December 10, 2006
IN NOVEMBER, the leaders of 48 African states gathered in Beijing, welcomed by gorgeous friezes, triumphalist slogans and billboards featuring the continent's finest-looking flamingos, elephants and giraffes, all buffeted by the fierce Siberian winds that swept garbage and the last of the Autumn foliage across the capital's ring roads. It was incongruous, shivering under the well-lit glow of Africa's best beaches, gazing into the pristine blue ocean from a sea of freezing Beijingers bloated by their winter overcoats and nauseous with exhaust fumes.
Since then, with the world trying to render the new geopolitical alignments into traditional concepts, China has been forced to defend its activities throughout Africa. Almost every week a Foreign Ministry spokesperson reels off the usual objections to accusations of colonial rapaciousness in Zambia or Chad, pointing out - quite reasonably - that China and Africa have both been the victims of imperialist aggression over the years, trotting out the usual catchphrases about "double wins" and "mutual interest" and worrying - as always - about the way China is always being misunderstood and misrepresented abroad. Meanwhile, when it is accused of propping up rogue regimes, it says that, on the contrary, it is practicing its principle of "non-interference", a stance honed - through bitter experience - during a period when overseas powers tampered wantonly with its own "internal affairs".
China, as we all know, is making a big scene on the world stage right now. After half a century being ripped asunder by foreign powers, and then another three decades of international isolationism, it has now gathered all its latent strength and focused it on becoming a world power, thereby terrifying a global population weaned on the late-Cold War idea that more than a billion healthy Chinese people might actually pose a threat to their economic and political wellbeing.
And it is this that Chinese leaders have been addressing over the last few years, taking pains to present the anxieties of traditional big players like the United States and Europe as outmoded and unjust, and explaining that its ordinary commercial aspirations are being unfairly maligned by a multitude of "China Threat theorists" unable to accept the idea that China has an equal right to a strong economy and a say in international affairs.
First of all, there were worries about the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a loose security alliance formed five years ago with Russia and a number of Central Asian republics. There followed a number of mutterings in Moscow and Beijing about replacing the "unipolar" order with a new "multipolar" arrangement. Then came China's relationships with Iran and North Korea.
It isn't just China's diplomacy that has come under attack. The United States has been accusing China of ramping up its military spending to unacceptable levels, obviously untroubled by the fact that US military spending is still significantly higher. Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said that the minds of a small number of Americans "still linger in the Cold War era".
And it isn't just the Americans. China's ambassador to Moscow is constantly being asked about Chinese immigration into Siberia and the territorial threats posed by China's growing might. Isvestia quoted one rather extreme Russian academic last year as saying that China posed a challenge not just to Russia but to the whole of "Euro-Atlantic civilisation". At the same time, in Kazakhstan, China's efforts to buy more oil are at risk of being thwarted by local opponents, who China accuses - once again - of being "China Threat theorists".
Meanwhile, China's theorists talk darkly about the "environmental threat theory", in which China's "peaceful rise" to prosperity is believed to pose unprecedented risks to the world's fragile ecological balance, growing beyond its means and pumping irresponsibly large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
For China, always keen to stress the virtues of continuity, nothing really has changed. China has always been sympathetic towards Africa, and now has the might and wherewithal to act upon it. China has always been unfairly maligned on the international stage, they say, and treated like a second-class citizen by the traditional powers, who are now using all the arguments in their arsenal - including WTO trading rules and the perils of global warming - in order to stunt China's growth.
China, said vice-Premier Wu Yi during the Sino-US Strategic Dialogue in December, is going to be too preoccupied with domestic concerns to pose any sort of threat abroad. It was a repeat of a message given to George W. Bush by Hu Jintao earlier in the year. Time will tell whether or not the misunderstandings can be overcome.
