China's Big Power Ambition under Xi Jinping

Narratives and Driving Forces

Suisheng Zhao, Suisheng Zhao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000511178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política asiática

Instead of emphasizing China as a developing country, Chinese President Xi Jinping has identified China as a big power and accentuated China's big power status. This book explores the narratives and driving forces behind China's big power ambition. Three narratives rooted in Sino-centralism are examined. One is China's demands for the reform of global governance to reflect the values and interests of China as arising power. Another is China's Belt and Road Initiative to construct a nascent China-centred world order. The third is the China model and self-image promotion in the developing countries.

There are many forces that have driven or constrained China's big power ambition. This collection focuses on two sets of forces. One is China's domestic politics and economic incentives and disincentives. The other is China's geo-political and geo-economic interests. These forces have both motivated and constrained China's big power ambition.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

Part I

The Narratives

Rhetoric and Reality of China’s Global Leadership in the Context of COVID-19: Implications for the US-led World Order and Liberal Globalization

Suisheng Zhao

ABSTRACT

When President Trump-led America abandoned the global leadership, China casted itself as the global leader in response to COVID-19, placing challenges to the US-led world order and liberal globalization. China’s rhetoric, however, has not matched its actions in comprehensively providing global public goods and developing universally accepted values. As neither the US and China have taken the global leadership that most countries can trust and count on, the world is in the danger of moving toward the vicious power rivalry, hampering the multilateral responses to global crisis such as COVID-19.

The US response to COVID-19 was sadly emblematic. Spending more than a month to play down the threat, delaying the diagnostic testing and stockpiling essential equipment after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Public Health Emergency on 30 January 2020, the Trump administration was unprepared, ill-equipped and overwhelmed. Disdaining international cooperation and focusing the bulk of its efforts on blaming the WHO and China, President Trump astonished the world by suggesting disinfectant and ultraviolet light could possibly be used to treat Covid-19.

Containing the outbreak by strict confinement measures and coming out of the crisis in a stronger position than many other countries, the Chinese government wasted no time to launch a propaganda campaign, trumpeting its powerful state capacity in time of crisis in contrast to the contradictory and incoherent response of the US and European democracies. As the US faltered in its handling of the pandemic, China enhanced its influence across the world by exporting medical equipment, expertise, experience, and largesse to other hard-hit countries through the so-called coronavirus diplomacy.

In some scholar’s eyes, the Trump administration’s belated, self-centered, haphazard, and tone-deaf response marked the death of American competence and beginning of the “post-American’ order.¹ Beijing moved quickly and adeptly to take advantage of the opening created by U.S. mistakes to fill vacuum of the global leadership.² The rest of the world was ‘accommodating to a world of growing Chinese power, in the absence of any viable alternative.’³ President Xi Jinping-led China actively contributed to world governance and human development and became a global leader in the 21^st century.⁴

Is China ready to step into the breach left by the Trump administration and become a global leader in reconstructing the world order and globalization? This article argues that taking advantage of the US retreat from the liberal world order and globalization, China has indeed filled some vacuums by proposing Chinese vision for the world order, grasping increasing number of leadership positions in the international organizations, and launching Beijing-led multilateral institutions to advance Beijing’s priorities and values. But China has pushed for an illiberal statist world order and appealed primarily to the authoritarian regimes. China’s ambition for global leadership has entrenched the divide between democratic and authoritarian countries. But China is still a fragile big power and does not have enough resources to lead a crusade against liberal democracies and overtake the US global leadership in supplying the global public goods. Although COVID-19 affected more countries than any other single event in recent history, it was unfolded in a vacuum of global leadership and furious US-China blame game to shirk responsibilities, paralyzing the global cooperation in response to the pandemic.

The China Challenge to the US-led World Order

The US global leadership was established through the construction and maintenance of the Post-WWII world order and the promotion of Post-Cold War liberal globalization. Prospering in the US-led order and benefiting immensely from liberal globalization, China is no longer a revolutionary power seeking to ‘the overthrow of the existing world order because as a big power, China occupies a pivotal position in the international organizations.’⁵

A rising China, however, has regarded the order unfair and unreasonable enough to reflect the interests and values of the emerging powers like China and become a revisionist power to advance its status as a rule-maker, expand its influence in the hierarchy, and change aspects of the order that it views as undermining its values and interests.⁶ Blaming the US promotion of liberal values responsible for conflict, disruption and chaos worldwide, ‘China’ leaders see the post-1945 liberal international order as reflecting the worldview of the victorious white colonial powers that created it. Xi considers the world of 2020 to be radically different from that of the post-war era.’⁷

The US-led order worked well when American democracy functioned as a model for the rest of the world and America was able to defend and pay for the order. But America is no longer a beacon of liberal democracy and many Americans are no longer willing to pay for the global leadership. Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 partially because he promised the arrival of a peace dividend after the Cold War to be invested in strengthening America at home. Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 because he promised to pull the US troops from the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Openly stating that the US would comply with the rules only if they are in its interest, the Trump administration spent great efforts on bilateral rather than multilateral diplomacy, favoring a sovereign normative order over a liberal order. Although the American leadership was essential to multinational agreements on trade, climate change, regional security and arms control, President Trump has cut US global commitments and broken up alliances, withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paris climate accord, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), criticizing nearly every multilateral network the US was part of, and suggesting Japan and South Korea develop nuclear weapons of their own.

The Chinese, therefore, complained that while the Americans often asked China to follow the rules-based liberal international order, ‘It has become harder and harder for foreign policy makers in China to discern what rules the Americans want themselves and others to abide by, what kind of world order they hope to maintain.’⁸ ‘The US accused China as revisionist, but the US as the main builder of the global order challenged it,’ causing the world anxiety and leading to global trust deficit, governance deficit, peace deficit, and development deficit.”⁹

A Chinese scholar warned that ‘the post-WWII order has quickly become disorder and dangerous to fail, evidence from racial contradictions to regional conflicts, from refugee issues to climate change, from terrorism to financial crisis, and from arms race to nuclear weapons proliferation. World conflicts and contradictions have approached the new thresholds since 2019, leading to a more complicated, more severe and unpredictable turbulent future.’¹⁰

China has long taken an à la carte approach to the world order, supporting the international institutions such as the World Bank that served its interests, turning others such as the UN Peace Keeping to its own purposes, and weakening those such as the human rights regimes that might pose a challenge to its values. But the Chinese leadership has become increasingly proactive to shape the rules and norms forming the basis for the world order and created international institutions to better align with its values and interests.

Presenting the Chinese vision for the world order, President Xi put forwarded the Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) in 2013. The Chinese government managed to incorporate this phrase into the UN resolution on the 55th UN Commission for Social Development in 2017. It was also enshrined by the UN Security Council, the Human Rights Council and the First Committee of the UN General Assembly.

The Chinese term (人类命运共同体) was at first translated into English as the Community of Common Destiny for Mankind. As the term is increasingly used, the English translation is standardized as the CSFM because the word ‘destiny’ implies a lack of choice along a pre-determined trajectory, possibly generating resistance.

Promising to build an ‘open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity,’ the CSFM calls for all socio-political systems to be respected as equally valid, i.e. democracies are not a model superior to authoritarianism. All should peacefully coexist, not attempting to transform the others.¹¹ Claiming to boost the shared future for mankind, China’s attempt to shaping the world order, howe...