"China stands up, again."
And speaks to our century.
6 MARCH—Wow. The Chinese have certainly had a lot to say for themselves lately. In the course of a couple of weeks the Foreign Ministry has made public a set of three documents—position papers, if you like—that effectively announce Beijing’s intention to assume a leading role in geopolitics and multilateral diplomacy. For once we can agree with President Joey Biden’s take on global affairs: China has accumulated very considerable power to reshape the world order. And this, we are now on notice, is precisely what it proposes to do in concert with as many other nations as will join in the effort.
Asserting itself as a major presence in global politics is something new for the People’s Republic. While it runs the world’s largest or second-largest economy, depending on how you count, in its reformist period it has limited its global presence to development undertakings—the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—while confining its diplomatic exertions to the Pacific region.
This is what is now changing. What you think of these latest statements of intent will depend on what you think of China. We will all do well in any case to listen as China raises its voice in, let’s say, a 21st century register.
With what velocity the world turns, I have to marvel. New and enhanced South–South partnerships and alliances, increasingly dense economic relations among non–Western nations, the expansion of multilateral organizations such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the SCO, the measurable rise in anti-imperialist sentiment everywhere other than in the West, and now China’s design for a new world order: Things I used to think would occur decades hence, if in my lifetime, unroll before our eyes.
The first of the Foreign Ministry’s communiqués, made public on February 20, is without question the sharpest and harshest. “U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils” is a piss-and-vinegar attack on America’s conduct abroad over the past seven and some decades. “Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War,” it begins, “the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.” What follows is 4,000 words of historically informed vitriol.
One day later the Foreign Ministry issued “The Global Security Initiative Concept Paper.” It is a 180–degree turn in tone from the encyclopedic critique of U.S. hegemony. It is as if, Beijing’s bile out of it system, it will now turn its attention to constructive contributions to a new world order. If the anti-imperial paper looked back, the global security document looks resolutely forward with plenty of uplift. From the third paragraph of the introductory section:
This is an era rife with challenges. It is also one brimming with hope. We are convinced that the historical trends of peace, development and win-win cooperation are unstoppable. Upholding world peace and security and promoting global development and prosperity should be the common pursuit of all countries.
Three days after putting out “Global Security,” the ministry made public the Ukraine “peace plan” Wang Yi, Beijing’s senior foreign affairs man, first mentioned at the Munich Security Conference a short time earlier. This is the only one of these three documents to get any attention in the Western press. It begins, “Universally recognized international law, including the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, must be strictly observed.” This is wholly in keeping with numerous other statements Beijing has made over the past year. The ministry’s evident intent is to apply the principle to the specific case of Ukraine.
“China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” seems to have left a lot of people disappointed: Not enough how-to, critics have complained. There is a dearth of detail, it is true, but let’s read the title a second time together. Beijing’s purpose is not to suggest what to do about Mariupol or where postwar lines should be drawn on maps. That would amount to the kind of interference in others’ affairs China has stood against since the 1949 Revolution. It is to state where Beijing stands on Ukraine after endless speculation among U.S. officials and in U.S. media that China disapproves and is distancing itself from Russia, or China is drawing closer to Russia and may begin to supply ammunition, or what have you in between.
It is impossible to imagine publication of these three documents, and the sequence in which they were made public, was other than carefully coordinated. China’s diplomatic history extends at least to the Qin Dynasty in the 3rd century B.C. In matters of statecraft, not much of what Beijing does is by accident or coincidence. Assuming very safely we are meant to read these three Foreign Ministry statements together, and I would say in the order the ministry made them public, what is Beijing trying to say?
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“U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils” is a thorough, carefully organized inventory of Washington’s imperial conduct, evidently written by one or more ministry officials who has or have done considerable reading and homework. While it is focused on the decades since the 1945 victories in Europe and the Pacific, in its indictment of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean it reaches back to the earliest decades of our republic. For a taste of the tone, this from the opening section:
In 1823, the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine. While touting an “America for the Americans,” what it truly wanted was an “America for the United States.” Since then, the policies of successive U.S. governments toward Latin America and the Caribbean Region have been riddled with political interference, military intervention and regime subversion.
The ministry then divides its analysis into five sections. “Political Hegemony” is followed by “Military Hegemony—Wanton Use of Force,” “Economic Hegemony—Looting and Exploitation,” “Technological Hegemony—Monopoly and Suppression,” an especially insightful text detailing how the U.S. subverts the advances of others as its own competitiveness declines, and “Cultural Hegemony—Spreading False Narratives,” which I also found especially pertinent in our age of war by information and imagery.
There are some errors of judgment to be noted. “The United States also interfered in the internal affairs of the Philippines,” the document states, “ousting President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 and President Joseph Estrada in 2001 through the so-called ‘People Power Revolutions.’” No, I would say. The ministry has the A.C.’s and the D.C.’s mixed up. The People Power movement that deposed Marcos was ground-up, unmistakably, and Marcos was still Washington’s man. I did not detect any kind of “color revolution” subterfuge in Manila at the time. I still recall the moment when, late in the Marcos days when the trouble had started, George H.W. Bush disembarked at Manila Airport and stated on the tarmac, “Mr. President, we love your enduring commitment to democracy.”
In my read, this document arose directly out of the diplomatic debacle two years ago this month, when Wang Yi met Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan at an Anchorage hotel and the secretary of state and national security adviser made it clear that the new administration had no intention of taking China seriously as an equal partner in any sphere. It was then, as I argued at the time and severally since, that Beijing made up its mind there was simply no working with the Americans. That occasion marked an abrupt, fundamental turn. “U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils” was thus a long while coming.
A question arises. If Beijing now runs down the history of U.S. imperial conduct going back 200 years, why did it see any mileage in working with Washington in the years prior to March 2021? Hmmm. I have no certain answer, so hmmm it remains.
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I do not want to make too much of the Anchorage disaster, but I don’t want to make too little of it, either. In my estimation, Anchorage was not the genesis of China’s now-declared intention to take a leading role in global politics and diplomacy, but it concentrated many minds in Beijing and accelerated the PRC’s tilt in the direction it is now determined to take.
To put this point another way, I question whether the Foreign Ministry would have issued its “Global Security Initiative” prior to Anchorage. There still seemed some chance, real or hoped-for, that the Biden administration would step back from the vicious animosities Mike Pompeo, as Trump’s secretary of state, introduced into Sino–US relations. Biden’s people didn’t, they stepped further forward into them, and now there’s no chance China will step back from its proposals in this, the second of its three recent releases.
This document is comprised of five “Core concepts and Principles,” 20 “Priorities of Cooperation,” and five “Platforms and Mechanisms of Cooperation.” The first of these sections is cast in terms of commitments and reads more or less out of the Five Principles of nonalignment I considered in a previous column: “Stay committed to the vision of a common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security,” “Stay committed to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries,” stay committed to the terms of the U.N. Charter, and so on.
The “Priorities” section consists of a comprehensive list of issues requiring bilateral or multilateral cooperation: peacekeeping operations, strengthening regional organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a Middle East peace plan, the climate crisis, reviving the U.N. as the convocation it was meant to be before the U.S. effectively commandeered it. The “Platforms” section is a list of where all these things are to get done. These include “the General Assembly, relevant U.N. Committees, the Security Council,” the BRICS and the SCO, and various other fora about which not much is ever written—the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, the “China + Central Asia mechanism,” the China–Horn of Africa Peace, Governance and Development Conference, the Middle East Security Forum, the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, and so on.
It is a technocrat’s banquet, this section, but it gives a sense of the fiber of the new world order, and good enough we learn how to take the notion down from pure abstraction. It will require a lot of work, we are reminded.
There are two items in the “Core Concepts” section, with its “stay committed” clauses, that should be considered carefully. These are “Stay committed to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously” and “Stay committed to peacefully resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation.” This is Chinese diplomacy at its most nuanced. In my read they are both indirect references to the Ukraine crisis and hint of the subtleties to come in the third of the ministry’s releases, the 12–point peace plan.
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I do not doubt for a second that there have been some… let’s say involved exchanges between Beijing and Moscow since the Russian intervention a year ago. China, with a very long history of incursions, border violations, and the like, is hypersensitively jealous of its territorial integrity and takes the principle of noninterference as if it were chiseled in granite. This is why Hong Kong became a hot-button question once the National Endowment for Democracy and other “civil society” groups began causing as much trouble as they could in the former British colony.
There is nothing too complicated in the 12–point plan presented in “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis,” and nothing too surprising, either, for those who have followed Chinese thinking since Anchorage.
The first point, “Respecting the sovereignty of all countries,” is a classic example of Chinese diplomacy at its most refined. It may seem as if Beijing condemns the Russian intervention—a reading I am sure the authors of this document intended to encourage—but no condemnation is made explicit. The rest of this clause invokes “basic norms governing international relations,” “international fairness and justice,” and “equal and uniform application of international law.” “Double standards must be rejected,” this fulsome paragraph concludes. Think for a moment what China means when it includes such phrases in a Ukraine peace plan.
These 88 words may seem impossibly subtle—subtle to the point of coyness—but they are the crux of this third document and are as clear a statement of China’s position on Ukraine as we are likely to get. “Regrettable but necessary” has been my view of Russia’s intervention from the first. As I read the peace plan it is Beijing’s, too.
There is an important corollary point here we ought not miss. One unstated point China intends to make in this document, and specifically in the phrases just quoted, is that the U.S. will not get away with its ridiculous fiction that Russia’s intervention was “unprovoked.” American propagandists can erase as much of this war’s context as they like, and carry on pretending America and its NATO allies did nothing to warrant Moscow’s decision to act. They may succeed in fooling most Americans all of the time, to borrow and bend Lincoln’s mot, but their chicanery on this point will never pass for the rest of the world.
Russia’s incessantly stated security concerns, to put this point another way, must be recognized if an enduring settlement is to be achieved. This is China’s point. Is it a “pro–Russian position,” as Western officials and media have it? This kind of foolishness gets boring after a time, but bored we will have to be.
“China’s peace plan implicitly presents the U.S. as a warmonger and NATO as the tool it uses to make an awful war last longer and cost more,” Ian Bremmer, a prominent voice in the neoliberal choir, wrote in a recent essay for TIME. “It also allows Xi to interact with Putin—and even to visit Moscow in coming months—as a mediator rather than as an ally of the man who ordered the invasion.”
Well, yes, and yes. Is there some argument about Washington’s warmongering and NATO as its cat’s paw? People such as Bremmer insists on pretending there is, which is why they are so boring.
Cease hostilities, drop the sanctions regime, restart talks, address the obvious humanitarian crisis, protect Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, get going on reconstruction plans: The rest of the peace plan is along these lines. There is nothing warlike or surreptitiously favorable to Russia in this document. I rate the Foreign Ministry highly for navigating craftily through a choppy sea of complexities and coming out right: Stop the war, address its causes and the interests of all sides in a negotiated peace.
If there is a thread running through all three of these recent documents, I would describe it as alarm: Beijing’s subtext is its mounting concern that the world order as it now (dys)functions is running out of control. Maybe it is this perception, shared by many other nations, that accounts for the speed with which an order intended to replace our reigning disorder comes to make itself heard.
https://thescrum.substack.com/p/china-stands-up-again