Edward Friedman
Friedman@polisci.wisc.edu
Testimony to the
US-China Economic and Security
Review Commission
March 18, 2008
“Peaceful rise,” “peaceful development,” and, most recently, “harmonious society” are ever changing propagandistic or public relations covers for the actual content of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foreign policy. The unchanging actual primary objective of ruling groups in Beijing is to build an international regime most likely to maintain the CCP’s monopoly of authoritarian power in China.
To achieve that objective, Beijing works to prevent the spread of human rights and democracy. The policies of CCP ruling groups have been a major force in staunching or reversing what had been called “the third wave of democratization.” Whereas the rise of the European Union (EU) seemed to establish a link between prosperity and freedom, a rising China has broken that linkage and tried to establish a link instead between authoritarianism and development. This triumph of the CCP over the EU is manifest in Beijing’s negation of conditionality and good governance regimes in Africa. Authoritarians, because of the rise of China and its global power, can now by-pass the forums established by the democracies and shop for money, loans, aid, weapons, and investment in the forums built by the authoritarian People’s Republic of China (PRC). Sri Lanka has recently done this.
Throughout the history of the PRC, the CCP government has insisted that it adheres to the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other governments. During that time, it actually sent troops against Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Taiwanese and Americans. It helped forces trying to overthrow governments all over its region. Beijing pressures Nepal and India to suppress Tibetans who care about the fate of Tibetans in China. Beijing pressures democracies to put aside democratic freedoms so that visiting leaders from the PRC do not hear or see protests against human rights abuses in China.
Given the priority of economic modernization, some Chinese suggested that China’s post-Mao, pro-economic development foreign policy line should be characterized as a “peaceful rise.” They soon came under attack. Chinese critics said that the slogan might lead some governments to think that China was unwilling to use force to seize territory it claims as Chinese. Some day these territorial claims may include Mongolia. Military action to grab sovereign territorial claims, no matter how flimsy or contested, has been defined in the PRC as peaceful behavior. Similarly, the energy challenges that China faces leads the regime to want to leave open the possibility of using force to maintain access to energy resources. The theory of peaceful rise therefore had to be withdrawn.
The well-known slogans of the CCP – stability, non-interference, and multi-polarity – are ideological covers for narrowly self-interested CCP purposes – protecting the CCP’s monopoly of power in China, helping authoritarian regimes around the world defeat the forces of democratization, and reducing the global influence of the United States and its friends and allies. These slogans can be as sincere and as attractive as was the American slogan of promoting freedom while supporting the royal family in Saudia Arabia and a military dictatorship in Pakistan.
But behind the PR phrases of Beijing are realpolitick goals. A so-called global harmonious society means a world order in which a supposedly uniquely moral China is a global pole for a hierarchical regime with China as its moral center. Harmony, in this Confucian perspective, presumes that there is only one sun in the heavens, only one tiger on the mountain top. The global pole ought to be a particularly ethical China. The Confucian theory of harmonious society could yet promote a racialism of Han Chinese superiority.
The CCP regime sees itself as promoting an economically successful gradualism, with gradualism signifying opposition to liberal constitutionalism, referred to by the CCP as “Western-style democracy.” Beijing promotes putting economic and social rights ahead of political and civil rights. It believes that it has been responsible in pushing Pyongyang toward economic reform, feeling that regime implosion in North Korea leading to a united democratic Korea would be de-stabilizing.
Actually, despite its rhetoric about embracing fundamental human rights, Beijing does not promote social and economic rights. Its single party authoritarianism makes illegal women or ethnic minorities or carriers of the HIV-AIDS virus or religions or workers organizing and acting in their own interests. The PRC, after all, brought on itself the most deadly famine in human history. China is not an embodiment of economic and social human rights.
China has, however, defeated the international human rights regime. France has been richly rewarded for no longer asking the U.N. Human Rights Commission to look into the authoritarian CCP’s violation of the human rights of Chinese people. The PRC is the world leader in netizens in prison and journalists in prison.
In addition, far from actually promoting non-interference, the CCP regime pressures neighbors – Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam – to rewrite their history texts so as not to include events which show things such as the history of China’s imperialist military interventions in Vietnam and Korea. The CCP often makes it a prerequisite of normal relations with China that other governments have no official relations with Taiwan.
The CCP regime actually opposes what it propagandistically claims to embrace. The PRC projects its power in the Asian region in particular and the world in general to defeat peoples promoting democracy and human rights. It has done this in Burma and Cambodia as well as Korea. It depicts a robustly democratic Taiwan as a chaotic society promoting trouble in the region. Beijing courts Taiwanese elites, hoping that they will betray the democratic project in Taiwan, as Hong Kong tycoons betrayed the democratic movement in Hong Kong.
China has recently greatly pressured Pyongyang toward de-nuclearization and economic reform. Not all “interference” is bad. Beijing has also recently nudged the regimes in the Sudan and Burma to decrease a bit their monstrous abuses of human rights. But the general thrust of CCP interference is to help tyrants suppress democrats. This has been the case in Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
CCP policies aimed at making the world safe for authoritarianism mainly rely on China’s new economic clout. It is worth mulling why Beijing has not used its wealth to rush to build a large navy to protect its sea lanes to sources of oil when the regime has experienced energy shortages since 1993 and many informed analysts have been predicting that China would be racing to build a blue water navy.
In general, since the military rescued the CCP on June 4, 1989 from a nationwide democracy movement, the military has been able to demand double digit annual increases in budget. A nasty and vengeful chauvinism has spread in China. Much wealth has been expended to create an armed force that can annex Taiwan and deter America from coming to Taiwan’s aid.
Many analysts have argued that policy toward China should aim at its peaceful integration with international institutions. The CCP regime, however, promotes policies that protect its basic interests. It sees the dominant international institutions as serving American interests. Therefore, China’s foreign policy is not to integrate in the existing institutions of the international order. To be sure, China uses those institutions functionally to advance Chinese purposes. It does not try to destroy them. It is not an out-and-out revisionist power. But the CCP regime understands those institutions as American or Western-dominated, meaning serving interests, such as democracy, which are incompatible with the authoritarian CCP’s top priority of maintaining its legitimate monopoly of power. This is why China has undermined the international human rights regime and worked to offer an alternative to EU-promoted good governance conditionality.
China’s rulers work to make their state a global pole of institutions friendly to Chinese purposes, an alternative to democratic, European or American institutions. Beijing prefers organizations where its interests can dominate. Its wealth dwarfs that of the IMF. The CCP regime, instead of working through APEC, where America has a major voice, prefers APT, ASEAN Plus Three, in which there is no democratic America or democratic India or democratic Australia. The CCP regime has fostered, with Russia, its own organization in Central Asia, the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). It too does not include America. China has gotten Uzbekistan to abolish American military bases. Beijing has begun to cooperate in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) efforts. Beijing is open to almost any international institution which includes China and excludes America.
Beijing has built its own organization for dealing with Sub-Saharan African and a similar organization for the Middle East. It prefers multilateral negotiations in which America and the EU are not principals. The PRC has gotten involved in Peace-Keeping Operations (PKO) because it fears that otherwise American would use PKOS to foster democracy, as in East Timor or Kosovo. The anti-democratic core of Chinese foreign policy meshes with the regime’s priority interest of survival.
A major assumption of CCP foreign policy is that democracy is an American plot to undermine the rule of the CCP. This is how the CCP interprets the so-called Color Revolutions as well as the independence of Kosovo. The bottom line in PRC foreign-policy is enhancing the likelihood of the persistence of the CCP’s authoritarian monopoly of power. Evermore, at home and abroad, it appears that Beijing is succeeding.
Beijing explains democracy as a cause of chaos and decline. It focuses on Hamas, Yugoslavia and Lebanon. Therefore, Chinese people are conditioned to respond to American promotion of human rights as not in the interests of the Chinese people but as a part of an American plot to spread chaos and weaken China so that America can dominate the world. Chinese are socialized to hold very unfriendly attitudes toward the United States. School texts claim that the British-initiated Opium War had America as a black hand behind the curtain pulling the strings.
Chinese certainly are not taught how American foreign policy has served the most basic interests of the Chinese people. They are not told that an American-led coalition defeated Hirohito’s militarist regime and forced General Tojo to end a cruel occupation of China. They are not taught how President Franklin Roosevelt fought to get China a permanent veto-wielding seat on the U.N. Security Council because Roosevelt believed that China’s future rise would warrant it. They are not taught how Mao’s Cultural Revolution both weakened the Chinese military and made an enemy of the USSR such that Mao had to turn to Nixon to deter Brezhnev from ordering a military attack on China in keeping with the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Chinese are taught instead that America is immoral and anti-China. The U.S. Government response to Hurricane Katrina was portrayed in China as exposing the inhuman reality of American Democracy. This anti-American propaganda is ceaseless. It is not based on a dislike of the American people. It is premised on the priority interest of the authoritarian CCP to discredit democracy.
The most important change in Chinese foreign policy priorities in recent years is the rise to a top spot on the national agenda of the energy issue. The belief in Beijing is that without sufficient energy, China can not grow rapidly and create enough jobs to maintain the social stability which keeps the CCP entrenched in power. In response to this recently experienced crisis, Beijing is working to centralize power over energy policy in a mega ministry. This switch also reflects a tendency of the Hu Jintao administration to see centralization as a domestic solution to regime problems.
The long term implications of this energy priority are still being debated among ruling groups in China. Some urge cooperation with neighbors to get drilling going in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Others would ignore the interests of weaker neighbors, promoting hydropower dams on rivers coming out of the Himalayas, even if people to the south are injured. The CCP regime, recently seeing a potential mass action coming from the millions stranded at railroad stations during the 2008 Spring Festival because of energy shortages, is considering and re-considering all aspects of energy policy. Some Chinese ask, for example, since Chinese-owned oil firms sell most of the oil pumped in the Sudan to Japan, what’s the point of China getting a bad reputation for Beijing’s Darfur policies in the Sudan when Chinese consumers do not even get most of the oil? The energy arena is central to on-going policy debates. As Chinese demand has contributed to the rise in prices, so, in general, the policy choices of ruling groups in Beijing, an economic superpower, have global significance. It is these interests and policies and not propagandistic slogans which shape the direction of PRC foreign policy.
As the above outline suggests, China’s major tools in winning friends have been the fruit of China’s extraordinary, sustained economic rise. The CCP is proud of its achievements. It wishes to be known for being responsible for most of the world reduction of poverty since 1980 and not for providing arms to the genocidaires in Darfur. Therefore, China is trying to back up its economic clout with soft power. It self-confidently promotes China as a moral global center. It promotes Confucian Institutes all around the world to teach people Chinese and to introduce them to a constructed history of Chinese culture and history in which China is uniquely benign and wonderful. China is increasingly open to international students and tourists.
For the moment, the people with the policy initiative in Beijing see a successfully rising China. Time, in their view, is on China’s side. Therefore, while rapidly building military capacity, the expectation in Beijing is that economic clout and soft power will be sufficient to establish China as a global power, predominant in its region but with global reach, indeed, at least the equal of the United States. Chinese are taught to imagine China, because of the CCP, returning to its supposedly natural and historic position in the world, a glorious moral center beneficently involved economically with all others, promoting gradualism and non-interference internationally, and stability and social and economic human rights at home. China’s leaders are proud of their achievements and wish to improve the world by promoting Chinese style solutions.
This presentation has tried to sketch the self-interested reality that is hidden by the CCP’s propagandistic, albeit not insincere, slogans. What impresses me is the success of Chinese soft power such that CCP propaganda is treated by international observers as reality. For example, Beijing’s repression in Uighur Muslim areas of Xinjiang which is meant to advance a long-existing policy of Sinification is reported as a response to supposed Taliban-like separatists. In like manner, Beijing’s efforts to annex a democratic and autonomous Taiwan are reported internationally as an understandable and peaceful CCP response to an irrational, dangerous, and provocative Taiwan.
Given the CCP regime’s great success in obscuring its narrow interests with clever slogans, this Commission’s hearing on what actually lies behind the slogans is important and welcome. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to respond to the Commission’s concerns.