Asia Times: China's elite clearly split over foreign policy


	February 15, 2002	atimes.com

China

China's elite clearly split over foreign policy
By Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON - As China prepares to greet President George W Bush during his state visit to Beijing next week, the country's government and intellectual elite are deeply split about to deal with the world's only superpower and handle relations with the global community, experts on China-US relations say.

"A rising China will be a somewhat uncertain and perplexed China," said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University who has written extensively about the internal debates about China's role in the world. "Consistent and clear national strategies are still missing" from the national leadership. China's foreign policy, Shi added, is "inconsistent and fragmentary" and usually reflects the "vicissitudes of immediate world events" rather than a long-range view of the world. The degree to which members of the political elite differ on foreign policy is "unprecedented since the 1949 revolution" that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, he said.

Shi, who is widely known as an expert in Sino-US relations, spoke at a forum here on China sponsored by Japan's Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He said China's leadership is divided into two groups, each with a distinct view of the United States. The first group, which represents a majority, doubts that long-term accommodation with the United States is possible because it believes the United States "won't tolerate China as a world power, even in Asia". Said Shi, "It is highly suspicious of US military strategy in East Asia and its alliance relationships, particularly with Japan."

A second group, which is small but highly influential, hopes to reach an accommodation with Washington by 2010 and believes that, in the long run, US forces in Asia provide stability and are important in dealing with the dangers from countries holding weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism, he said. This faction is also the leading voice for integrating China with multilateral organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), which China joined last year.

The contrasting voices of the Chinese political leadership were on open display this week. On Monday, Li Peng, China's second most powerful leader, condemned what he called foreign interference in China around human rights, a reference to the constant complaints from Washington about Beijing's human-rights record. Beijing, he said, is "firmly opposed to interfering in other countries' internal affairs by using the human-rights issue". Li heads China's National People's Congress, or parliament. A few days later, Zeng Peiyan, director of China's State Development Planning Commission and the country's top economic planner, told the official news agency Xinhua that "non-economic factors", a euphemism for human rights, "won't interfere with the deep economic ties between China and the United States. As long as the two sides can get rid of the impact of non-economic factors," he said, "Sino-US economic cooperation will grow healthily and have bright prospects."

At present, the more moderate group appears to be ascendant. Since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, China has been cooperating closely with the United States in its war against terrorism. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, US and Chinese intelligence agencies have been sharing information, about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network and on radical Islamic groups in Asia.

Meanwhile, China has pledged US$150 million for the reconstruction of postwar Afghanistan and may provide troops to a United Nations peacekeeping force in Afghanistan after US troops are withdrawn. Chinese leaders have also held back criticism of the US military role in the Philippines and Japan's cooperation with US forces around Afghanistan.

All of this is a far cry from the tensions a year ago over a US spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island, or the near-rupture in relations when US warplanes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led war against Serbia two years ago.

But it is also at variance with Chinese public opinion, which Shi said is highly nationalistic and frequently anti-American. "There is widespread criticism of the government softness in dealing with the United States and Japan," he said. Such sentiment was much in evidence after the Belgrade bombing, when thousands of Chinese citizens demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Beijing, and even after September 11. After the terror attacks, student postings on electronic bulletin boards at Beijing University and Tsinghua University were highly critical of the United States in its dealings with developing countries.

Reporting from Beijing just after the attacks, Washington Post reporter John Pomfret quoted one student as saying "We've been bullied by America for too long!" and another expressing happiness "because I hate America". In response, one student wrote: "I weep for the cold-blooded Chinese."

The internal debates, Shi said, "reflect the complexity of the US and Chinese international positions and future prospects".

Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, called Shi "one of China's most independent minds on foreign policy".

One reason that Chinese public opinion is often at odds with official government positions, he said, is the lack of independent sources of information that could provide analysis and ideas that would call government policies into question. According to Pei, the government-controlled press and government propaganda are often bombastic toward Washington and "raise public expectations" that the government will take a hard line toward the United States. China's initial reaction to such events as the Belgrade bombing, he said, are frequently "quite clumsy". Pei added that when the propaganda bureaus "jump the gun", they force the leadership to "climb down from the limbs they have created".

Bates Gill, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, said Shi's comment that a rising China will be a "perplexed China" raises interesting questions that should be kept in mind as China becomes a "more influential and powerful player in the international system".

As China becomes a key player in institutions such as the WTO and Asian regional security forums, he said it is important for China's leaders to define what their country represents. "It is easy to say what China is against," he said. "Much work needs to be done to determine what China stands for."

During his February 21-22 visit to China, Bush will likely meet with Hu Jintao, China's vice president who is considered the leading candidate to succeed President Jiang Zemin. Bush leaves on Saturday for a six-day tour of China, Japan and South Korea.

(Inter Press Service)

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