Beijing laces up the foreign-policy
gloves By Willy Lam
Daunting challenges call for extraordinary
responses. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
administration has found itself on the defensive
particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. China's
sovereignty spats in the South China Sea with
several Southeast Asian states came to a head in a
prolonged naval standoff with the Philippines over
the Scarborough Shoal (also known as the Huangyan
islet). Tension with Vietnam - another disputant
to China's claims over South China Sea
islands-also remains high. Japan and India, both
of which also have territorial rows with China,
have boosted military ties with the Philippines
and Vietnam.
Moreover, US Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta announced at the annual
Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore in early June
that the Pentagon would
by 2020 base as much as 60% of its naval capacity
- including six aircraft carrier battle groups -
in the Asia-Pacific theater. This seemed to be a
substantiation of the Asian "pivot" that President
Barack Obama unveiled with much fanfare early this
year.
These developments have apparently
prompted Beijing's foreign policy establishment to
exacerbate the aggressive tactics in the
diplomatic and security arenas that it first
started last year.
In theory, senior party
and government cadres have not abandoned late
patriarch Deng Xiaoping's famous foreign-policy
dictum of the early 1990s: "Take a low profile and
never take the lead." A rising number of
influential academic and military advisers to
Beijing have argued that due to China's
fast-rising quasi-superpower status - and the
intensification of the country's competition with
the United States and its Asian allies - the "low
profile" approach has become all but obsolete.
According to widely published defense theorist
Yang Yi, "it is no longer possible for China to
keep a low profile".
"When any country
infringes upon our nation's security and
interests, we must stage a resolute self-defense,"
Rear Admiral Yang told Xinhua News Agency in an
interview. "Counter-attack measures [taken by
Beijing] should be 'of short duration, low cost
and efficient' - and leave no room for ambiguity
or [undesirable] after-effects". The usually
hawkish Global Times, which is a subsidiary of the
People's Daily, said it all when it editorialized
that for China to safeguard its national
interests, "we must dare to defend our principles
and have the courage to confront multiple
countries simultaneously".
Indeed,
Beijing's immediate reaction to the Panetta
statement was hardly in congruence with Deng's
"take a low profile" mantra. The head of the
Chinese delegation to the Shangri-La Dialogue,
Lieutenant General Ren Haiquan, took a tough line
in response to the Pentagon's plans to boost its
naval presence in Asia. "We take the worst-case
scenarios into consideration," said Ren, who is
Deputy Commandant of the Academy of Military
Science. Ren added "Once Chinese interests are
hurt, our retaliatory measures will be
terrifying".
At the same time, a number of
military commentators in the official Chinese
media have made thinly veiled threats about using
military means to settle diplomatic flaps. Major
General Luo Yuan, a popular media commentator, has
reiterated the People's Liberation Army's
readiness to "teach the Philippines a lesson". Luo
blamed nationalistic elements inside and outside
the Philippine government for inflaming relations
with China. "If the Philippines cannot rein in
their folks, let us discipline them," he wrote
last month. Regarding the alleged provocations of
the Philippine navy, Luo warned "We have
repeatedly adopted a forbearing attitude-and we
have reached the limits of tolerance. There is no
more need to show further tolerance".
Emblematic of the more assertive stance
taken by Beijing is the so-called foreign policy
of core national interests - and, by extension,
the red line diplomacy. Put simply, this means
Beijing wants to draw "red lines" around
geographical locations deemed integral to the
country's "core national interests". If a foreign
power is perceived as having encroached upon these
red lines, Beijing reserves the right to retaliate
through military and other tough tactics.
Traditionally, Beijing's "core national interests"
merely referred to issues of national unity and
territorial integrity - for example, Taiwan, Tibet
and Xinjiang must never be allowed to secede from
the motherland.
Alarm bells were sounded
in Washington and several Asian capitals in March
2010 when two senior US officials were told by
Chinese cadres that Beijing regarded the South
China Sea as falling within the country's "core
national interests". In an official statement a
few months later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesman Qin Gang apparently tried to cool things
down by refraining from naming specific places
when he gave the official definition of China's
core interests. He said "Areas relating to
national sovereignty, security, territorial
integrity and developmental interests all belong
to China's core interests".
Given that
China's "developmental interests" may include
reliable supplies of oil and gas as well as
strategic minerals, Qin's definition could be
interpreted to encompass islets in the South China
Sea that are supposedly rich in hydrocarbons.
In the wake of the on-going crisis with
Manila - and Panetta's dramatic announcement -
Chinese theorists have been pushing the red line
policy with more gusto than ever. People's Daily
commentator Ding Gang cited the South China Sea as
a vital part of China's core national interests.
"We have to draw a set of lines [in the South
China Sea] for the United States so as to alert
the Americans regarding what it can do and what it
cannot," wrote Ding in the party mouthpiece. "The
Americans should also be made to be aware of its
hegemonic tendencies. This is not only necessary
but also beneficial to the Americans".
Senior cadres also have made more overt
references to the disputed Diaoyu archipelago
(also known as the Senkakus) in the East China Sea
as part and parcel of China's core interests.
While meeting Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko
Noda in Beijing last month, Premier Wen Jiabao
apparently complained about Tokyo's stance on the
Diaoyu islands as well as the Xinjiang Autonomous
Region. The official media quoted Wen as urging
Noda to "respect China's core interests and major
concerns".
The red line diplomacy also
includes penalizing a variety of countries whose
leaders have either met with the Dalai Lama or
allowed meetings of the World Uighur Congress,
which supports some form of Xinjiang independence,
to take place in their countries. Beijing has
halted a series of high-level exchanges with the
United Kingdom after Prime Minister David Cameron
held a "private meeting" with the Dalai Lama at
Saint Paul's Church in London last month.
This was reminiscent of the "punishments"
that Beijing had inflicted on countries including
Germany, France and the United States after their
leaders had met with the exiled Tibetan spiritual
leader. In almost all cases, however, Beijing has
"normalized" relations with countries penalized
due to the Dalai Lama factor after a decent
interval-at most, several months.
Equally
controversial has been Beijing's increasingly
frequent deployment of economic weapons to resolve
diplomatic differences. During the on-going
territorial confrontation with Manila, Beijing has
curtailed the importation of Philippine fruit and
agricultural produce. It also has called upon
Chinese tour groups to stop visiting the
Philippines.
This extraordinary gesture
was a further development of the CCP
administration's controversial "rare earth"
strategy, which was used to put pressure on Tokyo
in late 2010 after the captain of a Chinese
fishing junk was detained by Japanese coast guard
in the vicinity of the Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands.
Beijing also cut the number of Chinese tourists
visiting Japan. Earlier this year, Japan, the
United States and a number of other countries
filed a complaint in the World Trade Organization
(WTO) accusing Beijing of using artificial fiats
to cut down on the export of rare earth minerals,
which are an important component of a variety of
high-tech products. The WTO is pressing ahead with
investigations despite Beijing's vehement denial.
Until recently, Beijing had cautioned
against "mixing economics and politics" in China's
relations with foreign countries. At the height of
the anti-Japanese riots in 2005, nationalistic
Chinese demonstrators called for a boycott of
Japanese products. The firebrands also asked the
Ministry of Railways not to import Japanese
bullet-train technology.
Then-minister of
Commerce Bo Xilai, however, admonished the
nationalists to separate economic from political
and diplomatic issues. Bo indicated, in this
globalized economy, boycotting Japanese products
would end up hurting China.
He argued
"Boycotting products [of another country] will be
detrimental to the interests of the producers and
consumers of both countries ...This will hurt our
cooperation and [economic] development with other
countries." The minister added "we will protect
the legal interests of all foreign companies in
China, including those of Japanese enterprises".
Going further back, when Beijing had to make
annual applications to the US government for "most
favored nation status" in the 1990s, Chinese
officials invariably asked members of Congress who
criticized the nation's human rights records "to
separate politics from economics".
Other
instances of Beijing's controversial use of
economic power to score diplomatic points are seen
in its long-standing financial ties to rogue
states, including those that are the targets of
UN-mandated economic sanctions. Beijing not only
provides economic aid to North Korea, but also
trades with the Stalinist regime in contravention
of the UN embargo. The CCP also maintains close
investment and trading ties with Iran. Bilateral
trade was worth US$29.3 billion last year, up more
than tenfold from a decade ago. Beijing also has
been criticized for taking advantage of the
withdrawal of Western oil companies from Iran to
acquire oilfields and related resources there at
good prices.
It seems evident that
Beijing's bare-knuckled diplomacy has borne fruit
in individual cases. For example, the "rare earth"
strategy apparently played some role in Tokyo's
decision to release the captain caught in East
China Sea in late 2010. Additionally, Manila has
become less vociferous in its attacks on Beijing's
South China Sea policies in the wake of China's
economic pressure. Overall, Beijing's adoption of
hawkish and controversial tactics has hurt China's
global image - and its ability to win friends on
its periphery.
This concern seems to be
behind an article in the Global Times last week
entitled "Why Has China's Global Environment
Become More Severe?" In this thought-provoking
piece, Wang Jisi, a respected international
relations expert at Peking University, argued that
"while the global balance of powers has
demonstrated the trend of 'the East rising and the
West declining', China's international situation
has not improved". Among the numerous domestic and
foreign factors that Wang analyzed were Chinese
neighbors' reactions to the country's more
assertive power projection.
"In the course
of China's boosting its national defense
capability, its neighbors and the US not only cast
doubt on [Beijing's] peaceful-development
intentions but they also strengthen defensive
measures that target China, in addition to
coordinating their China-related strategies," Wang
wrote, "All these have put bigger pressure on
China's national security."
An equally
pertinent point, of course, is whether China's
global status - and its sense of diplomatic
security - may not have been enhanced if it had
refrained from using foreign policy tactics that
are deemed to run counter to well-established
international norms. The CCP leadership may want
to think twice before abandoning both the letter
and the spirit of Deng's "lie low" stratagem,
which signaled in an unequivocal manner the Middle
Kingdom's commitment to global diplomatic
conventions.
Dr Willy Wo-Lap Lam
is a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He
has worked in senior editorial positions in
international media including Asiaweek news
magazine, South China Morning Post and the
Asia-Pacific Headquarters of CNN. He is the author
of five books on China, including the recently
published Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao
Era: New Leaders, New Challenges. Lam is an
Adjunct Professor of China studies at Akita
International University, Japan, and at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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