China’s Hype and Reality Do Not Square Up

By S.P.SETH

The much-hyped up talk of US-China global partnership hasn’t taken long to experience some reality check.

The Copenhagen climate change conference showed that, despite US efforts to forge a cooperative partnership with China on global issues, Beijing was determined to pursue its own national interests as it saw them.

Indeed, its delegation, including Premier Wen Jiabao, humiliated Obama by simply ignoring him or not turning up for meetings.

Obama’s recent China visit was supposed to have created the basis for a global partnership. China simply made use of it to promote its global image, and to gain favor with domestic audiences.

Obama’s visit appeared to have christened China as the second superpower.

Indeed, President Obama was careful not to dwell on human rights violations in China by simply espousing universal principles of “freedoms of expression and worship, access to information and political participation.”

But the Chinese simply ignored all this and censored the “sensitive” bits for their television audiences.

Why is the US putting up with all this and still seeking common ground with China on global issues?

Some US Sinologists and policy makers have been laying down the rationale for a change of policy for quite some time.

This is best summed up by Professor John Ikenberry in a Foreign Affairs article:

“The United States cannot thwart China’s rise, but it can help ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century, rules and institutions that can protect the interests of all states in the more crowded world of the future.”

He adds, “The United States’ global position may be weakening, but the international system the United States leads can remain the dominant order for the twenty-first century.”

The Copenhagen conference showed, if it wasn’t clear already, that China would use international forums to pursue and advance its own national interests.

Therefore, the idea that China can somehow be persuaded to work within a Western-devised international system is not workable.

It doesn’t mean that the US shouldn’t engage with China.

What it means is that it should be aware that China’s objective is to displace the United States as the global superpower, and to create an international system more in tune with its own global aspirations, as opportunities arise.

And it is sensing these opportunities.

What has led to this situation?

The first and foremost is that for nearly a decade the United States has been engaged in two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While it is slowly disengaging from Iraq, Afghanistan is becoming an ongoing and costly affair, both in terms of casualties and commitment of more troops and resources.

At the same time, there are serious bushfires in Somalia and Yemen in an ongoing war against Islamic terrorists.

In other words, the United States is increasingly getting mired in crises outside its borders.

Which has given China an opening to expand its political horizons and influence out of proportion to its actual power.

In other words, the United States needs very badly to extricate its unsustainable military involvement in all these areas.

Even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been consuming US energies and resources, it has been hit by an economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties.

Even though China too has suffered badly from this global economic downturn, with its exports down by about 25 percent, it has sought to minimize its economic woes through a crash economic stimulation program.

This might create more economic and social problems at a later time. But, for the present, it has further enhanced China’s status as an emerging superpower.

However, there is another reality that is escaping notice with all the hype about China’s growing power. In all its haste for statistical economic growth (even those figures are sometimes dodgy), China’s rulers have ignored the imperatives of social equity and justice.

The system seems to work for the rich and the powerful in cahoots with the party apparatchik. And it is underwritten by systemic corruption at all levels.

According to China’s National Audit Office, Chinese officials siphoned off $39 billion by way of embezzlement and other forms of misuse of funds during the first eleven months of last year.

And this included money laundering and issuing fraudulent loans, sale or purchase of state land or mining rights. Corruption is estimated to cost about 10 per cent of government spending.

John Garnaut, China correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, has examined the case of a county in Anhui province where “the top cadres are dividing up the taxpayer spoils over hot pot, gambling, saunas and prostitutes, usually in this order.”

And he adds, “It’s not just carnal pleasures that are for sale, but investment projects, procurement contracts and almost every key position in the bureaucracy.”

Garnaut believes that this “sorry state of affairs is replicated across China’s 1600 rural counties”, as well as in urban areas, “although usually in less blatant form.”

Such widespread corruption is a serious threat to social stability—which is supposed to be the raison ‘d’être of Communist Party’s political monopoly.

No wonder that China’s rulers are always on the edge, fearing any challenge to their monopoly power. The eleven-year jail sentence for the prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo on subversion charges, is an example of this.

Liu was the co-author of the call for political liberalization in the country,called Charter 08. And he was detained just before the Charter was published in December 2008. Many Chinese intellectuals have since signed it.

Apart from calling for reforms to usher in democracy, the Charter makes a searing analysis of China’s deplorable state of affairs.

It says: “The political reality… is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power…”

And: “The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of natural environment…”

This is not all. There is also “the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.”

With such creaky social and political foundations, one has to be very skeptical about the hype regarding China’s great power status.