Power, Wealth, Ambivalence — How China’s Contradictions Weigh On The World
PARIS — From one battle to another: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate the news for their strategic importance and emotional impact. But they cannot diminish the rivalry between the U.S. and China, nor a series of recent, seemingly contradictory, developments on the Asian front.
Though less striking, these developments may indeed be more important in the long term for understanding the future evolution of the world. In late March, Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed a large delegation of American businessmen to Beijing. U.S. President Joe Biden will receive Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House on April 10. It’s notable also that Xi and Biden held an unannounced call on April 2 in an effort to manage tensions between the two countries.
During that March encounter U.S. business leaders in March, Xi played the role of a “salesman-in-chief.” He was smiling and reassuring, as if his priority at the moment was to clear up some small misunderstandings existing between Beijing and Washington on the geopolitical front. “Invest in China. Despite our real difficulties, especially on the real estate front, we are more resilient than ever, 30% of the world economy’s growth is still the product of China,” Xi said.
The problem is that this new Chinese message is a tough sell. How can China simultaneously attract foreign business and continue to forge closer diplomatic and strategic ties with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia? How can it denounce the Cold War climate, supposedly imposed by Washington, and at the same time demonstrate ever more aggressive nationalism in the China Sea?
China has to choose between resuming growth and chauvinistic provocations aimed, at least in part, at compensating for the difficulties of its economy. Be proud to be Chinese, for want of becoming ever more prosperous, Xi seemed to tell his fellow citizens, for want of a better word. But celebrating Chinese civilization’s greatness, if not its superiority, comes at a cost, especially in Asia. It makes China’s neighbors particularly nervous. According to well-informed sources, the U.S. and Japan are set to deepen their military security pact signed 60 years ago. With closer cooperation and a more integrated chain of command, these changes have only one objective: to be better able to resist Chinese ambitions.
Just as Putin’s Russia has transformed Germany’s approach to security issues in Europe, Xi’s China is leading Japan to invest massively in its own security. The pacifist reflexes of the two great vanquished nations of World War II are gradually giving way to the aggressive postures of the two great authoritarians of our time.
Is China on the verge of reconciling Japan and South Korea? We’re not there yet. And yet, on the cultural front, opinion polls show that young Japanese under the age of 35 look more to Seoul than to Los Angeles, London or Paris. Will the soft power of Korean music, aided to some extent by China’s hard power, bring Tokyo and Seoul closer together?
Beijing’s policies isolate China in Asia, and make it more difficult for global investors to regain confidence. Xi must choose between growth and power, mercantilism and nationalism. The two are not necessarily compatible.
Beijing is said to be tempering Russian temptations to brandish nuclear weapons as a scarecrow. But this is not enough. China needs to demonstrate that it is not in the same league as Moscow, even if its cybersecurity behavior is aggressive, to say the least. China, unlike Russia, is a great multi-dimensional power that creates wealth, rather than merely exploit it.
Just because war is more likely to spread to Europe — if not the Middle East — than explode in Asia, we should not lose sight of a continent that accounts for almost half the world’s population and economic growth.
The U.S. has understood this. It is paying attention (and more than that) to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But its strategic priority remains its rivalry with China, and the maintenance, more generally, of its status in Asia.