Global community can begin in Asia-Pacific

To build a community of shared future for all mankind, China should start by cooperating with neighboring countries to create an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future.

At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping called on “the people of all countries to work together to build a community with a shared future for all mankind, to build an open, inclusive, clean, and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity”.

It signaled building a community with a shared future for all mankind has now become a fundamental goal of Chinese foreign relations.

Building such a community is both a long-term goal put forward by China and its responsibility as a global power. It represents a significant change in China’s relations with the outside world and its international strategic thinking.

Such a community will not spontaneously appear, establishing it will require China to guide and coordinate it. At the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference in 2015, Xi emphasized: “Facing the fast changing international and regional landscapes, we must see the whole picture, follow the trend of our times and jointly build a regional order that is more favorable to Asia and the world. We should, through efforts toward such a community for Asia, promote a community of common interest for all mankind.”

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Meeting last year, Xi reiterated that “the vines of sweet potato may stretch in all directions, but they all grow out of its roots. Similarly, no matter what level of development it may reach, China, with its roots in the Asia-Pacific, will continue to contribute to its development and prosperity. China is committed to peaceful development and a win-win strategy of opening-up. While striving for its own development, China will also work to promote the common development of all Asia-Pacific countries and create more opportunities for people in our region.”

To build a community of shared future for all mankind, China should start by cooperating with neighboring countries to build an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future, before expanding it to embrace all mankind. There are several reasons for this.

First, as the roots of China’s economic success and growth are in the Asia-Pacific, its foremost security concerns are also in the Asia-Pacific. China’s reform and opening-up initially drew on the development experience of the “Four Little Dragons of East Asia”, as well as Japan. It then extended its economic relations to the entire Asia-Pacific, and then the rest of the world. In 2016, the Chinese mainland’s trade with other parts of the AsiaPacific accounted for 58.7 percent of its global total. Eight of its top 10 trading partners are in the Asia-Pacific region.

Peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific are important for China’s national unity, territorial integrity, and peripheral security. To be specific, the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland has implications for China’s national unity and national rejuvenation.

Additionally, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea nuclear issue concerns China’s major security interests. China cannot sit aside if the Korean Peninsula is engulfed in war and chaos. While China’s territorial and maritime disputes with several neighboring countries remain unresolved, we should be aware of the attempts of some major countries to use these disputes to hinder China’s rise.

Second, the importance of the Asia-Pacific as part of the global economy, and in international security and global governance continues to increase. By the end of 2016, the Asia-Pacific region was inhabited by 54.47 percent of the world’s population. According to some estimates, by 2020 the Asia-Pacific region will account for two-thirds of global GDP and half of global trade, demonstrating the emerging centrality of this region.

By 2020, the region’s share of global military spending will likely have grown to nearly three-fourths. Major wars or strategic confrontations in this region, if they occur, would likely prove catastrophic.

In addition, given the importance of the Asia-Pacific region, building and perfecting regional cooperation mechanisms is indispensable for such global governance issues as eliminating the threats from terrorism and extremism, protecting ecosystems and the environment, safeguarding public health and cracking down on drug-trafficking and illegal immigration.

Third, in the past few decades, especially since the end of the Cold War, AsiaPacific regional cooperation mechanisms and organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, have made great achievements. However, as of today, no existing regional cooperation mechanism in the Asia-Pacific is capable of engaging in the full spectrum of security, economic, political, cultural, and ecological matters, nor can one take responsibility for building an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future.

All of the existing regional organizations have limitations. The bilateral military alliances of the United States — with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia — do not take into consideration the security concerns of countries outside the US security system. These alliances are adverse to mitigating the arms race in the region, and reducing strategic mutual distrust between China and the US.

Under such circumstances, the necessary precondition for building an AsiaPacific community with a shared future is designing and setting up a comprehensive and multi-dimensional cooperation mechanism in the Asia-Pacific that includes all regional countries.

The following objectives should be pursued: deepening and institutionalizing regional economic cooperation and integration; mitigating the increasingly intensive geostrategic competition between China and the US, and improving relations among countries in the region; denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula as soon as possible, and reinforcing the commitment to nuclear non-proliferation; bolstering commitment to peaceful settlement of territorial disputes and reducing the dangers of armed conflict and an arms race; coping more effectively with non-traditional security issues and extremism; and promoting dialogue between civilizations, cultural exchanges, and jointly formulating shared values for the region.

Under current conditions, a relatively simple and feasible solution is to build a dialogue platform based on an existing multilateral negotiation mechanism. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s proposal to build a multilateral security mechanism on the basis of the East Asia Summit is a sensible one. The East Asia Summit composed of ASEAN members, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, as well as five other countries (the US, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and India) is quite inclusive of Asia-Pacific countries, and it has achieved significant progress in recent years.

The construction of the Asia-Pacific community is undoubtedly subordinate to the overall goal of building a community with a shared future for all mankind. But forming the concept of an Asia-Pacific community that all countries in the region can embrace will help deliver that bigger goal. Wang Jisi is president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University, and Zhao Jianwei is a research assistant at Peking University.