china must leave its foreign policy to the experts

2/9/13 China must leave its foreign policy to the experts

www.scmp.com/print/comment/insight-opinion/article/1143257/china-must-leave-its-foreign-policy-experts 1/3

Comment › Insight & Opinion

China must leave its foreign policy to the experts

Lanxin Xiang

Lanxin Xiang says China’s diplomacy must be conducted by those with

strategic vision, rather than the technocrats who have fumbled over the past

decade, to set a policy that inspires trust

For years, China's leaders have been struggling to find a new concept to reset, if not redefine, theSino-US relationship. So far, they has come up with only vague ideas such as "peaceful rise" and,more recently, "a new type of international relations between major countries".

With the re-election of Barack Obama as US president and the transfer of power in China to a newgeneration, one of the biggest challenges facing Obama will be finding a strategic and economicrole for the United States in Asia that is acceptable to its strong network of allies and friendswithout alienating the Chinese.

The biggest challenge facing the new Chinese leadership in the region is how to repair relationswith China's neighbours, and its image. In the past decade, Chinese foreign policy cannot becalled a success, for two reasons.

First, the leadership has been obsessed with the search for an overarching concept to guideforeign policy, but no such concept works or even sticks. The early years of the Hu Jintao-WenJiabao regime witnessed the quick rise and fall of the idea of "peaceful rise". As soon as theAmericans countered with the "responsible stakeholder" concept, outlined by then deputysecretary of state Robert Zoellick, "peaceful rise" fizzled out, for China was hardly ready or willingto take up responsibilities as a great power. Indeed, China always claims it does not want to be agreat power.

Later, Hu came up with the concept of "the harmonious world". This time, the confusion was evenmore evident. The real world is far from harmonious. To extend a political slogan at home - "aharmonious society" - to the anarchical world system not only looked silly, but also seemed todemonstrate China's hidden agenda of "harmonising the world" through efforts to change the rulesof the game.

Besides, the leadership has failed to maintain domestic harmony, as widespread corruption andsocial tension have pushed China closer to revolution. Indeed, Chinese bloggers have ended upusing the phrase "to be harmonised" to indicate web censorship.

More shockingly, in the past three years, China has somehow managed to squander itsremarkable achievement in establishing good rapport with its neighbours, losing a reservoir of



goodwill that several generations of leaders had accumulated over more than six decades. The

goodwill was founded on the smart and effective "periphery policy" (zhoubian zhengce). Its lossprovided fertile ground for the US to successfully build a containment strategy in Asia and thePacific, at minimal diplomatic and material cost.

The diplomatic failure of the past 10 years has taught us at least one lesson: China should neverannounce any concept that is vague and confusing. For example, a concept such as "coreinterests", when applied unwisely to disputed territories, could trigger enormous suspicion ofChinese intentions.

Therefore, the latest Chinese proposal for a "new type of international relations between majorcountries" is viewed by Washington in two ways: first, the goal appears to be for China to take abigger share of power, but not responsibility; second, it may be a scheme to undermineWashington's new Asian strategy. Many in Washington fear that, rather than share power, Chinareally wants to unravel America's alliances in Asia.

The Chinese claim they want to foster "mutual respect" and "win-win" conditions, but it is notconvincing to talk only about the desired result without specifying how to achieve it. Worse, it isvague about what a "major country" is. If the Chinese instead use the concept of "great power",then the logic is comprehensible: China is proposing to the US to reset the bilateral relationship toavoid the traditional trap of great power rivalry, especially during the process of structural changeof the international system.

Great power status comes, above all, with responsibilities. But the official Chinese translation ofthe term "great power" is in total chaos. The foreign ministry describes a "new type of relationsbetween major countries"; Xinhua uses "big powers"; still others, even more absurdly, use "bigcountries". The reason for this chaos is clear: to avoid the connotations related to the modernChinese history of national humiliation.

Since the Opium war in the 19th century, "great power" has been translated as "power in match" (

lieqiang), which was exclusively used to describe the imperial powers that invaded and humiliatedChina. So, Beijing now chooses the more neutral term of "major country". But by doing so, it fails tocommunicate the right message to the Americans.

The right message should be: a rising China will not challenge and undermine the leadershipposition of the US, and will increasingly take upon itself more international duties. The preconditionis, of course, that the US stops its silly containment policy. As Xi Jinping's put it, "at a time whenpeople long for peace, stability and development, to deliberately give prominence to the militarysecurity agenda … is not really what most countries in the region hope to see".

Any overarching concept without a clear definition is subject to wrong and vicious interpretations.The new Chinese leadership differs from the previous ones in its education background, personalexperience and strategic outlook. Most of its members were trained in the social sciences andhumanities, unlike the engineers who have run China for the past 20 years, starting with JiangZemin .

As it turned out, the engineers were a perfect match for a foreign-policy elite dominated by



Topics: DiplomacyChinaJapanDiaoyu IslandsSouth China SeaSino-American Relations

language specialists, to whom instant results is the only measure of success. One should notexpect them to have a long-term strategic vision.

The new leadership should realise that, to avoid future diplomatic disasters, this type of "diplomat"must be pushed back to where they belong - sitting in the background and doing their technicalwork - and not be allowed to develop strategic plans. Indeed, the reform of China's foreign policyand national security structure is no less urgent an issue, for foreign policy is too important to beleft to language technicians.

Establishing a political appointee system to allow those who have the confidence of the topleaders to conduct foreign policy might be the most effective way out.

Lanxin Xiang is professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute of

International and Development Studies in Geneva

Source URL (retrieved on Feb 10th 2013, 5:11am): http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-

opinion/article/1143257/china-must-leave-its-foreign-policy-experts

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1143257/china-must-leave-its-foreign-policy-experts

china must leave its foreign policy to the experts

Documents