President Joe Biden has so far maintained his predecessor’s tough China policy, which aims to limit China’s international power economically and politically.
In the US and Europe, China is widely recognized as an emerging star that threatens Western power.
But my research on the country suggests that China may no longer see itself that way.
China’s rise
In the three decades that I have studied and taught Chinese foreign policy, I have seen three discrete periods in China’s approach to international relations.
After the death of Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong in 1976, Mao’s successors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, instituted economic reforms that launched China on the path of phenomenal economic growth. The country rose from 11th to second place in the global GDP rankings between 1990 and 2020.
The prevailing view in Western capitals in the 1990s was that China’s economic transformations would inevitably result in a prosperous, peaceful and democratic country.
To ensure this outcome, the major economic powers were willing to accept China as a full member of their club of open market partnerships, and to allow it into international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and integrate it into world markets. The West wanted to bring it into this network of international political institutions set up after World War II to promote cooperation and peaceful conflict resolution.
And China was happy to join the club, at least in terms of trade and investment. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for foreign relations in the 1990s was to ‘hide abilities and time’, and to adopt a low-profile tao guang yang hui policy.
In the early 2000s, President Hu Jintao took some modest steps toward greater Chinese assertiveness on the world stage, by building China’s navy and launching a series of port projects in Pakistan and beyond. For the most part, however, Hu advocated a policy of ‘peaceful emergence’.
China’s dream
That changed when China’s current leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
Xi projected nationalism and power. His China will no longer take its time. Xi proclaimed the “China Dream” and regarded the country as a great power with increasing influence, not only in Asia but also worldwide.
Under Xi, China took a much more aggressive stance towards the world by worsening its military muscles in the South China Sea and elsewhere and linking diplomacy to major investment in infrastructure development in Latin America and Africa.
Over time, many Western foreign policy leaders, including Barack Obama, saw China as prone to overthrowing and not maintaining the economic order they created, and welcomed China enthusiastically.
In 2015, the US undertook a ‘strategic pivot’ in the direction of Asia and away from the Middle East, which has been Washington’s attention since 9/11.
In an effort to contain (or at least restrict) China, the US has strengthened alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, formed a coalition of countries in China’s environment, and defended cooperation with India, Australia and Japan increase.
US concerns
In October 2017, Xi confirmed Western fears at the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. He publicly stated his aim to move China to the “center” of world affairs.
Xi said China did not intend for global domination, but warned that no one “expects China to swallow anything that undermines its interests.” He also hinted that the rise of China would create a world order with ‘Chinese characteristics’.
In December 2017, an updated U.S. national security strategy officially declared China’s rise to a threat, citing intellectual property theft and the development of advanced weapons that could undermine America’s military advantage.
China against the world
But the China dream is not guaranteed. As President Xi told members of the Communist Party at a rally in January 2019, the country faces serious challenges.
Beijing faces an American coalition committed to resisting China’s economic, military and diplomatic power games in Asia. China also has rising debt, stagnant GDP growth rate and declining productivity.
Then there is China’s worrying demographic: the population is shrinking as well as getting old.
China’s population declined in 2018 for the first time since the deadly famine caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1960s. The Chinese Academy of Sciences predicts that if fertility continues to fall from the current rate of 1.6 children per woman to an estimated 1.3, China’s population would decline by about 50% by the end of this century.
China ended its policy of limiting families to one child in 2015, but the population is still skewed and allows fewer workers to support the growing number of elderly people.
These predictions within the Chinese Communist Party expressed concern that the country would ‘grow old before it gets rich’. This predicament can cause serious social unrest.
Xi and others in China’s communist leadership no longer project unbridled trust. Instead, they telegraph concerns that global leadership is slipping out of reach.
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Divergent views
These concerns are already fueling China’s foreign policy reform, which is leading to military action increasingly directed at neighboring India – where they are engaged in a territorial dispute in the Himalayas – and near Taiwan. China is also doubling its military efforts to assert its territorial rights on disputed islands in the South China Sea and curbing democracy in Hong Kong.
Xi has adopted a new international global diplomacy that is more actively undermining US interests abroad. Some call it ‘wolf-warrior diplomacy’, after two short films about Chinese special forces defeating American mercenaries in Africa and Asia.
This is the first time in six decades that China and the West have made such a fundamental difference in China’s global orbit.
The results can be destabilizing. If a weakened China feels threatened by Western restraint, it could double its nationalist exhibitions in India, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.
The international order after World War II, built to promote economic cooperation and avoid war, may not be able to withstand the stress of China’s growing challenges from within. A war between the West and China is still a remote possibility, but perhaps not as remote as it once seemed.
This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Andrew Latham, Macalester College.
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Andrew Latham does not work, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any applicable commitments outside of their academic appointment.