Page 2 of 2 The hard facts on 'soft
power' By Axel Berkofsky
criticism of human-rights violations and
political oppression in countries China is doing
business in.
Awarding Zimbabwe's dictator
Robert Mugabe an honorary professorship at the
China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing in
2005 and signing economic-cooperation agreements
with Uzbekistan a few days after the country's
Interior Ministry fired into the crowd of peaceful
demonstrators in May 2005 are
infamous cases in point.
Beijing's recent decision to appoint a
senior diplomat as special Africa envoy with a
focus on the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, on the other
hand seems to point to a (partial) change of heart
of China's insistence on not meddling in other
countries' genocides.
To be sure, China's
decision to deal with the Darfur crisis beyond
providing Khartoum with weapons despite a United
Nations arms embargo is not the result of a
voluntary change of policy to help end the
government-induced killing in Darfur. Rather,
international pressure, including the US Congress,
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and
others labeling the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics
the "genocide games", made Beijing reconsider its
strategy of seeing no evil in Darfur.
Initially, of course, Beijing reacted with
fury to the criticism and "interference" in its
affairs, but then caved in as the "genocide games"
label threatened to have a lasting negative impact
on its determination and ability to stage the
"best Olympic Games ever".
However, it
remains to be seen whether China's Africa envoy
and his masters in Beijing will really put
effective and visible pressure on a government
that is selling 60% of its oil to China. Either
way, this month Beijing announced that it was
dispatching a 275-strong team of military
engineers to Sudan to join a UN peacekeeping
mission set to begin operating in Darfur this
year.
No time to fight, Beijing
says China does not have time for war,
claims the "inventor" of China's "peaceful rise"
theory, Zheng Bijian, chairman of the China Reform
Forum. Economic and social development, Zheng told
this correspondent in Beijing, is China's main and
indeed only priority in years and decades ahead.
That sounds reassuring on paper, but
"rising peacefully" does not keep Beijing from
launching the occasional military threat toward
Taiwan, warning Taipei not to declare formal
independence unless it wants to be "reunified"
with the mainland by force.
The Taiwan
question aside, China's diplomats and politicians
are in charm-offensive mode wherever they speak
and travel to these days, reading from pre-written
scripts that China is striving for the
establishment of a "harmonious and peaceful
international society".
Western (until now
mainly US) concerns about China's rapidly rising
defense budget, on the other hand, are typically
dismissed as "alarmist". More than 30% of the
annual rise in defense spending, Beijing
maintains, is spent on salary increases, as its
soldiers would otherwise look for more lucrative
jobs in China's emerging private business sector.
"My salary was raised by 50% last year," a
Chinese navy officer told Asia Times Online off
the record and paid the bill for the beer in a
Beijing bar.
Analysts widely agree that
China's economic and military rise, peaceful or
not, will increasingly challenge US economic and
security interests in East Asia.
That is
hard to argue with, but Washington has stationed
100,000 troops in the region and China is still,
despite its rising defense budget, nowhere near
challenging the US militarily, in East Asia or
elsewhere.
Washington going too soft on
China and engaging Beijing on a come-what-may
basis is the "real" problem, according to Los
Angeles Times journalist James Mann. US political
leaders, he argues in his very recently published
book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders
Explain Away Chinese Repression, [1] are in a
state of denial with regard to current China
policies.
The US engagement course, Mann
argues in a book that will probably not win him
many friends among China's policymakers, has not
reached its goal of making China less autocratic
and more democratic. Political and economic
engagement, he writes, did not trigger the
introduction of political reform beyond the
experimental introduction of semi-democratic
elections on the village level, "supervised" by
China's Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Maybe
not, but one should not be blamed for trying, and
engaging China as opposed to containing it is
certainly also the preferred option for US
multinationals making profits in that country.
Business over principle, and not only in
China.
Note 1. For a
review of The China Fantasy, see The third way for China,
Asia Times Online, March 17.
Dr Axel
Berkofsky is associate policy analyst at the
Brussels-based European Policy Center and adjunct
professor at the University of Milan. The views
expressed here are the author's alone.
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