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How to deal with China is the biggest geopolitical challenge facing Britain and Western democracies in 2021, and one to which, so far, they have not provided a coherent response. China’s influence is growing rapidly around the world. It is predicted to overtake the United States as the largest economy by 2028. Its politicians, diplomats and military leaders display the bullish steadfastness of a new imperial superpower. This, they believe, is China’s time.
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Photograph: Xinhua / REX / Shutterstock
At the same time, China is becoming more suspicious and unpleasant. A recent Pew Global Attitude Survey found that negative sentiments are at their highest in Germany, South Korea and other advanced economies. Nearly three-quarters of Americans and Britons view China unfavorably, up from 35% and 16% respectively in 2002. Confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping “to do the right thing in world affairs” has collapsed.
China’s arrogant ambition and this concomitant increase in hostility are relatively new. In the case of Britain, it has only been five years since David Cameron hailed the beginning of a “golden age.” Back then, it seemed that China’s strength, measured in high tech, investment and trade, could be safely harnessed to the UK’s benefit. It was fondly believed that such collaboration would ultimately accelerate China’s transition from a one-party state to democracy.
The bursting of this bubble in 2020 was quick and painful. The sheer horror of the pandemic inevitably damaged China’s reputation. However, the hostile actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in downplaying the initial outbreak in Wuhan, thwarting legitimate WHO investigations, penalizing Australia for requiring an independent investigation, and exploiting the crisis commercially and politically were even more damaging.
Distressed citizens in Wuhan have been intimidated and threatened by the police for questioning the official handling of the Covid crisis. Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who reported on the early stages of the Wuhan outbreak, was jailed last week for four years for “causing fights and causing trouble.” State-controlled media continues to make sure inconvenient facts are suppressed.
A second phenomenon was central to China’s fall from grace in 2020: the CCP’s increasingly outspoken disregard for democratic freedoms and human rights. Every day seemed to bring new evidence of his arrogant nonchalance, whether it was incredible denials of torture and forced sterilization in labor camps in Xinjiang, a new crackdown in Tibet, or the persecution of Hong Kongers who opposed oppressive security laws.
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Xi’s relentless consolidation of power around himself has cast a relentless spotlight on the Orwellian intrusions of the state into the domestic lives of its citizens. One example is the way the ubiquitous Weixin (WeChat) messaging app is used to monitor private conversations, censor key words or phrases, and report suspicious users to the police. In Xi’s cowardly new world, even the most innocent Winston are guilty until the party finds otherwise.
Such developments also led to a growing understanding that the behavior of this nouveau riche superpower is not much different from that of the empires that preceded it. Humiliated neighbors like Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines can testify to Beijing’s harassment. China almost started a border war with India last year. I still could. Its gunboats routinely violate international law in the South China Sea.
Non-aligned developing countries that traditionally viewed China as a benign ally now have reason to reconsider. Xi’s flagship Belt and Road initiative, a $ 1 trillion (£ 760bn) global infrastructure and investment project, is caught in a cash crisis. American researchers say that loans from two Chinese state-controlled banks plummeted from $ 75 billion in 2016 to $ 4 billion in 2019. Countries affected by the pandemic in Africa and elsewhere are scrambling to renegotiate Chinese debt. .
In 2020, Donald Trump went out of his way to blame China for everything from Covid to factory closures. His scapegoat was cynical and unfair. Similarly, Boris Johnson, under pressure from the United States, abruptly turned on tech giant Huawei, allegedly for security reasons. Some analysts say there is more than a puff of calculated “reds under the bed” from the alarming cold war in Western behavior. They are right.
However, there is little doubt that 2021 will see a concerted Western pullback. Measures being debated range from sanctions on individuals to bans on Chinese investment in strategic industries and new laws linking bilateral trade with human rights. Joe Biden, who considers China a “strategic competitor”, proposes an alliance of democracies to counter its global influence. Like Britain, the United States plans another political “tilt” toward the Indo-Pacific.
Much of the Western disgrace accumulated over Beijing is due to its own actions and is fully deserved. A potentially dangerous crisis can be avoided if Xi takes a step back. You should do it. More than other factors, Xi’s expansive and aggressively nationalist policies abroad and the Mao-like dictatorship at home have fueled the deterioration of relations. The calculations of the “legitimacy of performance” that keep the CCP in power suggest that he think again.
© Photography: Xinhua / REX / Shutterstock
President Xi Jinping: a ‘relentless consolidation of power’.
Xi has overreached. I should quit the big man act and narrow things down. But Britain and its partners must be equally lucid. The West simply cannot afford a second cold war. You must find ways to work with China, not fight it.
