China expanding international democratic footprint
GENEVA (AP) — Chinese leaders have long been sensitive about their communist country’s international image. Now, they are battling back — investing in diplomacy and a courtship of hearts and minds, just as the United States digs in on the Trump administration’s “America First” mindset.
A trade war and other frictions between the world’s top economic power and the fast-growing No. 2 have exposed Washington’s fears about technology, security and influence. U.S. political leaders have derided China’s government over policies in protest-riddled Hong Kong, at detention centers in the majority Muslim Xinjiang region, and over allegedly underhanded business tactics by tech titan Huawei.
But increasingly, China is seeking to recapture the narrative — with a new assertiveness under President and Communist Party boss Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in decades.
“Almost overnight, we have awakened to the reality that while America slept, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as an immediate and growing threat to our prosperity, our freedoms, and our security,” Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said in a speech to the National Defense University last week.
Now the Chinese even have the world’s biggest diplomatic arsenal to draw from. China’s diplomatic network — including embassies, consulates and other posts — has overtaken that of the United States, according to the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank. Beijing has 276 diplomatic posts worldwide, topping Washington’s declining deployment by three posts, the institute found.
China’s growing diplomatic presence comes as Beijing is trying to expand its international footprint in places like resource-rich Africa or the strategic South China Sea, and to compete economically with Western countries, including with its much-ballyhooed Belt and Road Initiative that seeks to expand Chinese economic clout in places like Africa and Asia.
China’s campaign to increase its influence on the global stage comes as the Trump administration retreats from multilateral diplomacy. Trump has pulled the United States out of the United Nations’ educational, scientific and cultural organization and the U.N.-supported Human Rights Council. His administration has also announced a U.S. pullout from the Paris climate accord and shredded multilateral trade pacts.
It’s part of a broader diplomatic retrenchment that has led to the loss of nearly 200 foreign service posts at American embassies and consulates abroad.
China’s Communist Party has long believed in its monopoly on truth, history and narrative at home, Tsang said. Now, with “fake news” a buzzword, that belief may be ripe for export.
“If Donald Trump can say anything he wants — whatever that happens to be, without too much regard to whether it’s factually correct or not — why would the Communist Party of China not feel that they’ve been vindicated?” he said. “Therefore, Xi Jinping’s idea of seizing the narrative is the right thing: You don’t have to get worried about facts.”