Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  China’s relations with Mongolia are even more complicated than those with the post-USSR republics. Mongolia is a vast country, half the size of India but with less than three million inhabitants. For seventy years, as the People’s Republic of Mongolia, it was a de facto part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet presence had a fair amount of support among Mongolians. The ethnically homogeneous population is strongly anti-Chinese, mainly because Qing rule in Monglia had been deeply unpopular toward the end of the empire and because a very large number of Mongolians believe that China has never really given up its claim on their territory. Even so, China’s economic pull has proven irresistible to the democratically elected governments in Ulaanbaatar, and China is today the largest investor in the country. The Mongolians, however, are trying to compensate for their increasing economic dependence on China. They are inviting US and Russian companies, as well as companies from elsewhere in Asia and Europe, to help develop their country’s phenomenal natural resources. They may succeed in this strategy, not least because China for internal reasons has to be careful how it treats Mongolia, since there are at least twice as many Mongols inside China as in the independent republic to the north.

  Economic plans and needs are increasingly taking over as drivers in the relationships between China and all of the Central Asian states. They are giving this region a much greater importance to China than it had in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The 2008 economic crisis concentrated the minds of many Chinese planners, public and private, on the need for access to Central Asia’s abundant natural resources. Chinese companies have invested heavily in the oil and gas sectors in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, with massive loans to those crisis-ridden governments in return for the deals. One of the world’s longest pipelines now transports gas from Turkmenistan to China. All other great powers, including India, view China’s increasing economic predominance in Central Asia with suspicion. But there is little they can do about it, as long as China can and will invest more in the region than any others.

  LIKE TODAY’S CHINA, contemporary India was born in the bloodshed and chaos of the 1940s. China took a long time to reach some form of stability, but from the start India developed a democratic and durable political system, which has mostly kept the country on an even keel. During the Maoist years the Chinese Communists looked down on India because they thought its politics and overall development were too closely patterned on the model set by its former colonial masters. Mao himself felt that the lack of revolutionary spirit and its massive size made India a possible threat in the future. In the short run, he relied on the combination of what he saw as Nehru’s foreign policy naïveté and Indian disunity to steer the country away from conflict with China. To his associates the Chairman wondered whether the Indian state project was viable; he saw India more as an “abstraction” than a country, he said. The 1962 war was in many ways a shock for China; its leaders had not expected the Indians to take such a forward attitude to the border problems. Despite the Chinese victory, Beijing realized that India—especially as a de facto ally of the Soviet Union—would be more of a problem than it had bargained for.

  The Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 proved all of China’s suspicions about India’s aims. Instead of viewing the entry of Indian troops into East Pakistan in support of a popular rebellion there as an act of liberation, China insisted it was a naked power grab. Deng Xiaoping told the Americans, “It is the dream of Nehru, inherited by his daughter, to have the whole South Asian subcontinent in their pocket.”15 The first Indian nuclear test in 1974 surprised the Chinese, who had not thought that India had such capabilities and suspected the Soviets of having supplied the know-how. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assumption of emergency powers in 1975 was also seen by the Chinese as a Soviet ploy, especially since it came right after the Soviet-supported Indian annexation of Sikkim, which China also claimed to have rights over. There was a temporary increase of tension at the border. In 1986, India created a new province out of its northeastern territories called Arunachal Pradesh, which incorporated areas the Chinese thought of as theirs. Tension rose again, but open clashes were averted. Relations between the two giant nations remained as frozen as they had been since the late 1950s.

  It was the end of the Cold War that defrosted Sino-Indian relations and set them on a new but still uncertain course. In 1988 Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing, but it was his successor Narasimha Rao’s visit there five years later that really set the relationship on a new course. The two sides began to withdraw troops from their borders and facilitate trade. But even if the diplomatic relationship improved, the strategic rivalry remained. India’s new round of nuclear tests in 1998 marked a low point, especially since Indian officials made no secret of the fact that they regarded the improvement of their country’s military capacity as directed against a potential Chinese threat. In a letter to President Bill Clinton, India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee summed up his fundamental view of the situation:

  I have been deeply concerned at the deteriorating security environment, specially the nuclear environment, faced by India for some years past. We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to the distrust, that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state. At the hands of this bitter neighbour we have suffered three aggressions in the last 50 years.16

  China, meanwhile, started transferring its fear of encirclement from the Soviet Union to the United States. It worried about any improvement in Indo-US contacts, especially with Hindu nationalists such as Vajpayee in command in Delhi. Still, China felt strong enough to not let these concerns, and Indian rhetoric, bring relations back to where they had been during the Cold War. When India fought elements of the Pakistani army, which had infiltrated the Indian held zone in Kashmir, in 1999, Beijing attempted to rein in its Pakistani ally to avoid an all-out war. Mutually beneficial trade continued to increase in the 2000s, with China becoming India’s largest trading partner in 2010. With this expansion, however, has gone an increase in India’s trade deficit with China, which now stands at almost fifty percent of total trade. China is pushing for a further opening up of trade, but many Indians are skeptical, fearing that it will disadvantage producers in their own country.

  The Indian public’s attitudes to China are among the biggest problems in the relationship today. Only twenty-two percent of Indians see China’s growth as positive. Despite India’s own phenomenal economic growth, they worry about the possibility that China expanding first will mean less room for India in the global economy. Indians, including their security officials, also remain concerned about the security implications of a more powerful China. It is not any longer just Pakistan and the border that are problems but also Burma and Nepal, both bordering India, where Chinese influence has been increasing. In Beijing there is less worry about the relationship, and a growing understanding of the need to take India’s security concerns into consideration. But even so, Chinese leaders are concerned about the increasingly warm relations between Delhi and Washington and about India’s growing closeness with Indonesia. Indian public support for Tibetan causes also irritates the Chinese, who cannot come to terms with the pluralism of Indian society. Symbolically, and perhaps ominously, China is now the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that has not endorsed India’s wish for membership of that select group.

  THE CRISIS IN THE MUSLIM world that began with the Soviet collapse and is continuing today across the Middle East and North Africa has deeply affected China’s foreign relations in the new century. The US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced Chinese leaders of the inherent aggressiveness of the United States, even if most Chinese sympathized with the US predicament after 9/11. The problem was (and is) that China has no alternative
international strategy to recommend to deal with the crisis, except emphasizing peaceful negotiation to resolve all problems. It does not explain how such negotiations could have delivered the al-Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan in 2001 or prevented Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction (which the Chinese, like their US counterparts, believed that Saddam was trying to do in 2003). In the aftermath of these conflicts, China appears not so much as an alternative superpower as a fearful power obsessed with stability and sovereignty. In place of a grand strategy to change the world, China seems to offer little but a firm belief in free trade and the inviolability of borders. Such a deeply conservative doctrine might have suited some in the wake of George W. Bush’s acutely unpopular wars. But China’s many abstentions on crucial votes in the UN Security Council have left the impression of a power that wants to abdicate responsibility in the international community rather than assume it.17

  The Chinese leadership was concerned about the implications of US troops in Afghanistan after 9/11, but it realized that opposing the invasion would have few benefits for it internationally. Instead, Beijing restricted itself to recommending the establishment of a broad-based coalition government under UN supervision to replace the Taliban. China was happy to see the end of the reactionary religious-inspired regime, which had also promised to support Islamist groups from Xinjiang. But its leaders worried that a Western presence in Afghanistan would make the whole region more unstable. China’s main concern was with Pakistan, a traditional ally of Beijing’s, whose government chafed under pressure both from Washington and from its own increasingly anti-American population. While the CCP leaders’s analysis of Afghan matters was not very wrong—and significantly more accurate, to be sure, than that in Washington—China did not want to take an active role there. It preferred strengthening its ties with Pakistan while engaging in limited aid programs and commercial activities across the border.

  The big dividing line in international affairs in the early twenty-first century was President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq. President Hu and his advisers had seen the war coming for some time. By October 2002 Beijing was sure that the United States and its coalition would attack even if there was no agreement at the UN to do so. China had to position itself carefully. On the one hand, there was no doubt that China would oppose a UN Security Council resolution authorizing an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime. On the other hand, China did not want to be seen as the main opponent of unilateral US action and was happy to leave that task to Russia and the Americans’ own European allies, France and Germany. In the wake of the invasion, China secretly cooperated with the United States at the UN to enable a resolution that, postfactum, found the foreign occupation of Iraq “legal,” so that oil exports could continue. At the time, China was Iraq’s main foreign debtor. It was in the PRC’s interest to provide an income for the new occupation government and to keep Iraqi oil flowing, including to China itself. Although other powers that had opposed the war admired China’s Realpolitik, they were irritated that Beijing was not willing to be louder in its opposition to US policies. For China, however, confronting the United States over Iraq simply made no sense. Instead, as we have seen, it used Washington’s post-Iraq diplomatic dependence on Beijing to eke out concessions on East Asian issues, such as North Korea and Taiwan.

  Hu Jintao’s foreign policy team also concluded that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were weakening the United States, rather than making it stronger. Even though the military capacity of the Americans impressed PLA observers in Beijing, they were not shocked at the extent of US capacity as they had been after the last war against Iraq, the Gulf war of 1991. China had caught up in terms of its knowledge of military technology, though not always in its implementation. But the main conclusion Beijing drew was that the wars in the Muslim world would distract the United States from attempting to contain China’s own rising power. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 underscored this perspective for Beijing. The US federal budget deficit was described as a form of imperial overstretch, and the US trade deficit as a lack of public and private prudence in consumption. By 2010 China’s critique of America’s wars sounded increasingly like a defense of moderation and free trade, more Adam Smith than Karl Marx, more “Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself” than “History needs a push.”

  But the crisis in Muslim countries also reminds the Chinese leaders of the problems they may have to face in their own region. If China wants to be the regional leader in Asia, it will have to do more than letting matters be, even if it does not want to copy US and Soviet interventionisms. The potential for meltdown in North Korea or Burma is great, and Beijing is very uncertain as to how such situations should be approached. At the moment, China is comfortable positioning itself as a country that wants to learn from more advanced countries on matters concerning administration, management, finance, production, technology, and education. It is much more uncomfortable attempting to deal with chaos in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Many public voices in China advocate disengagement from “failed states,” for three main reasons: They kill and injure Chinese. They are the responsibility of the Western powers, who created the chaos there in the first place. And China has no business alleviating disorder in foreign and wild territories—better concentrate on reform at home. Whichever way one views such anti-interventionist creeds, the echoes of China’s past are unmistakable.

  MODERNITIES

  CHINA’S TRANSFORMATION over the past 250 years has been part of its internationalization. For a long time foreigners took advantage of China, a process that unsurprisingly bred resentment among most Chinese. But at the same time, some of those who lived in the country made use of what came from the outside to change China and change themselves. The country today has become a hybrid of what has developed internally for centuries and what has come from abroad. Quite a number of Chinese, as we have seen in this book, are well equipped to handle these forms of hybridity. They are resourceful beyond their means, both because they stand in a long tradition and because they have learned—sometimes the hard way—the value of flexibility when confronting major challenges. China is on its way to developing distinct forms of modernity, connected to what has been happening in North America, Europe, and Japan, but still separate, because it comes out of a very particular Chinese past.

  The problem for the historian in discussing Chinese modernities and their future is that what went before threatens to overwhelm the present. China, as its inhabitants are fond of reminding us, has so much past, so much perceived continuity, that it sometimes becomes a perceptual barrier against dealing effectively with what goes on today. One key argument in this book has been that even as one should respect the Chinese preoccupation with the past, one should not be daunted by it. China has a very long history, and some of it may be seen as continuous, in a way that Europe’s and certainly America’s are not. But the most important aspect of China today is how it has taken on a set of changes that were happening globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and made them part of what the country is now. It has embraced change, not always for the good, but with effects that put it right next to the United States in terms of inconstancy and changeability. For a rather old-fashioned European like myself, China today is distinctly, and sometimes embarrassingly, about the rapidity of change, about uncertainties, willingness to copy, and the impermanency of all things.

  Even if China were to transform its political system into something more like that of the United States or, for that matter, Japan, it would remain a hybrid society in terms of its relationship with the outside world, just as it has been from the beginning of our story. One part would be outward-looking, seeing opportunity. Another would be looking inward, sensing danger. Believing that the first one is good and the second bad would be a mistake for Chinese and foreigners alike. History does not break down as neatly as that. Some of those who have been looking outward, such as Mao Zedong or, for that matter, the wartime
collaborator Wang Jingwei, have seen opportunities that have turned into nightmares for Chinese and foreigners alike. And some of those who have looked inward and been mostly afraid have attempted to reestablish that domestic congruence and balance that both China and the world’s relationship to China have sorely needed.

  Our final chapter will look at how China’s relations with the rest of the world will likely develop, based on what we know today. As all predictions it is grounded on guesswork. As we observed at the beginning of this book, a number of current estimates have postulated that China sometime toward midcentury will be the world’s largest economy and the world’s mightiest state. But even if that were so, it would not help us predict China’s behavior as it is reaching these exalted positions. Some knowledge of the past may help, at least as far as direction and possible choices are concerned. The contradictions that are built into China’s modern experience will not go away as its status grows, and some of them will become more acute. The amount of transformation that China and the world watching China are yet to see will be mind-boggling. Some of it—such as minority relations or class readjustments within China—have the potential for becoming violent and controversial. Other parts will, I believe, be less confrontational than what most people think. The relationship to Taiwan, or even to a reunified Korea, a more independent Japan, or a more assertive Vietnam, will be based less on confrontation than compromise as long as the development inside China itself makes that possible. The central problem for China’s foreign affairs in the future is that it is an enduring empire that increasingly behaves like a modern nation state. It may, in the long run, turn out to be more like the United States, integrating its minorities and controlling its neighbors, or like Britain, France, or Russia, giving up its imperial pretensions based on principle or economic necessity. Whatever way it turns, it will be impossible to separate the internal from the external in China’s search for modernities of its own.