SINOGRAPH The world won't wait for China to
change By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - Washington's aggressive pursuit
of containment of China and Beijing's difficulty
in launching major economic and political reforms
will likely prove an explosive mixture. Meanwhile,
Japan, India, and other Asian powers exploit the
logic of "two ovens".
The 18th Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party was to be the
springboard for economic and political renewal in
the world's second power. Many Chinese - and
others - hoped it would mark the beginning of a
new era of reform.
The main challenge was,
and remains, the fate of state-owned industries
(state-owned enterprises, SOEs), which are often
controlled or influenced by
top party leaders or their families. The reform
and even partial privatization of SOEs would on
the one hand promote growth and expand the
economic base of China with a view to better
distribution of wealth and consumption. On the
other, it could be accompanied by a gradual
opening to democratic competition in the political
system, which is still dominated by the
party-state.
Democracy and the rule of
law, albeit in a Chinese cloak, would give greater
guarantees primarily to private investors,
domestic and foreign. On the geopolitical level,
they would rein in the crisis of negative
propaganda coming from America, Europe, and
China's Asian neighbors - especially India, Japan,
and Vietnam - condemning the closed-off
authoritarian regime in Beijing and keeping China
under constant pressure.
But the harshness
of the political struggle that preceded and
accompanied the ascent of the new Chinese
communists leadership at the recent congress has
slowed the momentum of reformers. After outgoing
supreme leader Hu Jintao decided to leave all the
posts, including that of president of the
strategic Central Military Commission, the balance
found by the new secretary-general and the next
president, Xi Jinping, who seems open to reform,
must take into account the resistance of
conservatives.
So next to Xi and his
number-two, Li Keqiang, who have been installed at
the head of the government in the Politburo
Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of power,
there are five older members who could be more
inclined to conservatism than to accepting the
risks of the reforms. However, looking at the
whole Politburo, one sees also many new faces,
including Sun Zhencai and Hu Chunhua (born in
1963), who are meant to rise to the highest
offices of the party and the state in 2022, at the
end of the decade of Xi and Li. As for the Central
Committee's 205 members, 80% were born after 1950,
and nine after 1960.
Reading between the
lines of the very opaque mechanisms for forming
the leading groups of the CCP, for the next 10
years, the watchword will be "forward, with
judgment".
This could not happen without
addressing the core issues of the economic and
political system, but so far there has been no
clear indication of a sudden push in this
direction. Evidently, Beijing's leaders think they
have more time and do not want to accelerate
change, which threatens to jeopardize the delicate
balance of power within the Communist Party and
the People's Republic itself.
Conservatives might have forced the
reformists - by threats or against the backdrop of
the dramatic story of Bo Xilai and the other
scandals that followed, involving the Western
press and various parties' revelations against
former president Xi Jinping (a Bloomberg story) or
against former premier Wen Jiabao (a New York
Times story) or against president Hu Jintao's
former head of staff Ling Jihua - that this is not
the time for acceleration.
But the world
will be not waiting for the slow decision process
of next group of leaders, during the next 10
years. Indeed, a look at today's geopolitical
context in China should lead to courageous
decisions in the national interest. By moving the
horizon of democratic change - however undefined -
at least a decade, Beijing has left a long period
of time to Washington's hawks eager to paint China
as a rising dictatorship to be stopped.
By
using this time frame, the US could step up its
pressure against the rise of the challenge of a
rival power from a position of relative strength.
Because the United States has not resigned itself
to the prospect of a "Chinese Century," it could
do many things to slow economic growth and hamper
the geopolitical power of the People's Republic,
which for many Americans, even in the political
elite, still remains Red China.
Lonely
at the top Recently re-elected US President
Barack Obama has made progress in Asia, confirming
and emphasizing the movement of the center of
gravity of American strategic interests toward a
region whose other political center is the
somewhat lonely communist China. Obama, unlike the
Chinese, is in a hurry. At the beginning of his
first term, in 2009, Obama offered an olive branch
to Beijing, hoping to build some form of de facto
alliance with America's largest creditor and
competitor. His plan was substantiated in the
fascinating idea of formulating a Group of Two
(G2). A Sino-American pact could ruffle many
feathers in the world, but this offer received a
lukewarm, and as usual cautious reaction from
China.
The leaders of the Communist Party,
preparing for their leadership succession, did not
give reassuring answers to Obama's overtures. In
the end, Obama probably weighed the meaning of the
unstoppable rise of the Middle Kingdom to the
pinnacle of world power - just as the United
States was in the throes of one of the most
serious crises in its history, the 2008 financial
crisis - against significant consequences in terms
of credibility, image, and soft power.
Perhaps Obama did not offer the G2 with
enough clarity and force, perhaps the Chinese
leaders did not perceive the urgency of the G2
perspective, noting in 2009 how in the world may
global players had begun to distance themselves -
and not only rhetorically - from the former "only
superpower." The fact is that now the opportunity
has passed, and it will be difficult to reopen a
window for a deep US-China strategic
understanding.
The United States then
launched a strategy to contain China: the pivot to
Asia. It's about building an informal alliance
between China's neighbors and other Asian
countries in order to put pressure on Beijing and
to prevent China from creating a sphere of Chinese
influence.
In this context, Obama's trip
to Asia last November is a very clear signal, even
though it was not crowned a complete success. When
the US president, after visiting Thailand and the
newly rehabilitated (for geostrategic purposes)
Myanmar, traveled to Phnom Penh, the capital of
Cambodia, to attend a summit of ASEAN (the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations), he found
that the group of countries, essential in the
strategy to contain China, remains divided.
If countries such as Vietnam, the
Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia appear more
or less open to America's approach, others,
including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand
expressed considerable reservations. All countries
of the region, however, see in the Sino-American
rivalry the opportunity to practice the
traditional policy of "two ovens," taking
advantage of the offers both sides pledge to win
favors and to counter the influence of the other
side.
With its formidable military, the US
offers itself as the guarantor of last resort for
the safety of those countries, and it sides with
Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan
in disputes with China on strategic areas around
the South China Sea and in Eastern Europe. They
have some capital to use to support emerging Asia
on its way to full development.
China is
in a position symmetrically opposite: not only can
it not provide credible guarantees of protection,
but rather China is perceived as a potential
destabilizing geopolitical force, if not as an
aggressor. At the same time, the Chinese offer
substantial financial incentives to neighbors in
exchange for their willingness to make regional
agreements with Beijing that would create de facto
a buffer zone around China. The "double oven" is
even more true for Japan and India, the two other
giants of East Asia and South Asia, which both
have ongoing historical border disputes - and not
just near the cumbersome Chinese.
It must
be considered that the American approach to China
in the Asian region is still not comparable to
American efforts to contain the Soviet Union
during the Cold War. At that time, it was a
zero-sum game between two enemies who had no
economic relationship - or almost no relationship.
Now the two major economies of the world are
symbiotic, so the advantage of one helps the
other, and vice versa.
In contrast, a
strategy of strangulation of the
partner/competitor can be a refined form of
suicide. Obama's goal is not to blow up China, but
to guide and help manage the growth in economic
power and geopolitical sway over neighboring
countries. The intention is to prevent other
nations from ending up under the heel of Beijing,
and rather for China's rise to become heavily
conditioned by its neighbors and to curb its rise
to the pinnacle of world power.
All this,
to keep the comparison with the Cold War, would be
done with no money to launch a new Marshall Plan.
In the afterthoughts of some Pentagon strategists,
there is the prospect of a sort of North Atlantic
Treaty Organization among key anti-Chinese Asian
nations, a realistic approach to the region leads
to the conclusion that it is a chimera (the
precedent of SEATO [the South East Asia Treaty
Organization], put to bipolar use at the time of
the USSR, is not encouraging).
The
paradoxical outcome of US containment of China
could be the development of a number of new and
old Asian powers - India and Japan, but also
Vietnam and Indonesia - who could rise on the
shoulders of the two rivals' frictions thanks to
the policy of "two ovens". It could bring to the
fore nations much more independent and aggressive
than Washington (and perhaps Beijing) tends to
imagine. The result might be that to stem the
headlong rush of China, delaying it maybe a couple
of decades, the United States is setting a trap in
which they risk losing their remaining Asian
influence to a new crowd of aggressive powers. In
any case, it should be much less difficult to
manage a region of two than of five or six or
seven - as Russia is till in the region and always
very interested in its developments.
Are
there alternatives to Washington containing China?
Certainly, yes. The most promising would be an
agreement with the Chinese Communist Party, since
it is a leading force in the People's Republic.
The agreement could allow the two countries to
build a new form of bilateralism, this time not a
zero-sum game but something more or less
cooperative and competitive. Of course, returning
to the prospect of G2 after Beijing closed the
door in Obama's face is not an attractive option
for him. It would hardly be taken well by the
American public, even if the president has the
advantage of not having to be reelected.
To restore credibility to a new form of G2
in America, it could be suitable for the CCP to
present the proposal in a clear form. Here, too,
there may be strong resistance in the domestic
public opinion, with rising concerns about
reaching out to Americans as they seem to be
sinking in the quicksand of debt and the economic
crisis. In China you do not vote (yet), but with
each passing day public opinion becomes more
powerful and an increasingly influential voice,
which even the non-elected leaders must take into
account. They do not have their hands completely
free to determine the geopolitical strategies.
So if, as now seems likely, the G2 de
facto partnership between the US and the CCP, were
not to take shape the risk of a confrontation
between China and the United States would become
consistent. It would therefore create tension
threatening almost a return to the times of the
"Warring States." After several years of US
containment of China, if China were to end any
serious agreement with the US, say in five to 10,
to 20 years, the possibility of a war between two
nuclear powers could not at all be excluded.
The spark to ignite the war could be one
of those countries that is poised between American
and Chinese influence and that, having grown
thanks to the "two ovens" would feel able to
express without concern its exclusive and
aggressive nationalism which in turn could spark a
war between the two major powers. The thought
turns, first of all - but not only - to Korea,
where already in the 1950s American and Chinese
troops found themselves fighting on opposite
sides. Or to Vietnam, which at the time of the
Cold War fought and won against the United States
first, and then entered into two conflicts with
China - although the scope and effects are
incomparable.
The containment of the
Soviet Union in Asia was the premise of the
American victory in the Cold War. However, history
does not repeat itself, and this time the new
containment of China, along with the difficulty of
the Chinese Communist Party to reform the country
and open to the world, could be a step toward a
major war with unimaginable consequences for the
planet. Unless this deadlock is broken a by a
clear determination of the party to step up with
political reforms. This could be the true content
of Xi's trip to the south, emulating Deng's trip
to Shenzhen 20 years ago. It is a strong sign for
reforms, only we don't know how far reaching these
reforms will be.
(The Italian version of
this article version of this article is published
on a special issue of the Italian journal of
geopolitics LIMES, with contributions among others
by Zheng Bijian, Charles Freeman, Joseph DeTrani,
Liu Yawei, Gordon Chang, Robert Kapp, Fabio Mini).
Francesco Sisci is a columnist
for the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore and can be
reached at fsisci@gmail.com
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