How China sees the world

By Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe

...In a widely read article in the most recent issue of The Washington Quarterly, David Shambaugh, a China expert at George Washington University, describes a rich and tumultuous internal foreign policy debate with at least seven discernible schools of thought.

“Many new voices and actors are now part of an unprecedentedly complex foreign-policy-making process,” Shambaugh writes. “No nation has had such an extensive, animated, and diverse domestic discourse about its roles as a rising major power as China has during the past decade.”

In the 1990s, the dominant factions in China’s policy debate espoused soft power and increasing involvement in global institutions like the United Nations. Today, Shambaugh finds that tougher, more hard-line schools of thought are on top – a consensus he describes as “truculent,” and pushing the nation “to toughen its policies and selectively throw China’s weight around.”

It’s not just America that views this turn in China with concern. In recent years, China has asserted that it has full sovereignty over the entire South China Sea, which many nations claim for use as a waterway, fishing ground, and potential field for natural gas and minerals. Last year, a group of neighboring countries, with America’s support, confronted China at an Association of South East Asian Nations meeting. That row sparked angry outbursts from Chinese officials: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in an enraged monologue.

At this hard end of the spectrum of Chinese thinking, Shambaugh sees groups he identifies as nativists and realists. Many of them see the international system as a conspiracy to suppress China, and they worry that the Communist Party’s embrace of the global economy could prove its undoing. The realists, whom Shambaugh considers the dominant group today, want China to assert itself aggressively, especially against the powers—including Britain and the United States—that they see as having historically worked against China’s interests.

More moderate schools of thought in China, he says, endorse China acting with more authority but focusing its policy attention on a few key relationships. Some Chinese specialists say Russia or the United States should take priority, while others argue that China should cast its lot with neighbors in Asia, or identify with the developing world.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, “selective multilateralists” and “globalists” buy into the idea that China will have to take on new responsibilities as its power grows, even if that means embracing international norms that limit China’s ability to maneuver on issues like Tibet, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. Some of these thinkers are still suspicious of international entanglements, but want China to be seen as contributing to the global system rather than behaving as a free rider. The most liberal globalists within China would like to see China concede some limits to its sovereignty and fully integrate with international institutions. The influence of these liberal schools, however, appears to have drastically shrunk since a peak in the 1990s...

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