T N Ninan: Temptations of power

China is not only on the path to Great Power status, it also means to exercise its newfound muscle. What is difficult to understand is why it wants to behave like a rogue power when the world would want it to be a responsible force in global affairs. Consider the evidence, starting with its choice of friends — including two countries whom you would consider as a part of the “axis of evil”, Pakistan and North Korea. China has not only ignored its own treaty obligations and nuclear-enabled a known proliferator like Pakistan, it has also lent its tacit support to North Korea even as that country has been busy violating its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which China is a signatory.

In the economic sphere, few will quibble with the argument that China’s skewed (export-oriented) growth pattern has added to a global payments imbalance that is exacerbated by its mercantilist currency policy. In the technical field, it repeatedly tries to hack into other countries’ government and strategic computer systems. And in the commodities sphere, it has only recently been reported that it forced Japan to back down in the two countries’ most recent confrontation by signalling an informal blacklisting of Japan in the supply of rare metals (in which China has a virtual monopoly, and rare metals are crucial to many industries). Finally, in the geographic sphere, its claim to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea as a “core interest” is about as unilateralist as it gets.

It is, of course, inherent in the nature of power that you want to use it to either change the rules, or break them when convenient. Nor can it be argued that other great powers have not behaved in exactly the same way in the past. China itself has bitter memories of gunboat “diplomacy”, the opium wars, the Boxer uprising, and unequal treaties being forced on it by the great powers of the 19th century. The United States, as the pre-eminent power of the past century, was not particularly choosy about the rogue rulers whom it supported when it found that convenient (remember Pol Pot, and sundry puppet regimes in three continents). Indeed, President Bush’s unprovoked war on Iraq could be cited as a good example of power gone rogue. So, China is not charting untrodden paths.

Still, Beijing must ask itself whether it serves its own interest well by creating hostility or wariness in its spread-out neighbourhood, taking in countries all the way from Japan to India, with South Korea in between and Australia off on the side, and not to mention at least some members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (notably Vietnam). Of course, if you really have power on your side, you don’t have to spare too much concern for those whom you are shoving aside, but even in international affairs what goes round does come round.

It is not that there is no alternative course available. For all the unilateralist action that can and should be laid at Washington’s door, the US as a superpower has frequently worked in the interest of protecting the global commons — defending free trade, protecting open sea lanes, acting as a global policeman when no one else was willing to take on the role (Serbia, Somalia, etc.), and working even if selectively to protect human rights. Such stances create a soft power that is a useful corollary to hard power, because it encourages willing compliance by other countries and helps create and sustain alliances. And it cannot be that China, with its strong civilisational strengths, would not see any self-interest in exercising some soft power.