Why Beijing is finally maturing
Global power
BEIJING, Dec 17, (RTRS): Over the last 15 years, China’s international diplomacy has marked it as something of a geopolitical adolescent, like a teenager who suddenly has the physical strength and desires of an adult, but not the experience and savvy to manage them. But recent behavior suggests that China’s foreign policy is maturing, and that Chinese Communist Party leaders may finally be coming to terms with the fact that a global power must behave differently than a peripheral developing country. Whether Beijing continues on this path will go a long way to determining whether China’s rise remains peaceful, or turns threatening.
Since the start of the 21st century, China has undergone a massive transformation. From a mostly poor, inward-looking, developing country, it has become a major global economic power with interests and activities all over the world. Countries, organizations and individuals everywhere have had to scramble to adapt. But no one has been more confused about and unprepared to handle the implications of this change than the Chinese themselves, and the sophistication of their international relations has lagged behind their overall power as a result.
Mao
Behave
Although the Communist leadership has for years aspired to Great Power status, it was less clear on how a Great Power should behave. China often came across as “insecure, confused, selfish and truculent.” With its major global rival, the United States, China was an important commercial partner, but also a cyber thief and trade nuisance; with its immediate neighbors, it was often thuggish, bullying and unresponsive to even minor requests; and nowhere was its lack of nuance in its international relations more obvious than on the African continent.
Though China’s investment in Africa has indeed been massive, totaling tens of billions of dollars, much of the value of this investment has been captured by Chinese firms and African elites, not the local African population. For large infrastructure construction projects, China would often import hundreds or thousands of Chinese laborers to Africa, rather than hire allegedly less-skilled local workers. Further, what local labor was employed at construction, mining, logging and oil projects often complained of substandard working conditions and pay. And of course, the projects themselves largely involved the transfer of raw materials back to China and the sale of Chinese goods in Africa, in an uncomfortable mirror-image of European colonialism of a century earlier. This monomaniacal focus on commercial gain may have served Beijing’s short-term interest in economic growth, but it brought evergreater scrutiny and criticism from African and international sources.
In its repeated efforts to brush aside, shut down and undermine this kind of criticism, the Communist leadership in Beijing usually returned to the line that China supports “non-interference” in the internal affairs of other countries: If African political leaders were willing to go along with China’s requests, it was not for the rest of the world to question. A relic of the Mao years, this idea had grown out of the original anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist impulse that was at the heart of the early People’s Republic: let the developing world manage its own affairs and focus on what it decides is important, not what outsiders think should be important.
Philosophy
But in recent years, this philosophy’s frequent use has begun to ring somewhat hollow internationally, as China’s global presence has become so broad and deep that its own interests have become tied up in questions of the internal affairs of other countries. For instance, the 2011 election in Zambia turned in large measure on a huge Chinese copper project in the country that opposition candidates said exploited the population; China sought to influence the results through lobbying and political work, an effort completely at odds with its traditional policies.
Further, as various African political and economic leaders across the continent begin to organize against the more pernicious effects of Chinese influence, Beijing and its agents are finding that its reputation for unfairness with the population is not a mere afterthought and that ignoring local wishes can come with a steep cost.