SPEAKING
FREELY China's soft power filling moral
void By David B Roberts
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
On any given day,
China announces various deals, exchanges,
missions, activities, exhibitions, events,
parties, celebrations and agreements between
itself and any given country.
In recent
weeks, Malta, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Malawi
have all been visited by a Chinese official in
some capacity. What, you might be asking, do these
countries have in common? The short answer is
nothing. Obviously, they need investment and/or
support in ventures, but that
is hardly a distinguishing feature, after all, who
doesn't? These countries are simply the latest
recipients of attention by Beijing and its
prodigious foreign police making machine.
No country is too small or seemingly too
insignificant for Beijing's attention in a
concerted campaign to make friends and - more
crucially - influence people. To this end, China
has been making vast steps forward in expanding
its soft power. This is a kind of power whereby -
crudely put - the country or actor in question
will do what China want them to do because they
see their goals as being shared by China, they
want to follow China's lead out of loyalty or a
belief that it will be to their longer term
benefit to do so. Soft power is conveyed in a
myriad of ways.
It can be through an
attentive ambassador including local business
leaders in meetings or conferences, the exporting
of a country's culture through music, theatre,
films or technology, thereby theoretically
creating a better understanding or empathy or it
can be the education of diplomats in Beijing -
getting them used to the ways of the Chinese and
making contacts that they may well find useful at
a later date. China have been pursuing just such
polices specifically but not particularly in East
Asia recently with considerable success.
The opposite of soft power is -
unsurprisingly - hard power, which is coercion of
one form or another: you don't follow China's lead
because you want to, but because there are
implicit or explicit military, economic or
diplomatic threats. While the use of hard power
can be effective, it is surely better to persuade
and finesse countries towards your goals and ends,
as opposed to being pressed into doing so,
inviting resentment and general antipathy.
But what are these policies and why does
China care if they have relations - good or bad -
with Sierra Leone or Malta? Most of the time,
China seeks resources of one kind or another. This
is clearly the case in Sierra Leone where the
Chinese have been harvesting timber for years. In
the Maltese, for example, case it would be more
accurate to say that the Chinese simply want -
like all countries - good relations with all
countries.
However, the Chinese also want
one other thing which is utterly central to all of
their politics and policies: international
recognition and corroboration of the one China
policy. Indeed, these sentiments of concordance
are often specifically included in the Xinhua
report of the meetings.
This is the crux
of their soft power policies. In return for
countries strict adherence to an avowed policy of
sovereignty and non-interference in other states'
affairs, China offer both unusual levels support
even of smaller countries as well as, crucially, a
reciprocated and fervent promise not to interfere
in their policies. This policy can thus lead China
to deal unusually closely with some of the world's
more repressive regimes.
There are two
distinct points of view to this. Firstly, from the
other country's perspective, China offers its help
without conditions. There are no human rights
complications, no promises for elections, and no
pressure for free press. Countries such as Sudan
and Zimbabwe appreciate China's unquestioning
support in return for arms, oil, trade or whatever
is on offer. These kinds of policies -
unsurprisingly - draw considerable international
criticism. The Chinese charge d'affairs in South
Africa recently defended China's policies of
engagement, trade and interactions with Sudan and
Zimbabwe by saying that China was "simply
protecting its own interests".
Others,
notably those from the West, find China's foreign
policy of interaction with pariah regimes anything
from unfortunate to disgraceful. There is,
strictly speaking, no right answer. While it is
easy for the West to harangue China for these
policies, they are not speaking from an unsullied
pulpit either, both historically and presently
speaking. Selling billions of dollars of arms to
various countries in the Middle East, all of whom
rate poorly to atrociously on the Freedom House
index, does not lend the West the high ground.
Nevertheless, entering such a kind of
Faustian bargain with Saudi Arabia is better than
the alternative of non-interaction. Take the
recent example of the multiple rape victim in
Saudi Arabia who was herself going to be flogged
as she was sitting in a car with an unrelated man.
The opprobrium that this created in the West was
translated into international pressure heaped on
the Saudi government and can surely be credited
with pressuring the Saudi King into pardoning the
women. Would this have happened if China had been
the major trade partner and the West not had any
kind of sway? Obviously not.
What this
goes to prove is that interaction is needed - but
it must be the right sort of interaction. There is
a fine line between exacerbating the problems
inherent in the countries in question by trading
with them, enriching and/or arming the elite, and
simply ignoring them. Simply leaving the states as
international pariahs will not work.
Into
this morally created void will walk China, shoring
up the regime with trade and reciprocal promises
of non-interference. One can only hope that
through interaction with the West and the exchange
of Western soft power, grandiose notions such as
democracy and human rights will filter down
however slowly and become embedded to help guard
against the seductive allure of a mechanical
foreign policy of naked self interest.
David B Roberts is currently
studying for his doctorate at the University of
Durham, UK in Sino-Saudi relations.
(Copyright 2008 David B Roberts.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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