by Bruno Maçães
Over the second half of 2018, signs of internal discontent with the Belt and Road started to emerge into public view, a development made all the more surprising by the tight control over public expressions of doubt over major policy lines. On August 1, as he voiced his criticism of China’s ambitious foreign policy, a retired professor of physics at Shandong University, Sun Wenguang, was seen being taken away by police, while his voice trailed off: “Regular people are poor, let us not throw our money away in Africa. Throwing money around like this does not do any good for our country or our society.” The topic of discussion during the hour-long show was China’s “throw-money diplomacy.” Sun had written an open letter critical of Xi Jinping on the eve of his July trip to Africa and the Middle East. In the letter, he urged Xi to stop spending money overseas on aid, loans and investments, saying the money would be better spent in China.
On 24 July 2018, Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua university, published a lengthy online critique of China’s present political and social condition. The essay may seem at times to be part of a Westernizing liberal tradition, but it quickly reveals itself to be anchored in a different political worldview. One theme stands out in this respect: the critique of “excessive international aid.” For a developing country with a large population many of whom still live in a pre-modern economy, such behavior is outrageously disproportionate, Xu argues, stressing that average Chinese are most frequently offended by the way the state scatters large sums of money through international aid to little or no benefit. Money earned in China must be spent in China. For Xu, the internationalism of the Belt and Road is no more than a form of vanity politics or flashy showmanship. At this point he appeals directly to the masses with language meant to evoke their ire: “Rural destitution is a widespread and crushing reality; greater support through public policy initiatives is essential. Without major changes, half of China will remain in what is basically a pre-modern economic state. That will mean that the hope to create a modern China will remain unfulfilled, if not half-hearted.”12
From the outset, the fear that time would wear off the consensus around the initiative encouraged Xi Jinping and his circle of advisors to run greater risks and make the Belt and Road so critical to the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Communist Party that it can no longer be abandoned. Enshrined in the Party Constitution, it stands above criticism. Setbacks will be downplayed—they could be financial or affect the life and security of Chinese citizens abroad—and every success magnified. With the elimination of presidential term limits Xi can think and plan on the very long time scale upon which success and failure are in this case to be measured. And that is highly revealing of the best way to answer the question of whether the Belt and Road will succeed. In fact, the initiative is so formless and multidimensional—it is an operating system, not a program or application—that the question as such makes no sense, unless we think in less binary terms. Create a list with all the—properly weighed—goals of the Belt and Road. One can discuss whether 70 or 60 or perhaps 50 per cent of them will be realized, but to use a single measure of success is as misleading as it is impossible to conceptualize.
The second question is how to define success. Where do Chinese authorities want to take their country? What China do they imagine after the Belt and Road and how will the initiative contribute to bring about the transformation? We know that the plans are bold and ambitious. Above all, they are not limited to China, but are explicitly meant to transform the world system as a whole. Many other initiatives have as their goal to bring about changes in China’s economy and society. What sets the Belt and Road apart is its global scope and the awareness that certain elements of China’s rise can only take place if the world as a whole adjusts to it.
In November 2012, two weeks after he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping visited “The Road Towards Renewal”, an exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing. There, in the company of other members of the Politburo, he made a speech celebrating the struggles the country has been through in its history and his hopes for a bright future. It culminated with the sentence: “I firmly believe that the great dream of the renewal of the Chinese nation will come true.” The dream is, first of all, one of national renewal or rejuvenation. There can be no doubt that the image of the dream is meant to refer us to the long historical period known by the Chinese as the ‘century of humiliation’, when the country succumbed to Western control and domination after being defeated militarily in the Opium Wars. This was the fate delivered to China at gunpoint in 1840: either accept “the extinction of the nation and the people,” or, like Japan, take the path of complete Westernization. In 1854 the US Navy began to patrol the Yangtze River to protect American interests in the distant Chinese interior, ending these patrols only when forced to do so by Japan in the Second World War.
The historical narrative restarts with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, whose centenary approaches, and then 1949, when the “New China was established.” At that point, as Chinese leaders are keen to put it, the Chinese people acquired a “pillar” in their pursuit of national liberation. Their psychological attitude changed “from passivity to agency” and they started to grasp their national fate in their own hands. The last Party Congress in 2017 spoke in this context of a “spirit of struggle.” If the Chinese people want to free themselves from the Western model which has kept the whole world in subjugation, then it needs to engage in uncompromising struggle. History looks kindly on those with resolve, with drive and ambition and courage, but it will not wait for those who are hesitant. China is now at the decisive moment when it must make that choice.
In a meeting behind closed doors with members of the Central Military Commission in February 2017—at the end of the five-year term initiated at the National Museum exhibition—Xi criticized Western democracy, saying many Western countries promote “democratic expansion” and see themselves as the “world savior,” while their institutions create not only societal divisions, but also infighting among parties and endless political scandals. Many leaders of developing countries are thus doubtful about the political system of the West, and expressed hope to learn about how China has developed. “We are now facing a historic opportunity that happens only once in a thousand years,” he concluded. “If we handle it well, we will prosper. But if we screw it up, there will be problems, big problems.”13
This is the scope of China’s current ambition. The Belt and Road will succeed to the extent that it helps propel China’s rise to its last stage, its denouement or, so to speak, the announced terminus of its prophetic history.
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There are a number of possible scenarios for China’s future place in the world system. In the first, the country would become a prosperous and successful economy, at the same time converging to a Western political and social model. Like West Germany and Japan in the past, it would not attempt to dislodge American power from the center of the world system, perhaps out of a belief that without that cornerstone the system itself cannot survive, or perhaps because such a revolution in world affairs, as almost always in the past, could only happen after a war for hegemony which nuclear weapons have rendered impossible. One could also argue that American power is elusive and based on civil society networks. It tends to be most effective when appealing directly to individuals rather than to the states whose citizens they are, and if this is the case only global public opinion rather than the Chinese state can hope to overthrow it. As Oliver Stuenkel writes in a recent book, it is possible to argue that, by creating a parallel structure of institutions, China is not setting out to destroy the Western-led order. Its initiatives in the realms of finance, currency, infrastructure, trade and security—most of them now subsumed under the Belt and Road—are meant to provide China with alternatives, to reduce its dependency on the existing order and limit risks, without thereby reducing its support for the current order. Indeed, he thinks that the
West should support these efforts: “Even though Beijing will be careful to design new institutions to its advantage, they will still force China to agree to a specific set of governance rules, which must make its behavior far more predictable than it is in the context of bilateral engagements. All these institutions will deepen China’s integration into the global economy, possibly reducing the risk for conflict, and lifting all boats.”14
The second scenario is also one of convergence, but it introduces a critical difference. Although committed to the general principles of the liberal world system, and while converging to some variety of Western politics, China would strive to and perhaps even succeed in replacing the United States as the center of political and economic power. This is a scenario that seems to fit reasonably well with the main goals behind the Belt and Road. The initiative seems to share some of the organizing principles of the global order as it exists at present—connectivity, openness and interdependence—while advancing Chinese economic and political interests. The scenario is also agreeable to those who see in the Trump presidency a retreat from global leadership, opening the way for China to take over from the United States as the guardian of a global order from which it has undoubtedly benefited much.
In this scenario, the Belt and Road would play a critical role. It would provide China with increased leverage, allowing it to exert pressure on the United States so that the existing international system could be reformed in a way that allowed China to have a degree of influence commensurate with its economic clout. But it would not be a tool to replace it with a new system since the existing one, generally speaking, still works quite well for China.15 When President Xi spoke in Davos in early 2017 he seemed to be saying just that, reassuring the audience that China was not about to embrace radical changes to the existing order—Davos is not the place to do that—while staking a claim to increase its power and influence. He Yafei, a former Chinese vice foreign minister, wrote in 2017 that “new emerging economies and developing countries represented by China strongly support globalization, while some Western countries including the US, the initiators and leaders of globalization, have reversed their positions.”16
Ultimately, the existing global order may prove more resilient than the sinews of American power supporting it. Even if China surpasses the United States, it is not clear that it will be able to create something new: “Even if China surpasses the United States in power capabilities, it is not clear that it will be able to overturn the existing international order. This is true not only because the United States is just one of many stake holders in the existing order. China will need to offer the world a vision of international order that is legitimate and functional. As China becomes more powerful, it will certainly seek greater authority and rights within the existing order—and the existing order is configured in a way that can allow this to happen. But can it preside over an epochal transformation of the liberal international order into something radically new? Not likely.”17
America’s China strategy for the past three decades—perhaps even longer—seems to have been articulated by reference to my first scenario above, at most countenancing very limited elements from the second. During the second Bush administration Robert Zoellick explained that the United States wanted China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing international system. What this would mean was left purposefully ambiguous, but its conservative element was clear enough: China was supposed to find a place within the international system without forcing too many changes upon its structure. If Japan had grown into the second largest economy in the world without disturbing the status quo—while reinforcing it as a matter of fact—the same could perhaps be expected of China. To ease things, Washington might be willing to make a number of concessions, granting Beijing a level of influence over global rules and institutions that its more direct allies were never able to attain. To this day officials in Beijing will quote Zoellick when defending the Belt and Road: Western countries want us to be a responsible stakeholder and contribute more to the provision of global public goods, that is what we intend to do with our broad initiative.
My third scenario poses the possibility of a normative clash between two visions of the world order. The reader will likely be already inclined to recognize its appeal and implications. The starting point: China is not converging with a Western political model. None of the private or public statements emanating from Beijing allow us to think otherwise. The image of the global order promoted by the Belt and Road differs in dramatic ways from the image of a liberal global order as it exists today and thus its success will not only mean that a different actor will move to the center of global power but also that that the system itself will be differently organized and the values it embodies will form a new constellation. In June 2018 Yao Yunzhu, a retired major-general of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, said the international order needed to be rewritten after failing to heed China’s growth. She cited the South China Sea as an example where the rules needed to be rewritten in response to territorial disputes and criticism that China has been constructing islands and militarizing them by building runways and missile systems. In January 2018 Joe Kaeser, CEO of German industrial giant Siemens, had made the same point about a Chinese world order with a pithy sentence: “China’s Belt and Road will be the new World Trade Organization—whether we like it or not.”18
Once great power competition invades the realm of fundamental values, everything changes. Suddenly initiatives such as the Belt and Road cease to be regarded as normal acts of diplomacy or exercises in soft power. While not hard in the sense of military force, nor can they be considered soft. They represent a direct challenge, an attack on the foundations of Western liberal societies by the mere fact of propagating a different and opposing vision and evoking the sense of a final clash for supremacy or even survival. Some have therefore tried to develop a new concept of “sharp power,” capturing the clash between different regimes or visions of society.19
On a wide range of issues from the Internet to human rights and sovereignty claims in the South China Sea or global trade, China is putting forth a clear challenge to the existing liberal order. It is one openly advocated by Chinese officials and intellectuals, although they obviously regard these differences not as failures to live up to Western values but as the affirmation of a different system carrying different values or, perhaps more aptly, different virtues: principles of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness furthering a community of shared destiny.
The Belt and Road would provide an obvious conduit to export important elements of China’s political regime. In Ethiopia, for example, ZTE Corporation has already sold technology and provided training to monitor mobile phones and Internet activity and in Kenya Huawei is partnering with the government to construct “safe cities” that leverage thousands of surveillance cameras feeding data into a public security cloud. And when it comes to the global debate on human rights and democracy, it hardly needs to be stressed that countries beholden to China’s financial largesse will be more likely to side with it.20
Seen from Beijing, the new world order would be replacing a model whose failures have become all too obvious. State Councilor Yang Jiechi observed in November 2017 that it had become “increasingly difficult for Western governance concepts, systems, and models to keep up with the new international situation.” Western-led global governance, he argued, had “malfunctioned,” and the accumulation of “various ills” showed the system had reached a point “beyond redemption.”21 Humanity is facing huge natural, technological, economic, social, and security challenges. Solutions to these problems will require us to pool resources, plans, and development mechanisms across the world, but existing models seem increasingly unable to deliver them. Collective decisions to fight climate change are weak and insufficient. Many countries have entered long periods of state failure or civil wars and the international community seems closer to giving up on peace efforts altogether than to brokering a negotiated
solution. As a result, terrorism has become an existential threat to many societies and the number of refugees worldwide keeps growing. Western efforts arguably made things worse, as in the case of recent military interventions in the Middle East. Global tensions are as high as in the worst moments of the Cold War, with the difference that we now lack an adequate framework to address and minimize them.
Chinese authorities thus have some ground to argue that the world as a whole is facing a dire governance crisis, that the West has run out of ideas and therefore that it is perhaps time for others to take up the task. “Western countries have frequently been limited by their own theories of international cooperation, either believing it requires the presence of a hegemon to be viable, or that it can only take place under the auspices of Western democratic models. The model of international cooperation that China advances, meanwhile, is naturally non-hegemonic and open to a diversity of political systems.”22 Following the 19th Party Congress, Foreign Minister Wang Yi elaborated on the CPC’s approach to global leadership, stating that “China will actively explore a way of resolving hotspot issues with Chinese characteristics and play a bigger and more constructive role in upholding world stability.” This implies that the country will become proactive in regions in crisis, perhaps intensifying its efforts there due to the growing number of Chinese workers and investments abroad. In Afghanistan, Beijing seems to have adopted a transactional, flexible approach—implying an alternative to the Western development model. Beijing may provide less aid to Afghanistan than Western countries, but its aid is delivered quickly and without preconditions. “Resolving hotspot issues with Chinese characteristics” also indicates that “China wants to engage with different stakeholders in hotspot regions as compared to countries in the West that differentiate between democracies and dictators.”23 During the drafting of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which set development priorities for the UN’s 193 member states, China was among those opposing a goal that called for “freedom of media, association, and speech.” Chinese resistance helped to ensure that the goals adopted in September 2015 featured much vaguer language and entirely missed media independence or the freedoms of speech and association.