by Bruno Maçães
The Belt and Road represents a major change in developmental philosophy, an alternative development model, a complete break with the ideas now dominant in western-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where development is no longer seen as bricks-and-mortar building of factories and bridges, but as institution-building and policy change. As Branko Milanovic puts it, the Belt and Road proposes an activist view of development: “you need roads for farmers to bring their goods, you need fast railroads, bridges to cross the rivers, tunnels to link communities living at different ends of a mountain.” And it will not deal in any of the moralizing prescriptions about institutions, rule of law, transparency, local empowerment and so on that now dominate Western views on development. “While in some quarters, this may be thought as a defect,” Milanovic concludes, “in others, it may be considered a plus: it will clearly distinguish between mutual economic self-interest and other political or cultural domains.”24
The number one question is whether China will succeed in reshaping the global order or, alternatively, whether that order might fracture into two opposing and irreconcilable visions, the defining mark of the fourth scenario in my classification. Remarkably, the Belt and Road could prove a winning strategy in that scenario as well, thus illustrating what a flexible tool it can be. As trade tensions between China and the US intensified in June 2018, officials in Beijing argued that China should press ahead with the initiative as a way to secure export markets and diversify from its excessive reliance on the American market. Shoring up relations with important customers along the Belt and Road was seen as a way to preempt US attempts to turn them against China in the case of a protracted economic conflict between the two countries. In July 2018 China’s State Council issued a revealing set of import guidelines as trade tensions escalated with the US. Companies should “look to Belt and Road countries as a new source of imports, strengthen strategic cooperation, and increase imports of high-quality products that meet the needs of upgraded domestic consumption in order to expand the scale of trade.”25 From January to May, China imported 1.1 trillion yuan in goods from countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, an increase of 15.1% year-on-year, and 3.4% points higher than the overall growth rate of imports. Instead of integrating into the existing world order, China could be creating a separate economic bloc, with different dominant companies and technologies, and governed by rules, institutions, and trade patterns dictated by Beijing.26
A balance between China and the United States may take place within the framework of common values and principles or it may be organized around fundamental differences on the question of the world order. Increasingly, it seems that Chinese leaders regard the ability to break with the liberal world order as a measure of their success and the Belt and Road as the main tool to bring about an alternative vision.
Convergence was a powerful idea, perhaps the most powerful foreign policy idea of the last three decades. As Thomas Wright puts it, everyone or almost everyone believed that as countries embraced globalization their political systems would become more liberal and democratic. “Citizens of other nations believed it, too, including many Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians. It mattered not whether you were on the left or the right; almost everyone bought into the basic notion of convergence, even if they were unfamiliar with the term.”27 Very few believe it today, at least when it comes to China. In the West, the recent decision to abolish presidential term limits, opening the way for Xi Jinping to rule for life, made it clear that China is treading its own path. Whatever liberal currents there have been in the past, they have been marginalized in the power struggle within China.
Once we get rid of what Wright calls the “myth of convergence,” the stakes become much higher. America and China are separated not only by divergent interests, some of which could conceivably be reconciled, but by incompatible visions for the future of Asia and the world. China’s current rulers may not be trying actively to spread their own unique blend of repressive politics and a mixed economy, but as they have become richer and stronger they have begun to act in ways that inspire and strengthen friendly regimes, while potentially weakening the institutions of young and developing democracies.28
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The strategic issue today is which paradigm of international relations will ultimately prevail. On the one hand, we see a return to a vision of global politics as marked by a renewed competition for spheres of influence. This is the paradigm of national interests and its defining characteristic is the absence of common or overlapping perspectives. On the other hand, however much their influence has been attenuated, it is still the case that common institutions and cooperative relations dominate most relations between states. Globalization has not retreated, interdependence has intensified and states must still engage in multiple cooperative endeavors. From this perspective, China is certainly right to emphasize ideas of interdependence and the United States and Europe will regret not offering rival initiatives that can promote the same goals. The struggle to find common perspectives and ways to manage common challenges and problems continues unabated. It is perhaps less formalized, more chaotic and, as a result, its outcomes have become correspondingly uncertain or even unpredictable.
The belief in universal values is a fair description of how many in the West see world politics, but this vision is increasingly difficult to sustain. In the case of Russia, the rejection of Western values is complete and definitive. In a first stage, Russian leaders still spoke approvingly of adopting modern European norms and standards, even if this was always combined with the assertion that a “common European home” would be multipolar and could not simply absorb Russia into existing structures. After the Ukraine crisis, the break went much deeper and the Kremlin has even flirted with the notion that Russia is now much more interested in its relations with China than in its old and halting movement towards Europe. As for the question of whether China and Russia may be somehow ordained to come into conflict—a question I am repeatedly asked—it is critical to keep in mind that they both see their priority as the creation of a new, multipolar world order. Such an order is, by definition, one where different actors struggle to preserve and extend their spheres of influence, something about which China and Russia might well have disagreements—but for the next two decades they will be focused on the former question of what kind of world order will prevail.
In China the European Union and the United States face an even greater challenge. While Russian revisionism may still be shrugged off as incapable of durable consequences for the global order—Russia might after all become an increasingly marginal state, incapable of solving its modernization problems—China now offers an alternative model with an increasingly global appeal. In the past, the belief that China would ultimately follow the adoption of a capitalist market economy with the corresponding conversion to liberal democracy helped define Western foreign policy. That particular illusion has been abandoned. We realize much better now that even countries on the same modernization path may end up in very different places. On the one hand, the very idea of a modern society now appears to us as far more capacious than hitherto. Its basic elements—abstract social relations and the widespread use of technology—are compatible with a myriad of different ways of life. Even the path taken by Western societies could easily reveal junctures where different alternatives might have been pursued.
Washington’s strategy of drawing China in—it may sound odd, but for a long time China’s isolation and poverty rather than Chinese influence were seen as a major threat to global stability—and helping it along a trajectory of economic growth in the hope that a growing middle class would in time push for democratic reforms, turned out to be a failure. Above all, it was a failure of imagination, revealing of a deep incapacity to understand the world on its own terms and to step out of rigid ideological models. Nothing in the history of Western political and economic models allows us to believe that current solutions were preordained
, and if they were not preordained for us they certainly are not inevitable for Chinese society. But it was also a failure of practical politics. China was by far the greatest beneficiary of global trade and economic arrangements over the past three decades. A study by the MIT economist David Autor and colleagues calculated that Chinese competition cost the US some 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011, battering factory towns that made labor-intensive goods.29 Trying to convince Congress to vote in favor of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, President Bill Clinton had argued in the spring of 2000 that China was not simply “agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom,” and realizing the vision of “a world full of free markets, free elections and free peoples working together.” As far as predictions go, this turned out to be spectacularly wrong. As James Mann argued in his The China Fantasy, American policymakers found in the myth of convergence a powerful anesthetic and tranquilizer, allowing them to defend the status quo on the grounds that China’s exposure to the benefits of globalization would lead the country to embrace democratic institutions and support the American-led world order. Instead, Mann predicted, China would remain an authoritarian country, and its success would encourage other authoritarian regimes to resist pressures to change.30
Western decision-makers were willing to agree to an informal bargain where China would receive Western technology under the assumption that it would be just as open to Western political and economic ideas. The second half of the bargain never materialized. The United States and the European Union now find themselves in the position of having to develop a new China strategy practically overnight, as they try to catch up with the Belt and Road rollercoaster.
On the other hand, the choices made in the West—Western values but also technical solutions only loosely related to those values—have lost their immediacy and appeal. The 2008 financial crisis, the rise of populism, the growing inability to deal with the consequences of a diminished global status—all these moments have awakened Western self-doubt where before only missionary zeal was manifest.
Chinese elites—and broader tendencies in Chinese public opinion tend to follow them—implicitly believe that to move closer to Western values or to attempt to imitate the West in different areas would be tantamount to abdicating China’s edge, opting to compete on territory defined by the West and therefore on terms clearly tilted in its favor. As a recent report puts it, if in the eighteenth century a Chinese emperor famously explained to a British embassy that he had no need for Western goods, the view in China today is that the country has no need for Western culture, ideas and values.31
Two issues stand out and will have critical consequences for relations between China and the West. First, on the question of reciprocity, the West now recognizes that China is unlikely to accept at home those norms of economic openness and market governance from which it benefits when its companies operate in the American and European markets. The difficulty here is that full reciprocity can only be established if the West renounces all pretense to the universality of its own values and starts to exclude China from the purview of a system of norms once intended for all. Closing the borders to Chinese investment or applying new tariffs and regulatory barriers to Chinese exports on the grounds that China does the same may serve different purposes: it could be an attempt to influence China to change its ways or, on the contrary, a measure meant to protect Western markets from Chinese intrusion. In practice we are likely to end up with some combination of these two goals. A multipolar world system would be based on different spheres of influence, as different actors pursue independent paths, even if they are also able—in limited areas—to influence and shape each other’s system of norms.
The second major issue is directly related to security and the role of international law. As China pushes its own national interest in such conflict areas as the South China Sea and its disputed border areas with India, the West—in this case the European Union more than the United States—has an important stake in defending the status of international law and rules-based methods for conflict resolution, but the challenge in this case is that those positions will increasingly be impossible to defend if the European Union continues lagging behind China and the United States in hard power. Conversely, if Europeans come to a common understanding that their values now need to be supported with better tools of power projection, might that conclusion not raise doubts about whether the EU is sacrificing its own values in response to a new world of cut-throat competition?
The National Security Strategy approved by President Trump in December 2017 radically breaks with the traditional strategy of convergence: “The United States helped expand the liberal economic trading system to countries that did not share our values, in the hopes that these states would liberalize their economic and political practices and provide commensurate benefits to the United States. Experience shows that these countries distorted and undermined key economic institutions without undertaking significant reform of their economies or politics. They espouse free trade rhetoric and exploit its benefits, but only adhere selectively to the rules and agreements.”32 The document advocates that the United States distinguish between those countries that adhere to the same values and those that do not. With like-minded states competition should happen in the “economic domain,” but with other states competition is taken to the political level, where it should be conducted through “enforcement measures.” Every year—the document argues—countries such as China steal intellectual property valued at hundreds of billion of dollars, an economic and security risk to which the United States will respond with counterintelligence and law enforcement activities to curtail intellectual property theft by all sources, while exploring new legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent and prosecute violations. This is a world where competition, not cooperation is the predominant reality. Values are less the common perspective of all nations than a specific way of life targeted by one’s enemies and adversaries. They are antithetical. As the strategy puts it in a crucial passage, “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”33
We are thus at a critical juncture when the language of values may enter a period of crisis. Antithetical values are a difficult concept to defend. It may be seen as internally contradictory: if each state actor defends its own set of values, it can no longer endow them with universal significance. Valid only for the agent asserting them, they may become too dependent on the logic of state power and conflict. In order to rebuild the concept of values on a new plane, the effort to bridge differences and find common ground will have to begin anew. At the current moment, that effort still seems to lie far in the future.
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What changed in the last two or three years is that China is no longer satisfied with waging an ideological war at home—staving off Western challenges to party rule—but wants to take that war to the world stage. It can no longer be said that the Chinese are indifferent to how other peoples govern themselves. In his opening speech to the Communist Party’s 19th Congress in October 2017, Xi Jinping spoke frankly about posing an ideological challenge to Western liberal democracy. China is “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization,” providing “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development”.
The difficulty is not one of devising the contours of a specific Chinese model, but the sense that such a model would remain of limited validity or that only Western values can claim to be genuinely universal. Many in Russia, the Islamic world and elsewhere have tried to question that universality, but usually they do so by arguing that no political value can aspire to be universal. That may have been the line in Beijing as well, but the time now is to go on the offensive. Waiting for us in the near future, as the writer Jinghan Zeng argues, is a China that is likely to become the largest world economy, offering a distinct growth model backed up by military power,
and actively exporting its ideological beliefs. At the 19th Party Congress, Xi Jinping set “the mid-21st century” as the deadline to fulfill those promises.34
The Belt and Road calls for universal values of a new kind and Chinese authors have taken that task to heart. On the one hand, one can easily identify fractures within the Western political tradition. Roads not taken, contemporary contradictions, excesses and contagions of different kinds. Many of the flaws in that tradition have been explored in detail by Western authors. Their work stands ready to be used. On the other hand, traditional alternatives may be reconfigured and made to serve new purposes in a modern society. Chinese culture places wholeness and synthesis above individuality, traits that seem able to survive even as China becomes a fully modern society.