Canadian Security Inteligent Services: CHINA AND ITS NEW PLACE IN THE WORL

What is known

Observers and commentators know for certain that China has “arrived”. Its rise has been facilitated by extraordinary aggregate economic growth and a projected growth rate over the medium term which will outpace much of the industrial world. China’s rise, as alluded to above, entails more than just economic growth, however. Based on expert discussions at the CSIS conference, it is possible to identify with greater certainty three additional characteristics of China’s trajectory.

First, China’s rapid and sustained economic growth over the past several decades has afforded it a greater stock of economic power in the global system. Its scale is a tremendous comparative advantage: cheaper though increasingly skilled labour, financial capacity and the promise of an enormous domestic market. China’s fiscal capacity and foreign exchange reserves are also a tremendous source of leverage in global money governance, even if Chinese leaders see excessive holdings in U.S. dollars to be a constraint and that the lack of RMB convertibility restrains a more aggressive Chinese global financial position. Nonetheless, the arrival of China, at least economically, means that the country enjoys greater autonomy in the international economy and a broader array of economic policy instruments available to Chinese policy-makers.

Second, China’s engagement with the international system is truly global. China’s geostrategic management of relations with the U.S., the EU, India, the rest of the global South and its neighbours in Asia has become more complex, requiring greater diplomatic sophistication. China’s foreign relations complexities are rooted in how it engages various parts of the world differently, be it managing China’s energy dependency through “oil diplomacy” with Russia, Latin America and Eurasia, strategically engaging aid diplomacy with parts of the less developed world, or challenging the status quo inside international organisations such as United Nations institutions which govern global security, trade and the environment. Despite having to manage its global geostrategic relations in varied and complex ways, depending on the region or country, China consistently and invariably maintains a principled commitment to sovereignty and territorial integrity. China thinks of Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Macao in not dissimilar ways; they are, or ought to be, a territorial part of a sovereign China. Furthermore, China’s military capability is growing, though still well short of the military capabilities of the U.S. One also knows that, save concerted efforts in global public diplomacy, China still poorly projects soft power in the West and even amongst its Asian neighbours.

Third, it is very unlikely that China will democratise any time soon. It is well known now that with China’s rapid economic growth and political development, protest movements have emerged in its countryside and cities. The targets of such protests are varied, as is the impact of such movements on politics and the economy. The state’s response to protest movements are also varied. In other words, civil society in China remains inchoate and organisationally disparate, weakening what some might expect to be the seeds of democratic change. Nonetheless, though liberal democracy may not arrive any time soon in China, observers now have a much better sense of the social, economic and political pluralism within China. The Chinese Communist Party (CPP) and the state apparatus are not monolithic entities. Policy-making involves significant consultation, particularly with expert communities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The state takes seriously societal input, if only to ensure the regime’s non-democratic legitimacy. And elites inside the CCP are hardly unified amongst themselves, with discernible factions contesting, bargaining, accommodating and compromising with one another quite openly.
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