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The changes in China - II

By P. S. Suryanarayana

Even while trying to checkmate the U.S. in its unilateral efforts to set a new agenda worldwide, Beijing wants a good equation with Washington to ensure peace in its geo-strategic neighbourhood.

CALL IT China's designer diplomacy or "independent foreign policy of peace". Beijing's worldview, under the new leaders, is centred on the United States. This aspect certainly does not connote a negative sense of China playing second fiddle to Washington. However, Beijing's diplomacy over the current Iraq war is more in line with its own enlightened interest than with any idea of an international united front against the U.S. On balance, the new Chinese leaders have drawn a fine line of pragmatism even while opposing the ongoing Iraq war. A relevant poser is not whether the present "fourth generation" of Chinese leaders has had little time to go beyond the vision-line of the previous generation. Jiang Zemin, whose influence as Beijing's chief foreign policy designer is still conspicuous, has so far been the greatest practitioner of realpolitik on China's external front since the beginning of the Mao era in 1949. The plain logic today is that a U.S.-friendly foreign policy, or more precisely a line that is not intrinsically hostile to Washington in every respect, is in the best interest of China. Even while trying to checkmate the U.S. in its unilateral efforts to set a new agenda worldwide, Beijing wants a good equation with Washington to ensure peace in its geo-strategic neighbourhood.

China lost no time in urging the U.S., as decisively as possible, to call off its military offensive against Iraq as the campaign began on March 20China's explicit peace call did not, however, mask the complex considerations it contended with before the U.S. shocked the moral conscience of almost the entire world. China had, during the pre-war phase, drawn a fine line across the shifting sands of war-and-peace diplomacy as regards the Iraq question in the United Nations Security Council. Unlike Russia and France, China did not quite tease and test the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The U.S.-U.K. "coalition" had sought an explicit war mandate from the U.N. even while maintaining that there was no need for a new resolution as the legal basis for a planned military strike (as it then was). Significantly, during the pre-war period, China's general refrain, too, was that there was no need for a new proposal to supersede the Council's resolution 1441. Adopted with the unanimous support of China and others, the resolution consisted of elaborate dos and don'ts that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was mandated to follow in the context of a reinvigorated weapons inspection in his country under U.N. auspices. In the end, the U.S.-U.K. "axis of war", too, came up with the theory that no new U.N. mandate was, after all, required ab initio for any military strike against Iraq.

The question, therefore, is whether the congruence of China's pre-war position and the eventual stand adopted by the U.S.-U.K. team would indeed place all of them in the same league. The answer, surely, is an emphatic `no' because of a major nuance in China's position. Responding to a question from The Hindu, Kong Quan, Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the current U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq is "not in conformity with resolution 1441". This should set China's record straight. It has implicitly indicated that resolution 1441 did not at all authorise the use of military force against Iraq. This clearly separates China from the U.S., the original view of which was that the provision for "serious consequences", spelt out in that document, could be seen as a war mandate, if Mr. Hussein were to refuse to disarm Iraq of its suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Authoritative Chinese sources told this correspondent that Beijing's pre-war stance was entirely traceable to the complexities of an uncertain international situation. Seasoned Chinese diplomats such as Liu Jinfeng and others have underlined that Beijing's "independent foreign policy of peace and development" should be read primarily as an agenda of "friendly" relations with "peace-loving countries". Given that a warring nation such as the U.S. would not necessarily forfeit all claims to being a "peace-loving country" in all circumstances, China's position is rich in subtleties. Opinion-makers with links to the Chinese establishment, such as Wang Hongwei and others, are of the view that Beijing had made the right strategic choice of not seeking to form a futile united front against the U.S., a "hyper-power", in the pre-war period. The inevitable "negative consequences" of the current U.S.-led war in Iraq would indeed hold a "few lessons" for Washington in the long run, it is said. In fact, China did not openly announce whether or not it would veto, or perhaps abstain from voting on, Washington's pre-war moves, finally aborted though, to arm itself with an explicit U.N. mandate for war against Iraq. Beijing was eager to keep all its options open, including an abstention in particular, until the political end-game of the pre-war period could be played out before the U.S. would inexorably strike against Iraq.

For Beijing, Iraq is an important case study of how Washington wants to toy with the world and, in terms of international energy security issues including Beijing's own concerns in this sphere. More important, Wang Jisi and other strategic analysts have, at different times, drawn attention to China's efforts to promote "pragmatic nationalism" by seeking "a new role in world affairs" since the end of the Cold War. Beijing's main objective in the present context is to keep the U.S. guessing in East Asia, China's natural domain. Japan, China's competitor in East Asia, remains a steadfast strategic ally of the U.S. Not surprisingly, in this regional situation, China tends to annoy the U.S. by allowing North Korea to challenge Washington on issues concerning the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. While the U.S. may regard Beijing's action as a deliberate ploy, at least one Chinese diplomat has spoken about the challenges of dealing with a "mysterious" North Korea.

India, which lies in China's other neighbourhood of South Asia, is of some pivotal importance to Beijing as it braces for strategic encounters with the U.S. at this stage. In a purely bilateral idiom, without any reference to the calculations of and about third countries, India's Ambassador to China, Shiv Shankar Menon, says that New Delhi and Beijing have decisively moved towards a comprehensive dialogue on a wide range of issues that include and go beyond the old controversies. As for China's global profile, Western Sinologists such as Andrew J. Nathan have argued, in the past, that it played the role of a "swing player" in the "strategic triangle" between 1972 and 1989, last phase of the Cold War. The "triangle" consisted of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union besides China itself, while the "swing player" could help one or the other superpower of that period tilt the balance of forces within the "triangle". Given the present subtleties of China's foreign policy, a puzzle that the old and new Sinologists are struggling to decode is whether Beijing will once again want to play a "swing" role — this time, in reshaping the world after the current Iraq war.

Mao, in his revolutionary fervour of the 1950s, maintained that the U.S. could not annihilate China. By the second half of the 1990s, Mr. Jiang gave a definitive thrust to Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao legacy by opening the way for a substantive engagement with the U.S. The anti-terror factor and the Iraq puzzle, besides the North Korean issue, will now define the ongoing China-U.S. paradigm shift.

(Concluded)

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The changes in China - I

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Stories in this Section

• Stamping out dissent
• In Chechnya, a welcome fallout
• Why dissent fails
• The changes in China - II
• War termination
• Baghdad... the gift of God
• Indifference to war
• Indefensible
• Demolition move
• Posture cannot be policy

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