The Chinese Century

The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn‘t seen atrain in years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink façadecrumbling away; the local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialistsfounded long ago is a distant memory, victim of a civil war that lastedfor 27 years. Dondo‘s fortunes, however, may be looking up. This month,work is scheduled to start on the local section of the line that linksthe town to the deep harbor at Luanda, Angola‘s capital. The work willbe done by Chinese construction firms, and as two of their workerssurvey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his feelings."Thank you, God," he says, "for the Chinese."

That sentiment, orsomething like it, can be heard a lot these days in Africa, whereChinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textilefactories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil,where Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming exporttrade. And you hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River innorthern Thailand, where locals used to subsist on whatever they couldmake from farming and smuggling--until Chinese engineers began blastingthe rapids and reefs on the upper Mekong so that large boats could takeChinese-manufactured goods to markets in Southeast Asia. "Before theChinese came here, you couldn‘t find any work," says Ba, a Burmeseimmigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from his task haulingsacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for Bangkok."Now I can send money back home to my family."

Youmay know all about the world coming to China--about the hordes offoreign businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showroomsin places like Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less abouthow China is going out into the world. Through its foreign investmentsand appetite for raw materials, the world‘s most populous country hasalready transformed economies from Angola to Australia. Now China isturning that commercial might into real political muscle, striding ontothe global stage and acting like a nation that very much intends tobecome the world‘s next great power. In the past year, China hasestablished itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations withNorth Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape thefuture of central Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe andLatin America and contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping missionin Lebanon. With the U.S. preoccupied with the threat of Islamicterrorism and struggling to extricate itself from a failing war inIraq, China seems ready to challenge--possibly even undermine--some ofWashington‘s other foreign policy goals, from halting the genocide inDarfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China‘s international rolehas won the attention of the new Democratic majority in Congress. TomLantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign AffairsCommittee and a critic of Beijing‘s human-rights record, told TIME thathe intends to hold early hearings on China, on everything from itscensorship of the Internet to its policies toward Tibet. "China isthinking in much more active terms about its strategy," says KennethLieberthal of the University of Michigan, who was senior director atthe National Security Council Asia desk under President Bill Clinton,"not only regionally, but globally, than it has done in the past. Wehave seen a sea change in China‘s fundamental level of confidence."

Blinkfor a moment and you can imagine that--as many Chinese would tell thetale--after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civilwar, revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a datewith destiny. "The Chinese wouldn‘t put it this way themselves," saysLieberthal. "But in their hearts I think they believe that the 21stcentury is China‘s century."

That‘s quite something to believe.Is it true? Or rather--since the century is yet young--will it be true?If so, when, and how would it happen? How comfortable would such adevelopment be for the West? Can China‘s rise be managed peaceably bythe international system? Or will China so threaten the interests ofestablished powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th centuryand Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going tobe nagging at us for some time--but a peaceful, prosperous future forboth China and the West depends on trying to answer them now.

WHAT CHINA WANTS--AND FEARS

Ifyou ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear about China--20%of the world‘s population, gazillions of brainy engineers, serriedranks of soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack ofdoom--remember this: China is still a poor country (GDP per head in2005 was $1,700, compared with $42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders faceso many problems that it is reasonable to wonder how they ever sleep.The country‘s urban labor market recently exceeded by 20% the number ofnew jobs created. Its pension system is nonexistent. China is anenvironmental dystopia, its cities‘ air foul beyond imagination and itsclean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and growing. Protests andriots by rural workers are measured in the tens of thousands each year.The most immediate priority for China‘s leadership is less how toproject itself internationally than how to maintain stability in asociety that is going through the sort of social and economic changethat, in the past, has led to chaos and violence.

And yet forall their internal challenges, the Chinese seem to want their nation tobe a bigger player in the world. In a 2006 poll conducted jointly bythe the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society, 87% ofChinese respondents thought their country should take a greater role inworld affairs. Most Chinese, the survey found, believed China‘s globalinfluence would match that of the U.S. within a decade. The moststriking aspect of President Hu Jintao‘s leadership has been China‘sremarkable success in advancing its interests abroad despite turmoil athome.

Surprisingly for those who thought they knew his type, Huhas placed himself at the forefront of China‘s new assertiveness. Hu,64, has never studied outside China and is steeped in the ways of theCommunist Party. He became a party member as a university student inthe early 1960s and headed the Communist Youth League in the poorwestern province of Gansu before becoming provincial party chief inGuizhou and later Tibet. Despite a public stiffness in front offoreigners, Hu has been a vigorous ambassador for China: the patternwas set in 2004, when Hu spent two weeks in South America--more timethan George W. Bush had spent on the continent in four years--andpledged billions of dollars in investments in Argentina, Brazil, Chileand Cuba. While Wen Jiabao, China‘s Premier, was visiting 15 countrieslast year, Hu spent time in the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco,Nigeria and Kenya. In a three-week period toward the end of 2006, heplayed host to leaders from 48 African countries in Beijing, went toVietnam for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit,slipped over to Laos for a day and then popped off for a six-day tourof India and Pakistan. For someone whose comfort zone is supposed to bedomestic affairs, that‘s quite a schedule. "Look at Africa, look atCentral America, look at parts of Asia," says Eberhard Sandschneider, aChina scholar who is head of the German Council on Foreign Relations."They are playing a global game now."

As itfollows Hu‘s lead and steps out in the world, what will be China‘spriorities? What does it want and what does it fear? The first item onthe agenda is straightforward: it is to be left alone. China brooks nointerference in its internal affairs, and its definition of what isinternal is not in doubt. The status of Tibet, for example, is aninternal matter; the Dalai Lama is not a spiritual leader but a"splittist" whose real aim is to break up China. As for Taiwan, Chinais prepared to tolerate all sorts of temporary uncertainties as to howits status might one day be resolved--but not the central point thatthere is only one China. Cross that line, and you will hear about it.

Thisdefense of its right to be free of interference has a corollary. Chinahas traditionally detested the intervention by the great powers inother nations‘ affairs. An aide to French President Jacques Chiractraces a new Chinese assertiveness to the U.S. invasion of Iraq,saying, "They felt they can‘t allow that sort of meddling in what theysee as a nation‘s internal affairs." But the same horror of anythingthat might smell of foreign intervention was evident long before Iraq.I visited Beijing during the Kosovo war in 1999, and it wasn‘t just thenotorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that year thatoutraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO‘s rearranging whatwas left of Yugoslavia. Wasn‘t the cause a good one? That didn‘t matter.

China‘scommitment to nonintervention means that it doesn‘t inquire closelyinto the internal arrangements of others. When all those Africanleaders met in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by2009, train 15,000 professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000students, and help Africa‘s health-care and farming sectors. But as a2005 report by the Council on Foreign Relations notes, "China‘s aid andinvestments are attractive to Africans precisely because they come withno conditionality related to governance, fiscal probity or otherconcerns of Western donors." In 2004, when an International MonetaryFund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected corruption, Chinaponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and money toZimbabwe‘s President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused ofmassive human-rights violations.

Most notoriously, China hasconsistently used its place as a permanent member of the U.N. SecurityCouncil to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the Sudanesegovernment to stop the ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinesestate-owned company owns 40% of the oil concession in the south ofSudan, and there are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops there protectingBeijing‘s oil interests. (By contrast, despite the noise that Chinamade when one of its soldiers was killed by an Israeli air strike on aU.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there are only 1,400 Chinese troopsserving in all U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide.) "Is China playinga positive role in developing democracy [in Africa]?" asks Peter Draperof the South African Institute of International Affairs. "Largely not."Human Rights Watch goes further: China‘s policies in Africa, it claimedduring the Beijing summit, have "propped up some of the continents‘worst human-rights abusers."

China doesn‘tsupport unsavory regimes for the sake of it. Instead China‘s keyobjective is to ensure a steady supply of natural resources, so thatits economy can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lidon unrest at home. That is why China has reached out to resource-richdemocracies like Australia and Brazil as much as it has to suchinternational pariahs as Sudan and Burma, both of which haveunderdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There‘s nothing particularlysurprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave whendomestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustaintheir economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behaviorin Africa might remember their own history on the continent.) But Chinahas never needed such resources in such quantities before, so itspoliticians have never had to learn the skills of getting them withoutlooking like a dictator‘s friend. Now they have to.

WORKING WITH CHINA

Assuminga bigger global presence has forced Beijing to learn the art ofinternational diplomacy. Until recently, China‘s foreign policyconsisted of little more than bloodcurdling condemnations of hegemonicimperialism. "This is a country that 30 years ago pretty much sawthings in zero-sum terms," says former Deputy Secretary of State RobertZoellick. "What was good for the U.S. or the West was bad for China,and vice versa." Those days are gone. Wang Jisi of Beijing University,one of China‘s top foreign policy scholars, says one of the mostimportant developments of 2006 was that the communiqué issued after akey conference on foreign affairs for top officials had no reference tothe tired old terms that have been standard in China‘s diplomaticvocabulary.

Washington would like Beijing to go further. In aspeech in 2005, Zoellick invited China to become a "responsiblestakeholder" in international affairs. China‘s national interest,Zoellick argued, should not be narrowly defined, but would be "muchbetter served by working with us to shape the future internationalsystem," on everything from intellectual-property rights to nuclearnonproliferation. Says Zoellick: "I‘m not sure anyone had ever put itquite in those terms, and it clearly had a bracing effect."

Thatwould imply that China‘s behavior has changed of late. Has it? A U.S.policymaker cautions, "It‘s important to see the ‘responsiblestakeholder‘ notion as a future vision of China." In practice, thisofficial says, "They‘ve been more helpful in some areas than others."When the stars align--when China‘s perception of its own nationalinterest matches what the U.S. and other international powersseek--that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North Korea, long aChinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S. AsNorth Korea‘s leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program inthe 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.--which wouldhave implied doing little to rein in Pyongyang--or stiffing its formerprotégé.

Hu‘s personal preferences seem tohave helped shape the choice. He is known to have been stinginglycritical of Kim in meetings with U.S. officials. Michael Green, seniordirector for Asian affairs at the National Security Council untilDecember 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups ofAmericans his skepticism about Kim‘s intentions. When the North finallytested a nuke last fall, China joined the U.S. and other regionalpowers in condemning Kim and supported a U.N. Security Councilresolution sanctioning Pyongyang. Says a senior U.S. official: "If youasked experts several years ago, Could you imagine China taking theseactions toward a longtime ally in cooperation with us and Japan? Mostpeople would have said no."

But nobody in Washington is gettingcarried away. Beijing has been helpful on North Korea because it‘s moreimportant to China that Pyongyang not provoke a regional nuclear armsrace than it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support. Contrast suchhelpfulness with China‘s behavior on the dispute over Iran‘s nuclearambitions. In December, China signed a $16 billion contract with Iranto buy natural gas and help develop some oil fields, and it hasconsistently joined Russia in refusing to back the tough sanctionsagainst Tehran sought by the U.S. and Europe. "It‘s hard to say China‘sbeen helpful on Iran," says a senior U.S. official, and there is littlesense that such an assessment will change any time soon.

Withinits own neighborhood, there are signs that China‘s behavior is changingin more constructive ways. China fought a war with India in 1962 andanother with Vietnam in 1979. For years, it supported communistmovements dedicated to undermining governments in nations such asIndonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Yet today China‘s relations with itsneighbors are nothing but sweetness and light, often at the expense ofthe U.S. Absorbed by the arc of crisis spreading from the Middle East,the U.S. is simply less visible in Southeast Asia than it once was, andChina is stepping into the vacuum.

While American exports toSoutheast Asia have been virtually stagnant for the past five years,Chinese trade with the region is soaring. In the northern reaches ofThailand and Laos, you can find whole towns where Mandarin has becomethe common language and the yuan the local currency. In Chiang Saen,signs in Chinese read CALL CHINA FOR ONLY 12 BAHT A MINUTE. A signoutside the Glory Lotus hotel advertises CLEAN, CHEAP ROOMs in Chinese.It is not aid from the U.S. but trade with China--carried on newhighways being built from Kunming in Yunnan province to Hanoi, Mandalayand Bangkok, or along a Mekong River whose channels are full of Chinesegoods--that is transforming much of Southeast Asia.

Noris China‘s smiling face visible only to its south. In a cordial statevisit last year, Hu reached out to India--an old rival with which itstill has some disputed borders. The two countries pledged to doubletrade by 2010 and agreed to bid jointly for global oil projects onwhich they had previously been competing. Hu has also sought to mendties with Japan, another longtime rival, with whom China‘s relationshave deteriorated in recent years. Last October, Hu met the newJapanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in Beijing just days after Abetook office, a visit Hu called a "turning point" in frosty relationsbetween the two countries and which Premier Wen described as a "windowof hope."

WHOSE CENTURY?

So, a China whose influence is growing but that is trying to ease old antagonisms--what‘s not to like?

Inone view, nothing at all, as long as China‘s rise remains peaceful,with China neither provoking others to rein in its power nor slippinginto outward aggression. And yet as remote as a confrontation seemstoday, there are some China watchers who fear a conflict with the Westcould still materialize in coming years. They point to two factors: themodernization of China‘s defense forces and the risk of war overTaiwan. The authoritative Military Balance, published annually by theInternational Institute for Strategic Studies in London, estimates thatChina‘s military spending has increased nearly 300% in the past decadeand from 1.08% of its GDP in 1995 to 1.55% in 2005. (By contrast, theU.S. spends 3.9% of its GDP on defense, and the U.S. economy is morethan five times as big as China‘s.) China‘s most recent defense whitepaper, published last month, showed a 15% rise in military spending inthe past year. Place such an increase in the context of Taiwan policyand you can start to feel queasy. The island has been governedindependently since the defeated forces of Chiang Kai-shek retreatedthere in 1949. Beijing wants to see the island reunited with themainland one day. The U.S., although it has a one-China policy and hasno formal diplomatic mission in Taiwan, is committed to defend Taiwanfrom an unprovoked attack by China.

In all likelihood, war overTaiwan is unlikely. After a miserable 200 years, China‘s prospects noware as bright as ever, the opportunities of its people improving eachyear. It would take a particularly stupid or evil group of leaders toput that glittering prize at risk in a war. Those in Taiwan who favorindependence--including its President Chen Shui-bian--have singularlyfailed to win the support of the Bush Administration. "China," saysHuang Jing of the Brookings Institution in Washington, "is nowbasically on the same page as the U.S. when it comes to Taiwan. Neitherwants independence for Taiwan. Both want peace and stability." China‘smilitary buildup is best seen as a corollary of changes in Chinesesociety. Where Chinese military doctrine was once based on human-waveattacks, it now stresses the killing power of technology. There‘snothing new, or particularly frightening, about such a transformation;it‘s what nations do all the time. If the Sioux hadn‘t learned how tohandle horses and shoot Winchesters, they wouldn‘t have wiped outCuster‘s forces at the Little Bighorn.

But otheraspects of China‘s rise are real and troubling. China is a one-partystate, not a democracy. Some U.S. policymakers and business leaderslike to say there is something inevitable about political change inChina--that as China gets richer, its population will press for moredemocratic freedoms and its ruling élite, mindful of the need forchange, will grant them. Could be. But China is becoming richer now,and if there is any sign of substantial political reform--or any signthat the absence of such reform is hurting China‘s economic growth--itis, to put it mildly, hard to find.

Does China‘s lack ofdemocracy necessarily threaten U.S. interests? One answer to thatquestion involves looking back to the cold war. The Soviet Union wasnot a democracy, and although the U.S. contested its power in all sortsof ways, American policymakers were content to live with the reality ofSoviet strength in the hope (correct, as it turned out) thatcommunism‘s appeal outside its borders would wither and Russia‘spolitical system would become more open. Is that how the U.S. shouldtreat a nondemocratic China? In the forthcoming book The China Fantasy,James Mann, an experienced China watcher now at the Johns HopkinsSchool of Advanced International Studies, warns that living with a morepowerful, nondemocratic Beijing would not be easy for the U.S. Incrucial ways, the U.S. has less leverage over China than it ever hadover the Soviet Union. China holds billions of dollars of U.S.government assets. American consumers have come to rely on cheap laborin China to provide goods at Wal-Mart‘s everyday low prices. The SovietUnion, by contrast, was an economic basket case: it had minimalforeign-exchange reserves and was desperate for U.S. and European hightechnology.

This lack of leverage over Chinese behavior may makefor an uncomfortable future. Mann sees a time when a powerful China notonly remains undemocratic but also sustains unpleasant regimes inpower, as it does today in such nations as Zimbabwe and Burma. Suchbehavior could make the world a colder place for freedom. Green, theformer National Security Council staff member, agrees that China "wantsto build speed bumps on the road to political globalization andliberalization" and is "particularly against any attempt to spreaddemocracy." Sandschneider, the German China expert, says the Chinese"talk about peace and cooperation and development, which sounds greatto European ears--but underneath is a question of brutal competitionfor energy, for resources and for markets."

How can thatcompetition be managed? And how can the U.S. and its allies convincethe Chinese not to support rogue regimes? The key may be to identifymore areas in which China‘s national interests align with the West‘sand where cooperation brings mutual benefits. China competesaggressively for natural resources. But as David Zweig and Bi Jianhaiof the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology argued in ForeignAffairs in 2005, it would make just as much sense for the U.S. andChina--both gas guzzlers--to pool forces and figure out how to taprenewable sources of energy and conserve existing supplies. For astart, the U.S. could work to get China admitted into the InternationalEnergy Agency and the G-8, where such topics are debated.

TheU.S. can also encourage China‘s leaders to recognize that irresponsiblepolicies will diminish China‘s long-term influence. As China expandsits global reach, it will find itself exposed to all sorts ofpressures--of the sort it has never had to face before--to behaveitself. Already, there are voices in Africa warning China that it isacting just like the white imperialists of old. In the Zambian city ofKabwe, where the Chinese own a manganese smelter, the local shops arestocked with Chinese-made clothes rather than local ones. In theoil-rich delta region of Nigeria, where Chinese rigs have a reputationfor poor safety and employment practices, a militia group recentlywarned the Chinese they would be targeted for attack unless theychanged their ways.

There are some glimmers that such criticismis having an impact in Beijing. The Chinese, says Joshua Kurlantzick ofthe China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,"are beginning to understand that some of their policies in Africa areturning people off" and have quietly turned to the U.S. and Britain forhelp in devising foreign-aid policies. A former senior U.S. officialsays Chinese officials have been closely monitoring the growinginternational distaste over its support for the Sudanese government.Congressman Lantos says younger Chinese diplomats "are embarrassed thatthe Chinese government is prepared to do any business with Sudan foroil despite what is happening in Darfur." Slowly, slowly, engagementwith China, debate with its leaders--and the hope that as they see moreof the world, they will understand why so many want to shundictatorships--may all act to shade Chinese behavior.

Suchengagement will always be controversial. Like it or not, it involvescozying up to a nation that is not a democracy--and does not look as ifit will become one soon. But China is now so significant a player inthe global economy that the alternative--waiting until China changesits ways--won‘t fly. There is still time to hope that China‘s way intothe world will be a smooth one. Perhaps above anything else, the sheerscale of China‘s domestic agenda is likely to act as a brake on itsdoing anything dramatically destabilizing abroad.

On theoptimistic view, then, China‘s rise to global prominence can bemanaged. It doesn‘t have to lead to the sort of horror that accompaniedthe emerging power of Germany or Japan. Raise a glass to that, butdon‘t get too comfortable. There need be no wars between China and theU.S., no catastrophes, no economic competition that gets out of hand.But in this century the relative power of the U.S. is going to decline,and that of China is going to rise. That cake was baked long ago. [Thisarticle contains charts and graphs. Please see hardcopy or pdf.]