China's recent rise has made many uncomfortable with its direction as a world power. The experience called China and its thinking are so very different to that in the West that misunderstanding is so easy, leading to unnecessary fear and unwarranted optimism. If Russia is a riddle in an enigma, China is even more mysterious, with little contact with Western history until lately, different religion & philosophy and even different basis for its language.
While I am not a scholar or an expert in the field, I find most analysis of China's foreign policy ignores the history and culture of this great nation and so I will attempt to explain how China's foreign policy is rooted in its history and its culture. The timeline of the Chinese dynasties here may help put things into historical perspective. Also, by culture, I do not mean the arts, although that is an element, but I mean the way people think and behave in the social sphere.
The article got much longer than I expected and is now part of a five part series. In the process I all realised that what I really want to do is to share insights into Chinese culture, philosophy and practices, which shaped and are shaped by its history. Many non-Chinese observers view China as a mirror of their own experience but while there is much that the Chinese culture shares with the rest of the world, being part of the human world after all, there is also much that can be very alien to it. And of course, a great deal lies in the middle - same drives expressed in different conditions. So, I hope I can help the Western mind understand China using an examination of its foreign policy as a convenient vehicle. You will need to keep this intention in mind as this series is not intended to be a complete thesis of all the topics it touches on.
Breakdown of government legitimacyEvery government coming into power anywhere in the world can only rule with legitimacy, with the consent of the ruled if you must. And that legitimacy is governed within the context of a permanent social contract that governs the relationship between any transient ruler and the ruled. Sometimes, consent are obtained under duress by the barrel of the gun, as military dictators are wont to do, but it is still a form of legitimacy nevertheless. In China where the entrenched one-party rule made the ruler is no longer transient, legitimacy and social contract are one and the same thing: shifting between restoration of national pride and personal economic advancement depending on the political expediency of the day.
Legitimacy and geopolitics
While the early post-revolution wars were fought for ideological leadership for the mindshare of communists worldwide, today there is also an economic aspect to China's conflicts. The government has identified key resources worldwide it need to own or control so as to continue the economic growth that underpins its legitimacy: from Australian minerals and rare earths elsewhere to undersea maritime resources. In particular, the South China Sea which tianxia-cultured Chinese still see as its very own Southern seas, much like India seeks to ensure Indian Ocean is Indian. The South China Sea disputes also potentially bring much oil and gas resources into play for the Chinese economy, resources China is desperately short.
Indians never hesitate to point out that China has ongoing border disputes with most of its neighbours - clockwise from north: the old Soviet Union, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bhutan, India and Tajikistan - that is 12 out of 22 land and maritime neighbours, ignoring less active ones that Indians like to list. Oh, and communist China has also fought hot wars with four of its neighbours and two internally plus the on-and-off war to reclaim Taiwan - all in seven decades of its short communist history. With the exception of the ongoing war with Xinjiang Islamists, China fought each of these wars by choice though of course provocation and justifications were claimed. Each war was carefully calculated to an end in mind and accordingly propagandised to its populace. War has always been a cornerstone of communist legitimacy.
The invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was a classic example of a tianxia war. While geopolitical concerns over encirclement by Soviet client states probably was a some small consideration, the war's stated aims were to 'teach Vietnam a lesson' for occupying the Cambodia of the ardent Maoist Khmer Rouge. The war only served to expose the woeful inadequacies of the PLA, with stories of human wave attacks against battle-hardened Vietnamese fighting on home territory. But still, it was portrayed as a glorious triumph: a Chinese national I worked with expressed surprise when I told him that Vietnam won the war because he was taught about Chinese victory in school - but his response did betray some scepticism of the government line. Today, China plays down the Sino-Vietnam war, so as not to invite examination of its military underperformance, its failure to achieve war aims (the Vietnamese stayed a decade in Cambodia until they left in a UN-brokered deal) and most importantly, its display of unjustified aggression against a neighbour, from an International law point of view.
The Sino-Indian War of 1962 had even less of a geopolitical aim other than ostensibly to build a road link between Xinjiang and Tibet in Aksai Chin, a region in the west end of the Himalaya mountain range which the Indian prime minister described before the war as a place where 'nothing grows there', indicating an absence of economic utility. The Sino-Indian border at the eastern end of the Himalayas had not only little economic value but also no geo-political value: the dispute was over where in icy glaciers was the peak of the Himalaya range, which from ancient times was understood to be that arcane line separating China from India. The trouble was that the border in both places, the Johnson Line and the Macmahon Line respectively, were drawn by British officers. To make matters worse, the Macmahon Line in the east was really the result of consultations that officers of the British Raj in India had with the government of Tibet, at that time de facto independent but nominally under Chinese sovereignty - Beijing control was only militarily asserted by China in 1959. Thus, the Sino-Indian conflicts were really initiated as a defiance against borders imposed on a weakened China as one of the unequal treaties, one imposed by that paragon of evil opium dealers, the Englishmen. Foreign policy and legitimacy The Chinese regime does not do anything on the basis of principles, at least not anymore since the pragmatic Deng took over. While Western foreign policy is often ostensibly conducted on principles of democracy and human rights - ostensible being in bold because the underlying agenda could of course be decidedly different - Chinese foreign policy is transactional and principles-free. The principle of non-intervention much touted by Chinese diplomats is really for the preservation of its ruling regime. Which is why non-democratic leaders welcome Chinese scruples-free aid even if they burden their future generations with debts. There really isn't much window dressing in China's foreign policy and is rather nakedly about self-interest: in that sense I find it refreshingly honest. The different ways of conducting foreign policy is really due to fundamentally different world views and values systems created by culture: tianxia and Chinese pragmatism vs Westphalia system of nominally equal nation-states. This is not to say that what drives the Chinese regime is reflective of attitudes of the Chinese population. Especially that growing segment of better read youths grown up in the luxury of middle-class affluence, who often push the envelope of the social contract by raising values-based issues of concern even against interests within the Communist Party.
So, Chinese foreign policy is driven really by an amalgam of economic self-interest, restoration of past grandeur and revenge on foreigners who have wronged them. The pragmatic nature of Chinese action, untempered by softer values, can be particularly brutal for the subjugated: over a million out of 13 million Uighurs are said to be in concentration camps. Under tianxia, local interests even of recipients of economic or other aid, are always subordinate to those of China as there is no higher principles to appeal to. While probably not an intention of the Belt and Road Initiative, China ended up owning a port in Sri Lanka, putting many other nations in wariness of China's motivations and methods.
Of late, a newly confident crop of diplomatic officials have taken the cue from Xi to conduct a highly aggressive form of diplomacy known as"Wolf warriors", the name taken from a Chinese series of movies of a Chinese Rambo-copy special forces team defeating American ex-SEAL mercenaries in the like-manner. The highly successful movie franchise appeals to Chinese aspirations to beat Americans at their own game, extracting vengeance along the way for denying China's heaven-mandated place at the apex of the family of nations. In that sense, aggressiveness of wolf warrior diplomacy is consistent with the growing segment of Chinese consciousness impatient with the dream of a return to world pre-eminence, now tantalisingly within reach due to its recent economic clout. You can well imagine that wolf warrior diplomacy is not very well received by much of the rest of world, particularly its neighbours, and Xi has been forced to rein it back in. American diplomacy is very much backed by its soft power projections, its overseas bases to project military power, and more importantly a world-wide network of military, economic and diplomatic alliances founded on a common worldview and values like democracy and human rights - both as sources of their own legitimacy and as demanded by their own constituents. Despite its newly found confidence, China does not have the soft power projections Americans have or even the potential to challenge that soft power in the near future. Soft power and legitimacy
Even countries within China's traditional cultural orbits are now wary adversaries with vastly different aspirations and values systems that do not hold to Chinese pre-eminence that they once did a long time ago. Japan, Korea and even Singapore have more soft power than China's. And the transactional nature of China's foreign policy does not make for the building of long-lasting alliances, the way that a common worldview and values system would do.
Discerning the trajectory of China's foreign policy in the short term is not too difficult. The border disputes with its many neighbours are red lines which China has made clear with military moves: there is no room for negotiations. Wolf warriors red lines, however, do not go down well in a diplomatic world used to negotiating pragmatically in civil conversations. So far, Chinese economic ties and its more recent vaccine diplomacy has also drawn guarded acceptance from nations wary of the naked power projection agenda involved, except maybe by potentates eager for assistance without the scrutiny that comes with aid from Western institutions. The lack of transparency over the origins of the Covid-19 virus, results of its vaccine tests and its initial slow reaction raised much suspicions and conspiracy theories over perceived Chinese motives, whatever the truth of the virus origins were. This is not to say Chinese diplomats will not learn from these mistakes to do better in future but the glimpse into Chinese mindset and intentions afforded by the recent clumsy stumbles will likely keep potential partners chary well into the foreseeable future.
Though the Belt and Road Initiative is doubtlessly a tool of diplomacy, there is likely an economic rationale for its genesis: to export its overcapacity and provide employment for an overly weighted public investment sector. Even if not born out of a clearly articulated policy, the ruling elites quickly surmised its potential and packaged it as Chinese largesse to recipients - much of which are loans not grants. Photo ops of crates with Chinese characters outside the ship or plane at the port or airport with the Chinese national anthem played by the local band is certainly one that Chinese, ruling and ruled, relish. So, while I may not subscribe to the theory that debt-trap diplomacy was the core reason for the Belt and Road Initiative, debt is certainly an intended by-product. Debt and other controversies very much dented its efficacy in China's soft power projections.
Aside from the lure of economic partnerships, I would think Chinese soft power could be in the area of technology, which has garnered much respect for its quiet and rapid advancements in industrial, space and weaponry fields as well as the apps developed for its alternative internet. At the present moment, much of this is retracing the same steps of successful Western efforts, picking off easy wins that do not depend on risky innovations: like adding more CPUs to make a more powerful supercomputer. The Chinese space program look suspiciously similar to early Soviet and American space programs, scoring some firsts that both programs neglected like landing a probe on the far side of the moon.
Still, it remains to be seen how the Chinese system will work when it has to lead from the front and create its own roadmap instead of improving on success of others. Tik Tok is very much the first significant Chinese social media app that has appealed in a novel way to non-Chinese consumers in a very crowded market, unlike Chinese copies of Amazon (Ali Baba), WhatsApp (WeChat), Facebook (Renren), Twitter (Weibo), Google (Baidu), etc that work well in a walled Chinese ecosystem - interesting that even the ecosystem itself is a Western copy. It comes hot on the heels of Tencent quietly cornering parts of the gaming market in the Asian region through their business model of aggressive investments into teams, titles and local partners.
There is a constant leakage of Chinese soft power when success of Chinese stars take them out of China to escape state control. Li Na, the first Chinese to win a tennis grand slam made no secret of the fact that she won in spite of the Chinese sports system and not because, earning her much opprobrium in the Chinese social media for any misstep she made. Tik Tok was quick to consider cutting links with China when under pressure from the Trump administration. Tencent's partnerships and investments into local players and teams in the region was very much due to its need to divest to outside of China to escape state control of the gaming ecosystem in China. It is difficult to escape the feeling that the rhetoric will quieten pragmatically once you put a green card in the hands of a voluble proponent of Chinese supremacy. Legitimacy and the regime Changing the Chinese narrative for it to adopt the Westphalia model of equal nation-state requires a fundamental rethink in its social contract based on tianxia. That means breaking the link between nationalism and legitimacy, between a future and a past which nationalism reimagines, between a national self-esteem and a hierarchical pre-eminence that tianxia is based on. Such a fundamental shift would be difficult as it is a deep reach into the psyche of the nation and culture and likely, also a change in the current polity of the Communist Party, for which nationalism and the Century of Humiliation is embedded in its origin story.
Just as Zhou Enlai's reply of "It's too early to tell" to a question about the impact of the French Revolution (no, it was not Deng and it was likely a misunderstood question), it is still uncertain to me whether the People's Republic of China is the latest of China's long-lasting dynasties or just another long interregnum. After all, in China's history, seven decades is a short while: they say only China and the Vatican think in centuries. And they do - that is why diplomatic negotiations between these two parties take so long: it is in neither culture to feel hurried in these sort of things. Anyway, in Chinese history, being an interregnum is not necessarily negative: although most interregnum is inherent unstable by Chinese standards, which may be considered very stable in Europe, an interregnum could still be a period when arts flourished and sinicisation progressed, as happened during the three-centuries long Six Dynasties period.
Unlike imperial governments of the past, technological and sociological advancements have enabled a tighter grip on restive provinces, even if it is still not enough to handle the task. Modern techniques built on China's ability to marshal all human and material resources at its disposal, facilitated ambitions to build economic, technological, and tianxia-based political power to challenge America's global manifest destiny in that ultimate clash of exceptionalisms. Its control over the messaging and narrative means that it still has that iron grip on power via its social contract. All government propaganda needs to do is to proclaim clearly its intentions and priorities on the many channels of its all-pervasive media & walled internet and the Chinese sense of pragmatism does the rest. Dethroning Chinese imperial dynasties has never been easy and this current one has proven just as immovable. The communist agenda has permeated through all parts of the Chinese society until it can be considered totalitarian without being arbitrarily mandatory. The scrupulous observance of the social contract has kept the populace on its side in concert towards its ostensibly common aspiration. The careful and proactive use of laws to rule has minimised naked and arbitrary use of power - the barrel of the communist gun is rarely visible in society but very clearly in the minds of people.
The process of dismantling communist power will likely be so tumultuous a revolution that the Chinese people with a Confucianist idea of social harmony may find it a cost too high to pay. The omnipresent communist power means that merely taking over of levers of government, as was done in Russia, will not be enough. Unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet Union where control and funding is clearly separate if symbiotic, most of the funding for the Chinese Communist Party comes directly from state activities and it is hard to identify which activity is party and which is state. Most alarmingly, the entire military apparatus of the People's Liberation Army belongs to the party and civilian control is exerted by the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, not by a government minister. The Defence Ministry does not exercise any control over the military but acts only as liaison with defence establishments in other countries. This beats the Nazi system of parallel military formations or the Soviet system of embedded parallel chain of command via political commissars - the party does more than mirror the army or guide the military: it actually owns it. Very critically, the party has over the decades positioned itself at the heart of Chinese life. While membership is counted in the millions, it is still a relatively small proportion of the population - just under 10% of adults. It used to be a requirement to have party membership to get ahead in your career in China but of late, the focus has been to get the best and the brightest of society to be part of the ruling elite, very much the model in Singapore. The objective is a body of ultra-capable, ultra-motivated, ultra-loyal who is always strategically placed at all key decision-making points in the machinery of government and the economy. to be mobilised at command. It is not as insidious as being mobilised as shock troopers like the SS - after, they already own the army - but to engage the public and influence public opinion. This makes disentangling the tentacles of the communist party from China all the more difficult.
Not that I am advocating armed rebellion: Chinese emperors have never hesitated to deploy all forces to ensure its continuity in power, with many layers in between insulating them from the consequences of their decrees - Beihaihe is big enough and secluded enough to mute any gunfire in Tiananmen Square. I am just illustrating that the regime is entrenched by culture, by mechanism and so far, by consent of the ruled. The party has successfully built its multi-layered defence for its continuing stay in power in a way no other government has.
The fear is that as the economy slows down and the Chinese Communist Party can no longer rely on personal economic advancement for its legitimacy, it may then have to turn to its other alternative legitimacy: restoration of national pride. That inflection point may be near. The first public event attended by all seven Standing Committee members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee after Xi Jinping's accession to power in 2012 was a visit to the "Road to Rejuvenation" exhibition at the National Museum, no less a potent indication of his agenda in power. At that visit, he was very explicit in his speech, later known as the "China Dream", contrasting the current capitalist development of China with its former backwardness and “humiliation” by foreign powers. Under Xi, redressing past humiliation is very much a part of policy.
Centralising powers into a single person's cult of personality as Xi has done is very much a slippery slope. Often, the autocrat eventually gets corrupted by power even after initial successes (think Mugabe, et al) or the machinery of absolute power is handed over to a successor less equipped to deal with the nuances and patronage demands to stay in power (think Maduro, Nicholas II, et al). We all still hope for a new China to emerge peacefully, democratic in nature and reconciled with its past to give up its dreams of restoration of their imagined past. But until, then the stability of the region will still depend on an oligarchy in Beidaihe imprisoned by China's long history and culture. In conclusion, I hope I have illustrated how much Chinese foreign policy is entrenched in its history and culture, conducted by a regime with deep-roots into the mechanism of power and legitimacy. Until something changes and the Chinese people find themselves at the raw end of a social contract deal, I cannot see mindset changed, and thus the foreign policy moderated. China's neighbours and the wider world will need to work out a way to either live the lives of tributary states again or to more adequately defend their Westphalia-style independence from servitude to a power with a sense of self-predestined glory.
I also hope that this series has helped to illuminate the fascinating story of and fascinating stories from Chinese culture and history. While it is not my intention to provide a complete account of the events mentioned in this series, I hope there is enough links for the reader to start their own journey of understanding and further delve into this very absorbing subject. Many of the topics touched on is worthy of an article on itself and I apologise for my lack of competency to explore them further or my inability to otherwise maintain the flow of this engaging story. I will be happy for anyone to contact me either on this site or directly to discuss, debate, dispute, disagree, correct or improve this topics talked about here
This is the last article of the series.
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