[Salon] The China guessing game




The China guessing game


EAF editors

As good a sign as any of the global uncertainty about China is that even as it has emerged as the largest economic and military power in its own region — and, potentially, a rival to the United States as a global superpower — there remains an active, even frenzied, market for books, op-eds, podcasts and essays trying to answer the same question: what exactly does China want in, and for, the world?

Would it be happy to enjoy regional pre-eminence in a ‘multipolar’ international system? Is acceptance as a peer in a US international order the goal? Or does China aim at wholesale rewriting of that order on terms favourable to itself — subordinating even the United States under Sino-centric dominance?

Beijing’s official pronouncements are parsimonious on its grand strategy, relying instead on slogans like ‘win-win cooperation’ and humankind’s ‘shared destiny’. The opacity surrounding China’s actual grand strategy aids the tendency of national security hawks in the West to see each move by a Chinese diplomat, coast guard boat or state-owned enterprise as part of a diabolical push for regional and even global domination.

As one of China’s most authoritative scholars of international affairs, Jia Qingguo, argues in this week’s lead article, the worst fears of many in the West, particularly the United States, about what China’s rise spells for the world are not only inaccurate, but might be imperilling the possibility of peaceful coexistence between the United States and China. ‘[I]f viewed from within China’, Jia writes, ‘the so-called “China threat” has little to do with China’s actual intentions or behaviour. Instead, it reflects Western — particularly US — perceptions, anxieties and political considerations’.

For Westerners, Jia reckons, ‘China’s rapid rise’ at the expense of ‘the long-standing dominance of the West … provokes a sense of strategic and ideological insecurity’ that manifests in a narrative of threat and the purported necessity of re-gearing economic and security policy around competing with, confronting and containing China. But ‘[f]raming China as a predetermined adversary risks transforming a complex but manageable relationship into an outright confrontation’.

Agree or not, this perspective reflects a broadly held view among the Chinese elite — that China has been cast as a revisionist spoiler, when in fact it respects the fundamentals of the US-created international system while shaping it in a direction more amenable to the developmentalist ambitions — and more illiberal political systems — of many fellow members of the Global South.

Jia argues that ‘pragmatic, confidence-building measures are needed to foster mutual understanding’, and that ‘Western countries, especially the United States, should respond by expanding diplomatic channels, promoting educational and cultural exchange and deepening economic partnerships’.

Yet in key countries like the United States (and for that matter in Australia) the foundations for that understanding are eroding. China studies is one of many academic fields under pressure from declining public encouragement, funding and enrolments. A political environment in China that has become unconducive to fieldwork-based research by foreign scholars compounds the problem.

Informal channels of dialogue — whether through think tanks, cultural institutions or professional networks — have atrophied under the combined weight of political suspicion, travel restrictions and nationalist sentiment on both sides. In an attempt to counter growing Chinese influence — both real and perceived — many Western governments have become more like China’s and take a paranoid outlook towards bilateral scholarly and civil society contact.

Unless these trends are reversed, policy debates in both China and the United States risk becoming echo chambers, driven more by deductive reasoning from doubtful premises rather than the fine-grained understanding of the ideological, political, social and economic drivers of foreign policy that real expertise unlocks.

US higher education policy under the Trump administration will remain a disaster zone for the time being. But there is no excuse for other Western governments — especially Australia — not to reinvest in China studies and exchanges as part of a broader strategy of rehabilitating Asian studies in their universities.

More academic exchange is just one element of a broader reinvigoration of expert and civil society dialogue, but it will be particularly useful in helping drive home the point to Chinese experts about how their country’s actions are perceived — not through the lens of propaganda or hostility, but from informed counterparts engaging in good faith dialogue.

Exposure to critical perspectives from abroad — even, and especially, from those arguing for more constructive ties with Beijing — may help Chinese thinkers grasp that the threat narrative in Western capitals is not only a product of conspiratorial hawkish paranoia, but also a response to Beijing’s own policy choices, including the restrictions on its own citizens’ engagement with the rest of the world.

Xi-era recentralisation notwithstanding, China remains a fragmented and complex institutional and political landscape. Its foreign policy is shaped by a varied mix of national and local priorities, public and private interests, strategic and commercial goals.

If Western governments are to develop grounded and effective responses to China’s rise that take up the opportunities for constructive engagement and cooperation while mitigating the security risks arising from its growing strategic heft, then deeper understanding of Chinese perspectives — historical, ideological and institutional — is indispensable to the effort.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Law, Policy and Governance, The Australian National University.

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Jia Qingguo

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