The Chinese Century
Time Magazine
Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn't seen a train in
years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink facade crumbling away; the
local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialists founded long ago is a distant
memory, victim of a civil war that lasted for 27 years. Dondo's fortunes,
however, may be looking up. This month, work is scheduled to start on the local
section of the line that links the town to the deep harbor at Luanda, Angola's
capital. The work will be done by Chinese construction firms, and as two of
their workers survey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his feelings.
"Thank you, God," he says, "for the Chinese."
That sentiment, or something like it, can be heard a lot these days in
Africa, where Chinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textile
factories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil, where
Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming export trade. And you
hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand, where
locals used to subsist on whatever they could make from farming and
smuggling--until Chinese engineers began blasting the rapids and reefs on the upper
Mekong so that large boats could take Chinese-manufactured goods to markets in
Southeast Asia. "Before the Chinese came here, you couldn't find any work,"
says Ba, a Burmese immigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from his
task hauling sacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for
Bangkok. "Now I can send money back home to my family."
You may know all about the world coming to China--about the hordes of
foreign businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showrooms in places
like Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less about how China is
going out into the world. Through its foreign investments and appetite for raw
materials, the world's most populous country has already transformed economies
from Angola to Australia. Now China is turning that commercial might into
real political muscle, striding onto the global stage and acting like a nation
that very much intends to become the world's next great power. In the past
year, China has established itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations
with North Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape the future
of central Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe and Latin America
and contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. With the
U.S. preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terrorism and struggling to
extricate itself from a failing war in Iraq, China seems ready to
challenge--possibly even undermine--some of Washington's other foreign policy goals, from
halting the genocide in Darfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China's
international role has won the attention of the new Democratic majority in
Congress. Tom Lantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign
Affairs Committee and a critic of Beijing's human-rights record, told TIME that
he intends to hold early hearings on China, on everything from its censorship
of the Internet to its policies toward Tibet. "China is thinking in much more
active terms about its strategy," says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University
of Michigan, who was senior director at the National Security Council Asia
desk under President Bill Clinton, "not only regionally, but globally, than it
has done in the past. We have seen a sea change in China's fundamental level
of confidence."
Blink for a moment and you can imagine that--as many Chinese would tell the
tale--after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civil war,
revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a date with destiny.
"The Chinese wouldn't put it this way themselves," says Lieberthal. "But in
their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China's century."
That's quite something to believe. Is it true? Or rather--since the century
is yet young--will it be true? If so, when, and how would it happen? How
comfortable would such a development be for the West? Can China's rise be managed
peaceably by the international system? Or will China so threaten the
interests of established powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th century
and Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going to be
nagging at us for some time--but a peaceful, prosperous future for both China
and the West depends on trying to answer them now.
WHAT CHINA WANTS--AND FEARS
If you ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear about China--20% of
the world's population, gazillions of brainy engineers, serried ranks of
soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack of doom--remember this:
China is still a poor country (GDP per head in 2005 was $1,700, compared with
$42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders face so many problems that it is reasonable
to wonder how they ever sleep. The country's urban labor market recently
exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension system is
nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia, its cities' air foul beyond
imagination and its clean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and growing. Protests and
riots by rural workers are measured in the tens of thousands each year. The
most immediate priority for China's leadership is less how to project itself
internationally than how to maintain stability in a society that is going
through the sort of social and economic change that, in the past, has led to
chaos and violence.
And yet for all their internal challenges, the Chinese seem to want their
nation to be a bigger player in the world. In a 2006 poll conducted jointly by
the the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society, 87% of
Chinese respondents thought their country should take a greater role in world
affairs. Most Chinese, the survey found, believed China's global influence would
match that of the U.S. within a decade. The most striking aspect of President
Hu Jintao's leadership has been China's remarkable success in advancing its
interests abroad despite turmoil at home.
Surprisingly for those who thought they knew his type, Hu has placed himself
at the forefront of China's new assertiveness. Hu, 64, has never studied
outside China and is steeped in the ways of the Communist Party. He became a
party member as a university student in the early 1960s and headed the Communist
Youth League in the poor western province of Gansu before becoming
provincial party chief in Guizhou and later Tibet. Despite a public stiffness in front
of foreigners, Hu has been a vigorous ambassador for China: the pattern was
set in 2004, when Hu spent two weeks in South America--more time than George
W. Bush had spent on the continent in four years--and pledged billions of
dollars in investments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba. While Wen Jiabao,
China's Premier, was visiting 15 countries last year, Hu spent time in the
U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. In a three-week period
toward the end of 2006, he played host to leaders from 48 African countries in
Beijing, went to Vietnam for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
summit, slipped over to Laos for a day and then popped off for a six-day tour of
India and Pakistan. For someone whose comfort zone is supposed to be
domestic affairs, that's quite a schedule.
"Look at Africa, look at Central America, look at parts of Asia," says
Eberhard Sandschneider, a China scholar who is head of the German Council on
Foreign Relations. "They are playing a global game now."
As it follows Hu's lead and steps out in the world, what will be China's
priorities? What does it want and what does it fear? The first item on the
agenda is straightforward: it is to be left alone. China brooks no interference in
its internal affairs, and its definition of what is internal is not in
doubt. The status of Tibet, for example, is an internal matter; the Dalai Lama is
not a spiritual leader but a "splittist" whose real aim is to break up China.
As for Taiwan, China is prepared to tolerate all sorts of temporary
uncertainties as to how its status might one day be resolved--but not the central
point that there is only one China. Cross that line, and you will hear about it.
This defense of its right to be free of interference has a corollary. China
has traditionally detested the intervention by the great powers in other
nations' affairs. An aide to French President Jacques Chirac traces a new Chinese
assertiveness to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying, "They felt they can't
allow that sort of meddling in what they see as a nation's internal affairs."
But the same horror of anything that might smell of foreign intervention was
evident long before Iraq. I visited Beijing during the Kosovo war in 1999, and
it wasn't just the notorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that
year that outraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO's rearranging
what was left of Yugoslavia. Wasn't the cause a good one? That didn't matter.
China's commitment to nonintervention means that it doesn't inquire closely
into the internal arrangements of others. When all those African leaders met
in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by 2009, train 15,000
professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000 students, and help Africa's
health-care and farming sectors. But as a 2005 report by the Council on
Foreign Relations notes, "China's aid and investments are attractive to Africans
precisely because they come with no conditionality related to governance,
fiscal probity or other concerns of Western donors." In 2004, when an
International Monetary Fund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected corruption,
China ponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and money to
Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused of massive
human-rights violations.
Most notoriously, China has consistently used its place as a permanent
member of the U.N. Security Council to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the
Sudanese government to stop the ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinese
state-owned company owns 40% of the oil concession in the south of Sudan, and there
are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops there protecting Beijing's oil interests.
(By contrast, despite the noise that China made when one of its soldiers was
killed by an Israeli air strike on a U.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there
are only 1,400 Chinese troops serving in all U.N. peacekeeping missions
worldwide.) "Is China playing a positive role in developing democracy [in
Africa]?" asks Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs.
"Largely not." Human Rights Watch goes further: China's policies in Africa,
it claimed during the Beijing summit, have "propped up some of the
continents' worst human-rights abusers."
China doesn't support unsavory regimes for the sake of it. Instead China's
key objective is to ensure a steady supply of natural resources, so that its
economy can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lid on unrest
at home. That is why China has reached out to resource-rich democracies like
Australia and Brazil as much as it has to such international pariahs as Sudan
and Burma, both of which have underdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There's
nothing particularly surprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave
when domestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustain
their economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behavior in
Africa might remember their own history on the continent.) But China has never
needed such resources in such quantities before, so its politicians have
never had to learn the skills of getting them without looking like a dictator's
friend. Now they have to.
WORKING WITH CHINA
Assuming a bigger global presence has forced Beijing to learn the art of
international diplomacy. Until recently, China's foreign policy consisted of
little more than bloodcurdling condemnations of hegemonic imperialism. "This is
a country that 30 years ago pretty much saw things in zero-sum terms," says
former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. "What was good for the U.S.
or the West was bad for China, and vice versa." Those days are gone. Wang
Jisi of Beijing University, one of China's top foreign policy scholars, says one
of the most important developments of 2006 was that the communiqué issued
after a key conference on foreign affairs for top officials had no reference
to the tired old terms that have been standard in China's diplomatic
vocabulary.
Washington would like Beijing to go further. In a speech in 2005, Zoellick
invited China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in international affairs.
China's national interest, Zoellick argued, should not be narrowly defined,
but would be "much better served by working with us to shape the future
international system," on everything from intellectual-property rights to nuclear
nonproliferation. Says Zoellick: "I'm not sure anyone had ever put it quite in
those terms, and it clearly had a bracing effect."
That would imply that China's behavior has changed of late. Has it? A U.S.
policymaker cautions, "It's important to see the 'responsible stakeholder'
notion as a future vision of China." In practice, this official says, "They've
been more helpful in some areas than others." When the stars align--when
China's perception of its own national interest matches what the U.S. and other
international powers seek--that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North
Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S.
As North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the
1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.--which would have implied
doing little to rein in Pyongyang--or stiffing its former protégé.
Hu's personal preferences seem to have helped shape the choice. He is known
to have been stingingly critical of Kim in meetings with U.S. officials.
Michael Green, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council
until December 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups of
Americans his skepticism about Kim's intentions. When the North finally tested a
nuke last fall, China joined the U.S. and other regional powers in condemning
Kim and supported a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Pyongyang.
Says a senior U.S. official: "If you asked experts several years ago, Could you
imagine China taking these actions toward a longtime ally in cooperation
with us and Japan? Most people would have said no."
But nobody in Washington is getting carried away. Beijing has been helpful
on North Korea because it's more important to China that Pyongyang not provoke
a regional nuclear arms race than it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support.
Contrast such helpfulness with China's behavior on the dispute over Iran's
nuclear ambitions. In December, China signed a $16 billion contract with Iran
to buy natural gas and help develop some oil fields, and it has consistently
joined Russia in refusing to back the tough sanctions against Tehran sought
by the U.S. and Europe. "It's hard to say China's been helpful on Iran," says
a senior U.S. official, and there is little sense that such an assessment
will change any time soon.
Within its own neighborhood, there are signs that China's behavior is
changing in more constructive ways. China fought a war with India in 1962 and
another with Vietnam in 1979. For years, it supported communist movements
dedicated to undermining governments in nations such as Indonesia, Singapore and
Malaysia. Yet today China's relations with its neighbors are nothing but
sweetness and light, often at the expense of the U.S. Absorbed by the arc of crisis
spreading from the Middle East, the U.S. is simply less visible in Southeast
Asia than it once was, and China is stepping into the vacuum.
While American exports to Southeast Asia have been virtually stagnant for
the past five years, Chinese trade with the region is soaring. In the northern
reaches of Thailand and Laos, you can find whole towns where Mandarin has
become the common language and the yuan the local currency. In Chiang Saen,
signs in Chinese read CALL CHINA FOR ONLY 12 BAHT A MINUTE. A sign outside the
Glory Lotus hotel advertises CLEAN, CHEAP ROOMs in Chinese. It is not aid from
the U.S. but trade with China--carried on new highways being built from
Kunming in Yunnan province to Hanoi, Mandalay and Bangkok, or along a Mekong River
whose channels are full of Chinese goods--that is transforming much of
Southeast Asia.
Nor is China's smiling face visible only to its south. In a cordial state
visit last year, Hu reached out to India--an old rival with which it still has
some disputed borders. The two countries pledged to double trade by 2010 and
agreed to bid jointly for global oil projects on which they had previously
been competing. Hu has also sought to mend ties with Japan, another longtime
rival, with whom China's relations have deteriorated in recent years. Last
October, Hu met the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in Beijing just days
after Abe took office, a visit Hu called a "turning point" in frosty
relations between the two countries and which Premier Wen described as a "window of
hope."
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