China at 70: The Growing Pains of a Rising Power

This year marks the 70th birthday of the People’s Republic of China. To a 5,000-year-plus civilization, 70 years seem like the blink of an eye. Yet within that blink the Middle Kingdom has experienced a miraculous rebirth. 

In 1949, China was poor, backward, and isolated by the West. Today, it is the world’s largest trading nation and second largest economy, a global leader in technological innovation, and a major actor in many regional and international institutions. No other country in human history has achieved such a dramatic transformation within such a short period of time.

As China’s wealth and power have changed, so has its foreign policy.

Two major aspects of Chinese foreign policy over the past seven decades are worth close examination. The first is China’s evolving relationship with the beautiful country -- the Chinese translation of “America.” Now that China is fast becoming a global power, its policy toward the United States seems to be undergoing a subtle but important shift, and this shift is viewed by some as the major contributing factor for the current difficult state of the bilateral relationship.

The second aspect concerns the impact of a “born-again” China on the outside world. The rise of China so far has been felt most keenly in the economic realm. But even on this score Beijing appears to have had limited success in using its economic power to achieve all of its desired outcomes. By the same token, China’s agenda-setting and ideational power remains incommensurate with its economic clout. Overall, one can argue that China is a global power with limited influence.

China’s American Conundrum

The United States has been the world’s most powerful country since the end of World War II, and the only superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Given U.S. dominance in international affairs, its extensive security alliances in East Asia, and its special relationship with Taiwan, it is fair to say that how to deal with the United States has been a top priority of Chinese leaders since 1949. 

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the U.S. alliance with the Nationalist regime in Taiwan, and the Korean War, Beijing for a time viewed Washington as its existential threat. As a result of this security threat and shared communist ideology, Beijing was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and staunchly opposed to the United States in the 1949-1969 period. Yet the Sino-Soviet border clash in 1969 and U.S. President Richard Nixon’s strategic vision of China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union quickly brought Beijing and Washington into an informal and temporary partnership. This was the first major shift in Chinese foreign policy toward the United States and led to the normalization of bilateral relations in 1979.

From 1979 until the outbreak of the 2008 global financial crisis, the primary goal of Chinese foreign policy, one could argue, was to embed itself in the U.S.-led international economic order so as to promote domestic economic development. The end of the Cold War – and especially China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 – greatly facilitated China’s accomplishment of that goal. Economic cooperation became the major driving force behind China’s relations with the United States and U.S. allies. By almost every indicator – particularly merchandise trade and investment – China is now deeply embedded in the global economy.

Beginning around 2010, Beijing’s policy toward Washington underwent a perceived shift from cooperation to “assertiveness.” This assertiveness, according to many U.S. officials and pundits, stemmed from Chinese perceptions of a significant and favorable change in the two countries’ relative power as a result of the global financial crisis. In their view, Beijing’s stance on the disputed islands in the South China Sea is a direct challenge to U.S. military dominance in the western Pacific, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a thinly-veiled strategic coalition against the United States, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a Chinese scheme to undermine the U.S.-led Bretton Woods system, and China’s public diplomacy campaign in the United States and elsewhere is an insidious plot to erode American democracy. With the election of Donald Trump, an increasing number of U.S. policymakers and analysts have begun to see China as an existential threat to the American of way of life and to call for a “whole of government” and “whole of society” response to counter that threat.

But change is in the eyes of the beholder. 

From Beijing’s perspective, its commitment to a cooperative and constructive relationship with Washington remains steadfast, despite the narrowing gap between its power and that of the United States. Rather, it is the United States’ China policy that has undergone significant changes, and these changes were driven by perceived threats from a rising China to U.S. global leadership. The Barack Obama administration’s high-profile “pivot to Asia,” in the eyes of most Chinese policymakers and analysts, represented the beginning of a sea change. From their viewpoint, strong U.S. opposition to the AIIB amply illustrates U.S. attempt to keep China down, even though the launch of the bank reflected mounting Chinese frustrations with Washington’s unwillingness to let it play a greater role in existing global financial institutions. The Trump administration arguably offers the most compelling evidence of a decisive shift in U.S. China policy, as exemplified in the escalating trade war, all-out U.S. efforts to block Huawei, the tightening of visas for Chinese students, and increasing scrutiny of bilateral cooperation, especially in science and technology.

Whether the above changes – on either the Chinese or U.S. sides, or both – are perceived or real, the fact is that the bilateral relationship is at its lowest point since 1979 and could deteriorate further. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation seems to be on a collision course with a U.S. president bent on making America great again.

It is certainly understandable that a rising China – particularly after a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers – is eager to play a more active and important role in international affairs. But China’s seemingly ambitious foreign policy agenda could be viewed as “overreach” by an ostensibly declining United States that then responds with “overreaction.”

China is experiencing the growing pains of a rising power, excited and confident, while the United States is showing symptoms of a declining power, resentful and insecure. 

As Trump’s China policy becomes increasingly paranoid and anti-intellectual – to borrow from the late American historian Richard Hofstadter – it is tempting for Beijing to play tit-for-tat. But such a response would almost certainly bring the two great powers into an all-out confrontation – and potentially armed conflict. This is certainly not the best way for China to celebrate its 70th birthday. It seems likely that China-U.S. relations will be characterized by selective confrontation and cooperation in the foreseeable future. Confrontation may spring from perceived threats posed by the other; cooperation may stem from extensive and inescapable economic ties and continued people-to-people exchanges.

China’s Global Presence and Limited Influence

The rise of China is reflected first and foremost in its global presence, primarily economic but increasingly diplomatic and cultural. Products made in China and assembled in China, such as Huawei phones and iPhones, can be found in nearly every household and consumer shop around the globe. Chinese workers and businessmen are leaving their footprints across the world. China is becoming the major source of investment for many countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs for local residents. 

On the diplomatic front, Beijing has become a key player in many regional and international forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), the East Asia Summit (EAS), and the ASEAN Regional Forum. It has also initiated a series of multilateral forums such as ASEAN+1, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, cooperation with Central and Eastern Europe (16+1), and the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. In addition, China played a crucial role in the six-party talks and the Iranian nuclear deal and is getting more actively involved in the Middle East peace process.

On the cultural front, China’s global network of Confucius Institutes has attracted millions of Chinese language learners and fans of Chinese food, art, kung fu, and calligraphy. Generous scholarships from Beijing lure additional thousands of students to come and study in China. State-owned media outlets – most notably China Global Television Network (formerly CCTV), China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Radio International – reach out to local audiences through services in Chinese, English, French, Arabic, and Spanish. Each year tens of thousands of Chinese films, TV series, and books are translated into foreign languages for overseas audiences.

While China’s global presence is an indisputable fact, it would be wrong to assume that this presence has automatically translated into influence. To have influence is to get one’s desired outcomes, and Beijing seems to have had limited success on this front. 

Take the economic realm for example. Now that China is the top trading partner of over 100 countries and a major source of investment for many others, one would think it should have an easy time using its economic clout to get what it wants. But the reality is quite different. In its disputes with Japan and the Philippines over islands in the East China Sea and the South China respectively, for example, China did apply economic pressure as a tactic, but one can hardly argue that China had a clear win in both cases. Similarly, Beijing boycotted South Korean businesses in protest of Seoul’s decision to install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, an American anti-ballistic missile defense system. While Chinese efforts certainly hurt the South Korean economy and tanked bilateral relations for a period, the system was eventually deployed.

Apart from economic power, China can also try to get what it wants through agenda-setting power and ideational power. But Beijing appears to have a huge deficit in both types of power, particularly compared with the United States. On the one hand, despite China’s important role in many international organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the agendas of these organizations are almost exclusively controlled by the United States and its key allies. The IMF is a case in point. After many years of complaints and campaigning, Beijing now has the second largest voting share (6.9 percent), but the U.S. share stands at a hefty 16.52 percent, which gives it an effective veto over any major decision at the world’s most important financial institution.

On the other hand, narratives in the international community are usually set by Western media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC. Beijing has invested billions of dollars in revamping its overseas publicity apparatus (e.g., CCTV), but the effects of this massive investment seem far from satisfactory due to low ratings or small readership of Chinese media products. As a result, China’s “good news” stories are often drowned out by Western media’s critical coverage of China. For example, lifting nearly 800 million people out of poverty is certainly a great Chinese story, but such an achievement gets overshadowed by headlines about Hong Kong or Xinjiang. Whether Western media are inherently biased against China or not, the fact remains that Beijing has a hard time controlling the international narrative about China – despite its best efforts to do so.

Last but certainly not least, China has much catching up to do in terms of ideational power. The most compelling evidence comes from the intellectual world. Beijing’s tremendous investment in higher education notwithstanding, Chinese academia – particularly social sciences and humanities – is absolutely dominated by Western concepts and theories like Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, as well as soft power and identity politics. A distinct Chinese school of international relations, or sociology, or economics, or linguistics – the list goes on – has yet to emerge. In the political realm, Beijing has yet to put forward a set of values that are uniquely Chinese but universally appealing. For example, domestic political stability was a necessary condition for China’s extraordinary economic development over the past four decades, but political stability as a value hardly resonates with publics in Western Europe and North America. China’s developmental model seems to resonate well in some regions (e.g., Africa), but there are growing signs that its economic and political ties with those regions have produced backlash among local populations. 

A Look Ahead

A birthday is an occasion to look ahead as well as to look back. What are the key foreign policy challenges and opportunities for China in the years to come?

Relations with the United States will continue to be the top priority for Chinese leaders. Regardless of who gets elected U.S. president in 2020, there is no going back for China-U.S. relations in the short term. One indication of how much damage the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric have done to the bilateral relationship is the sharp downturn in U.S. public opinion about China in the wake of the trade war. Gallup polls show that 53 percent of American had a favorable view of China in February 2018, the highest point since 1990, but the figure fell to 41 percent a year later, the lowest point since 2009. Surveys from the Pew Research Center showed a similar trend. In the first year of the Trump presidency 44 percent of respondents reported favorable views of China, the highest since 2012, but that proportion dropped to 26 percent in 2019, the lowest since the Pew series were launched in 2005.

While it took less than two years for American views of China to shift in a decidedly negative direction, it may well take decades to reverse that downturn, as in the case of post-1989 U.S. public opinion about China. Thus even if the White House has a new occupant in January 2021, that person will probably be hesitant to immediately engage in a course correction on U.S. China policy.

On the other hand, Washington’s hawkish China policy could be a blessing in disguise for Beijing. After all, not every country endorses Washington’s paranoid China policy. Furthermore, most countries have important stakes in the continued growth of the Chinese economy. Thus collateral damage from the trade war may push many of them – including some U.S. allies – to pivot from Washington to Beijing, even if only temporarily. It is in this sense that some analysts call Trump a God-sent opportunity for a rising China to expand its circle of partners.

More broadly, Beijing should address a conspicuous pattern in its relations with the outside world: The co-existence of high-level economic interdependence with low-level political trust. This is certainly the case with the United States and its allies, and it also seems true with many non-Western countries like Myanmar and South Africa. This pattern of “hot economics, cold politics” means that countries tend to look to China for prosperity and to another country  – often the United States – for security, a division of labor that seriously limits Beijing’s influence in international relations.

Unlike a 70-year-old human being, China at 70 has just begun a new phase of life. It is energetic, ambitious, and confident. There are many uncertainties ahead, but one thing is certain: China is here to stay and the world must learn to live with it.