China as a Diplomatic Actor
Remarks
to the American Academy of Diplomacy
Ambassador
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
DACOR
Bacon House,
Washington,
DC, 23 January 2015
I became interested in China a
bit over five decades ago. Back then,
with the notable exception of Zhou Enlai and a few people he’d mentored,
China’s diplomacy was all revolutionary bluster and bellyaching with no bottom
line. Since then the country has changed
so often and so much that our view of it has always lagged behind its
realities. Frequently it's had more to
do with our own head trips than with China itself. When China didn’t make much difference in
world affairs, imputing politically correct but factually dubious
characteristics to it and its diplomacy didn’t make much difference. Now it does.
So I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the remarkable
evolution of China as a diplomatic actor.
When I first encountered it,
China’s diplomacy reminded me of the “forlorn hope.” The forlorn hope is a military maneuver in
which a group of soldiers, usually volunteers, is assigned to sacrifice
themselves in an almost certainly fatal assault on a heavily defended position
so that a larger battle plan can go forward.
As a diplomatic version of it, consider Sino-British interactions in
August 1967.
Beijing was then in the midst of
the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
The office of the British chargé there had just been sacked and its
staff beaten by a mob of Red Guards. Her
Majesty’s Government responded by imposing restrictions on the movement of
China’s diplomats in London. China’s
diplomats there naturally reacted to this by taking up baseball bats and having
at the police outside their embassy.
In the ensuing scuffle, at least
one Chinese official – along with a bobby or two – was injured. True to the revolutionary spirit of the
times, Beijing immediately instructed its chargé in London to lodge a fiery
protest against British policy brutality.
He was sent an eight-page screed and told to declaim it in its entirety,
come hell or high water. Both his
instructions and the text were transmitted to him en clair, enabling the Brits to read them in advance.
And so it was that China’s
Chargé and an interpreter-colleague went to call on the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern
Department. In a change from usual
practice, they were not greeted as they arrived. Instead, a building guard ushered them to an
office from which all furniture other than a desk and chair had been
removed. A relatively junior British
official sat behind the desk as the two Chinese diplomats stood before it to
make their démarche.
After listening impassively for
a few minutes, the Brit got up, ducked through a door behind him, and
disappeared into a private office, leaving the Chinese chargé to read his
script to an empty chair – which he did without missing an ideogram as his
colleague put his rant into English.
When they’d got through about three-fifths of their text, a janitor with
a bucket and mop entered the room and began to mop the floor around them. As they finished, he suggested to the Chinese
that they leave and, bucket in hand and mop over shoulder, escorted them out of
the building.
Diplomacy is, of course, a
political performing art. In this farce, both parties played their parts with consummate skill. By doing so, they accomplished what is so
often the real rather than the ostensible purpose of diplomatic démarches –
staging a show of resolve to impress domestic politicians and pundits. British and Chinese decision-makers and
opinion-molders are not alone in their overriding interest in convincing their
compatriots of their toughness. Nor are
they in any respect unique in their lack of concern about the equally tough
reactions their posturing is bound to evoke from the foreigners against whom it
is directed.
A dozen years after the face-off
I just described, I spoke separately with British and Chinese participants in
it – both diplomatic professionals I had come to know well. Each confessed that he had seen both his own
and his counterpart’s behavior as a waste of time. But the Brit confided that he’d been
impressed by the imperturbable discipline with which the Chinese had executed
their idiotic instructions. And, for
their part, the Chinese said they’d secretly admired the exquisite
one-upmanship with which the Brits had greeted them on a mission whose
absurdity and futility they fully appreciated.
Chinese diplomats have not lost
their self-possession, but they are now well-trained professionals who represent
a country that is very different from the China of the 1960s. That China was isolated, angry, poor, and
weak. Despite its impotence – or perhaps
because of it – it was vociferously determined to overthrow the liberal
international order we Americans had created.
Ironically, of course, American-sponsored admission to that order proved
to be the key to the rapid restoration of China’s wealth and power. China today is globally engaged,
self-satisfied, prosperous, and regionally powerful. It has become an anything-but-revolutionary
and increasingly influential participant in the institutions of global and
regional governance. It is now the
world’s biggest industrial power and, by some measures, already its largest
overall economy. And, while its growth
is slowing, it’s living standards are still rising at rates the whole world
envies.
As it grows, China continues to
change. It is becoming notably less
passive in the face of regional challenges to its territorial integrity and
security. China’s neighbors have reacted
to this with legitimate alarm. Still, a
bit of perspective seems in order. So
far, Chinese have been considerably more deferential to international law and
opinion than we Americans were at a similar stage of national development.
Around 1875, the United States
passed the U.K. to became the world’s biggest economy. Soon thereafter, we pressed the ethnic
cleansing of our country to a conclusion, engineered regime change in Hawaii
and annexed it, seized the Philippines and Puerto Rico from the Spanish Empire,
forced Cuba to grant us Guantánamo in perpetuity, detached Panama from
Colombia, and launched repeated military interventions in Honduras, Nicaragua,
Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
To date, by contrast, China has leveraged the upsurge in its power to
step up its contributions to U.N. peacekeeping and use its coast guard,
construction companies, and other nonlethal means to buttress century-old
claims to islands, rocks, and reefs in its near seas against more recent
counterclaims by neighbors.
It says more about us than about
China that we have chosen to treat its rise almost entirely as a military
challenge and that we have made countering Chinese power and perpetuating our
quasi-imperial, post-1945 dominance of the Western Pacific the organizing
principles of our Asia policy. China’s
capacity to defend its periphery is indeed growing apace with its economy. The military balance off the China coast is therefore
inevitably shifting against us. This is
certainly a threat to our long-established dominance of China’s periphery. It promises to deprive us of the ability to
attack the Chinese homeland from there at will, as Air-Sea Battle
envisages. But greater security from
foreign attack for China does not imply a greater risk of Chinese or other foreign
attack on the United States.
Even more important, the notion
that Americans can indefinitely sustain military supremacy along the frontiers
of a steadily modernizing and strengthening China is a bad bet no sober analyst
would accept. Extrapolating policy from
that bet, as we do in the so-called “pivot to Asia,” just invites China to call
or raise it. We would be wiser and on
safer ground, I think, to study how Britain finessed the challenge of America’s
emergence as a counter to its global hegemony.
It viewed us with realistic apprehension but accepted, accommodated, and
co-opted us.
There may be more to the analogy
between China and the United States as rising powers than is immediately
apparent. Post-Maoist China, like
pre-World War II America, avoids entangling alliances. Like the United States then, it is
unresponsive to demands that it exercise global leadership commensurate with
its economic heft or that it join in foreign wars. And, like Americans then, Chinese do not go
abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
They do so to make money or for purposes of tourism.
Like the United States, China
refuses to compromise its sovereignty or sacrifice its ideological
identity. Unlike us, however, the
Chinese still insist on the strict respect for the sovereignty of other states
enshrined in the U.N. Charter. Like most
non-Americans, they are intrigued by democracy but do not see history as driven
by a struggle between it and autocracy.
They are not into armed evangelism or regime change. Chinese find foreigners peculiar but are
content to let them remain unChinese.
They are notoriously indifferent to their foreign partners’ ideologies,
politics, and social systems. A world in
which the United States shares influence with China, India, and other great
civilization-states is likely to be safer for political diversity because it should
be less roiled by moral supremacism, ideological expansionism, and cultural
imperialism.
China is finally becoming more
active in global governance but it still shows no desire to displace American
leadership. Quite the contrary. It says it’s ready to follow our lead in
global governance. Just five weeks ago,
Vice Premier Wang Yang declared that "China and the United States are
global economic partners, but America is the guide of the world. America
already has the leading system and its rules; China is willing to join the
system and respect those rules and hopes to play a constructive
role." This remarkable declaration
by Beijing deserves to be tested. So
far, however, there has been no audible response to it from Washington.
Perhaps that’s because to be
followed the United States must be prepared to lead. That means reforming existing institutions
and providing funding that can meet the very real needs of the day. American domestic dysfunction continues to
prevent us from doing this and leaves others no choice but to step forward
where we cannot. China has the money and
is building the self-confidence to do this.
It has recently begun to sponsor new multilateral arrangements to fund
infrastructure projects and currency swaps that are beyond the current capacity
of the World Bank, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank, and other legacy
institutions.
Sadly, instead of treating these
initiatives as a compelling reason to get our own act together and reassert
international leadership, we have reacted to them peevishly, with carping
comments and attempts to persuade others to boycott them because they don’t
enforce the kinds of conditionalities we have traditionally favored. But staying outside these Chinese-sponsored
institutions will reduce rather than reinforce our role in global governance
and erode, not promote, the prevalence of our values internationally. As all in this room know, Americans are not
universally admired these days. And if
you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
Our dilemma is a reminder of the
purpose of politics, including diplomacy.
As every diplomat knows, this is to add the power of others to one’s own
to promote shared interests – or at least interests you’ve persuaded others are
shared. To get others to see their
interests the way you want them to, you must understand their world view. For this to happen, empathy must at least
temporarily eclipse egotism while realism prevails over the prescriptions of
political correctness. It’s pointless to
try to enlist others in support of projects whose premises contradict their
fundamental conceptions of what’s right.
Chinese do not share the
interest of Americans in promoting multiparty democracy, Wall Street financial
practices, regime change in autocracies, church attendance, post-pious sexual
freedoms, or uncensored access to dissident perspectives on the news, among
other things. China rejects the concept
of humanitarian intervention. It
disapproves of our frequent resort to punitive diplomacy through sanctions,
drone warfare, and military interventions, all of which it considers both
inappropriate and counterproductive. It
is privately aghast at the amateurism of many of our decision-makers and
diplomats and our lack of institutional memory.
But China does share our
interest in preserving and enhancing effective global governance; in promoting
worldwide economic prosperity through liberalized terms of trade and
investment; in retarding and ultimately reversing climate change, nuclear
proliferation, and the spread of Islamist extremism; in combating terrorism and
piracy; and in assuring a peaceful international environment in which to enjoy
domestic tranquility and pursue national reconstruction. And Chinese are coming to agree with us about
a growing list of other matters, including the need to safeguard intellectual
property, manage rather than deny the military rivalry between us, develop
non-polluting sources of energy, and save the whales. Like Americans, Chinese want relations
between our two countries to embody peaceful cooperation and competition rather
than antagonism and military hostility.
Given serious and skillful diplomacy by both sides, that should be
doable.
But a constantly changing China
will continue to affront American complacency in many ways. It defies our doctrinaire denigration of
industrial policy by outperforming us economically. Despite multiple problems and a system of
government that is a big turn-off to foreigners, China belies our disdain for
autocracy with a government that enjoys very much higher levels of approval
from those it governs than ours does.
(65 percent of Americans are now dissatisfied with our system of government. 70 percent of Chinese express satisfaction
with theirs, with approval of the Chinese central government at much higher
levels than that.) Contrary to our
orthodoxy, despite restrictions on freedom of speech, China’s huge private
sector is becoming increasingly innovative.
In a challenge to our self-image, China now seems in many ways much more
devoted to the United Nations and the rules of international law we helped
craft than we are. Far from the monolith
we imagine, China encompasses exceptional diversity within its borders. It includes the spectacularly futuristic city
of Shanghai and the gambling paradise of Macau – now with the world’s highest
GDP per capita (according to the World Bank).
But it also embraces many backward and impoverished areas, like Tibet, where
GDP per capita is still on a par with that in Congo-Brazzaville.
China’s rise is an unprecedented
challenge to our country. It should
provoke us to get our act together at home, ramp up our competitiveness, make
common cause with Europeans and others who share our values, live up to our
libertarian ideals, strive once again to be an inspiring example to other
societies, and address the many deficiencies of our diplomacy. All this could yet happen. If it does, China will inadvertently have
done us and the world a great service.
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