, it drove wedges among ASEAN member-states in an attempt to break them apart and isolate the more assertive claimants of disputed territories.

The misadventure backfired. ASEAN is the fastest growing sub-region in the world and is on its way to becoming an economic community less than two years from now. No one wants it to fail. Everyone, including China, stands to benefit from a united, peaceful and prosperous ASEAN. The states that China now tries to bully and even those that it thinks it can control will not forever remain weak. The peoples of ASEAN are proud; they cannot be bought or intimidated. Cries for freedom and justice — advocacies that threaten authoritarian regimes — are everywhere not only in the region but all over the world. Even in China, voices of dissent and calls for democracy from leading lawyers and scholars have re-surfaced since last month.

The imposition of the 9-dash line in the Paracels and Spratlys has stigmatized China, now seen even more as the primary external threat. If armed conflict breaks out, China would be the most severely affected. It is through the Strait of Malacca and other South China Sea shipping lanes that almost 80 percent of its oil imports pass.

But nothing is permanent in international relations. China can still be the power that the world wishes it to be. That country is capable of change, particularly now with the exposure of its people, especially its leaders, businessmen, intellectuals and the youth, to globalization, social media, international education and technological innovations.

It is time for China to ask itself: Will its rise to superpower status usher in the golden age of humanity, or will this oldest surviving civilization preside over the global cataclysm?