China's New Diplomacy

Evan S. Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003

Summary:  The recent crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons has had at least one unexpected aspect: the crucial -- and highly effective -- intervention of Beijing. China's steady diplomacy is a sign of how much things have changed in the country, which has long avoided most international affairs. Recently, China has begun to embrace regional and global institutions it once shunned and take on the responsibilities that come with great-power status. Just what the results of Beijing's new sophistication will be remains to be seen; but Asia, and the world, will never be the same.

Evan S. Medeiros is an Associate Political Scientist at the Rand Corporation. M. Taylor Fravel is a Fellow at Harvard University's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

Finally, senior Chinese leaders have also started promoting their country's policies through frequent trips abroad. Throughout the 1990s, Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, and Zhu Rongji traveled with increasing frequency to most of the continents and especially to other parts of Asia. Their successors, appointed in November 2002, are even more internationally oriented and have spent far more time abroad. According to one report, the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee made over 40 overseas trips in the four years preceding their appointment. By contrast, Mao left China only twice in his lifetime (both times to visit the Soviet Union), and Deng traveled abroad as China's top leader only a handful of times.

THINKING GREAT

These collective changes in the content, character, and execution of China's foreign policy over the last ten years represent an important evolution from Beijing's narrow and reactive approach to global affairs in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet potentially even more significant changes are now afoot.

Within the last three years, and especially since September 11, 2001, the writings of Chinese strategists have begun to reflect a critical shift in their view of the international system and China's role in it. For example, provocative articles have recently run in major Chinese newspapers and journals advocating that China abandon its long-held victim mentality (shouhaizhe xintai). The writers reject the persistent emphasis on China's "150 years of shame and humiliation" as the main lens through which Chinese view their place in modern international affairs, and even Jiang subtly endorsed this view, in a seminal July 2001 speech marking the 80th anniversary of the Communist Party. Influential Chinese analysts have begun to promote instead China's adoption of a "great-power mentality" (daguo xintai). This emerging notion would replace Chinese victimhood with a confidence born of two decades of impressive economic growth and with a tacit recognition of both China's past unwillingness to assume international responsibilities and the limits of its current international influence.

A natural extension of these ideas is China's growing emphasis on great-power relations (daguo guanxi) as a top foreign policy priority. Chinese strategists increasingly see their interests as more akin to major powers and less associated with those of developing nations, which have been downgraded to a lesser priority. This change alone represents a significant perceptual shift from the 1990s, when many Chinese still viewed their nation as disenfranchised by globalization, the other major powers, and multilateral forums. Chinese officials now talk explicitly about the need to "share global responsibilities" among major powers -- China included. Reflecting these changes, President Hu Jintao became the first Chinese leader to attend a meeting of the group of eight highly industrialized countries (G-8) this past June (albeit as a "dialogue member").

A final, major element of China's new thinking is a recent, if grudging, acceptance that the world is for the moment unipolar and that U.S. preponderance will persist for decades. Although Chinese leaders publicly tout multipolarization as the trend of the times (and condemn American unilateralism), Chinese analysts now acknowledge that their country cannot (and will not) challenge U.S. global dominance anytime soon -- although such dynamics in Asia are less certain. One noted Chinese foreign policy expert recently published an article distinguishing between "hegemonic power" and "hegemonic behavior," and suggested that China can accept the former, just not the latter. This scholar argued that "peace and development" and Chinese economic goals can still flourish in a unipolar world -- as, indeed, they already have. A great irony, unacknowledged by many Chinese, is that China's economy has benefited enormously from U.S. military primacy and American efforts to maintain stability in Asia over the last 20 years.

AT HOME ABROAD?

As important as all these trends are, China still faces serious obstacles to becoming a high-profile, much less a dominant, player in the international community. For the moment, China's foreign policy still serves the domestic goals of its leaders: namely, strengthening, reforming, and ensuring the survival of a Leninist political system in transition. Even as the country's diplomacy becomes more active, the domestic situation remains uncertain, as its leaders grapple with political, social, and economic changes wrought by this transition.