Shyam Saran: The Beijing paradox

China's unprecedented effort to prepare global public opinion for its rise to pre-eminence

A recent visit to Beijing as an invitee to the Fourth World Peace Forum proved to be a welcome opportunity to feel the pulse of an emerging great power. The forum is the brainchild of Professor Yan Xuetong, a scholar celebrated for recommending the abandonment of Deng Xiaoping's famous dictum of "keeping a low profile and hiding brightness", and instead adopting a more activist profile of "striving for achievement" which goes together with a strong political leadership. The World Peace Forum is only one of several high profile international gatherings that China has been convening over recent years. There is now an annual Xiangshan Forum, bringing together well-known international political and academic personages from across the world; another recent addition is an annual closed door brainstorming conclave for exchange of views on the current global landscape and its likely trajectory in the coming years and decades. And there is, of course, the well-known Boao Forum, which is a kind of a Chinese equivalent of the World Economic Forum. These are all platforms which allow Chinese scholars and thinkers as well as political leaders, to interact, often in an unusually informal and open environment, with their counterparts in many foreign countries. They create opportunities for China to keep track of emerging trends and perspectives both in the Asian region and the world. They are also useful in conveying China's own perspectives to influential opinion-makers in key foreign countries. This new found openness and willingness to engage is unusual in a one party-state, otherwise intolerant of dissent and with strict social and media controls. It is difficult to think of such range and density of out-reach in democratic India. China is going all out to mobilise international public opinion behind its foreign policy aims and achieving some success. There is also a parallel effort to get the world used to the idea of China as a great power, assuming its rightful and historically pre-eminent place in the international order.

The many interactions, both formal and informal at the World Peace Forum pointed to certain consistent elements in China's current world view:

• The international order is inherently hierarchic and is currently moving towards a new bi-polar structure, headed by the US and China. Furthermore, China's emergence as a great power, in the same league as the US, is a historical inevitability since, except for the past two centuries, China was the pre-eminent power in Asia and the wealthiest country in the world. At the Forum, this came out clearly in Foreign Minister Wang Yi's replies to a question from a Japanese participant. Wang Yi said that Sino-Japanese relations would improve once Japan reconciled itself to the fact that China was today a bigger economy than Japan and that this gap would continue to expand in the future. He added that a Japanese friend himself had conveyed to him that it should not be difficult for his country to accept China's emergence as a great power because Japan had lived through the centuries in the shadow of Chinese power, except for the aberrant period when China was weak and vulnerable. In a different context a prominent Chinese scholar pointed out how Putin's Russia, too, had, until recently, been resisting China's rise as a powerful neighbour, unable to accept that China was now richer and more powerful than Russia. Sino-Russian partnership had progressed rapidly once Russia had accepted and reconciled to this reality.

I wonder how Serge Ivanov, the former Russian NSA who was attending the Forum, would have reacted to this rather gratuitous put down of his country!

• Despite this clear and candid articulation of how China sees its own emergence in relation to other major powers, there was nevertheless a sense of caution in dealing with the United States. With an eye to President Xi Jinping's forthcoming visit to the United States, Wang Yi made three important pronouncements which may appear somewhat contradictory to the positions referred to above.

One, he said China was not out to overturn the existing order because China itself was one of the founders and architects of the post-Second World War international system. This is of interest because, of course, it was the KMT-ruled Republic of China which had been a signatory to the San Francisco Treaty, which China had always considered an illegitimate interloper. Now China is, in a sense, articulating a Chinese identity and a historical continuity that goes beyond the governments that have ruled the country.

Two, he claimed that China was not a "trouble-maker", but rather a country which was using its enhanced economic and military capabilities to contribute to international peace and security; and

Three, China was not a "free-rider", but willing to generate and distribute global public goods, whether in the form of peacekeeping missions or development cooperation, such as through the One Belt One Road initiative or the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. He added, as reassurance, that these initiatives and institutions were not to supplant but to supplement existing processes and institutions.

Despite this reassuring posture, Wang Yi did not budge on the South China Sea issue, saying that any compromise would be a "betrayal of our ancestors and of succeeding generations".

On China-India relations, one was asked why India had not signed on to the One Belt One Road initiative. I said we were not clear about its scope and implications and had reservations about the Sino-Pakistan Economic Corridor traversing Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Another query was over India's reluctance to admit China to SAARC even while China was being magnanimous enough to allow India's membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). I pointed out that China could engage in cooperation with SAARC as an Observer and that India was being admitted to SCO only after regional cooperation among its current members had achieved a certain scale and density. SAARC I said was still thin on intra-regional cooperation. And a Chinese scholar, when asked where India fitted in the hierarchical order that China envisaged, said for China, India was a "swing State" which ought to be kept from leaning too close to the United States or straying too far from its traditional non-alignment. This may require China, he acknowledged, to make greater efforts to woo India and this is what its leaders were committed to.

So, is being non-aligned but threatening to become aligned the right posture for India? Something to think about!

The writer is a former foreign secretary and current chairman, RIS and senior fellow, CPR