POLITICS: Rising China Uncertain about Global Role — Experts

   By Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON, Feb 14 — As China prepares to greet President George W Bush during his upcoming state visit to Beijing, the country's government and intellectual elite are deeply split about how to deal with the world's only superpower and handle relations with the global community, experts on China-U.S. relations say.

"A rising China will be a somewhat uncertain and perplexed China," said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University who has written extensively about the internal debates about China's role in the world. "Consistent and clear national strategies are still missing" from the national leadership.

China's foreign policy, Shi added, is "inconsistent and fragmentary" and usually reflects the "vicissitudes of immediate world events" rather than a long-range view of the world.

The degree to which political elites differ about foreign policy is "unprecedented since the 1949 revolution" that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, he said.

Shi, who is widely known as an expert in Sino-U.S. relations, spoke at a forum here on China sponsored by Japan's Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

He said China's leadership is divided into two groups, each with a distinct view of the United States. The first group, which represents a majority, doubts that long-term accommodation with the United States is possible because it believes the United States "won't tolerate China as a world power, even in Asia".

"It is highly suspicious of U.S. military strategy in East Asia and its alliance relationships, particularly with Japan," said Shi.

A second group, which is small but highly influential, hopes to reach an accommodation with Washington by 2010 and believes that, in the long run, U.S. forces in Asia provide stability and are important in dealing with the dangers from countries holding weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism, he said.

This faction is also the leading voice for integrating China with multilateral organisations, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which China formally joined in 2001.

The contrasting voices of the Chinese political leadership have been on open display. On Feb. 11, Li Peng, China's second most powerful leader, condemned what he called foreign interference in China around human rights, a reference to the constant complaints from Washington about Beijing's human rights record.

Beijing, he said, is "firmly opposed to interfering in other countries' internal affairs by using the human rights issue". Li heads China's National People's Congress, or Parliament.

A few days later, Zeng Peiyan, director of China's State Development Planning Commission and the country's top economic planner, told the official news agency Xinhua that "non-economic factors", a euphemism for human rights "won't interfere with the deep economic ties between China and the United States".

"As long as the two sides can get rid of the impact of non-economic factors," he said, "Sino-U.S. economic cooperation will grow healthily and have bright prospects."

At present, the more moderate group appears to be ascendant. Since the Sep.11 attacks on New York and Washington, China has been cooperating closely with the United States in its war against terrorism.

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, U.S. and Chinese intelligence agencies have been sharing information about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network and radical Islamic groups in Asia.

Meanwhile, China has pledged 150 million U.S. dollars for the reconstruction of post-war Afghanistan and may provide troops to a United Nations peacekeeping force in Afghanistan after U.S. troops are withdrawn.

Chinese leaders have also held back criticism of the U.S. military role in the Philippines and Japan's cooperation with U.S. forces around Afghanistan.

All of this is a far cry from the tensions a year ago over a U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island, or the near-rupture in relations when U.S. warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)-led war against Serbia two years ago.

But it is also at variance with Chinese public opinion, which Shi said is highly nationalistic and frequently anti-American. "There is widespread criticism of the government softness in dealing with the United States and Japan," he said.

Such sentiment was much in evidence after the Belgrade bombing, when thousands of Chinese citizens demonstrated in front of the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and even after Sep. 11.

After the terror attacks, student postings on electronic bulletin boards at Beijing University and Tsinghua University were highly critical of the United States in its dealings with developing countries.

Reporting from Beijing just after the attacks, 'Washington Post' reporter John Pomfret quoted one student as saying "We've been bullied by America for too long!" and another expressing happiness "because I hate America". In response, one student wrote: "I weep for the cold- blooded Chinese."

The internal debates, Shi said, "reflect the complexity of the U.S. and Chinese international positions and future prospects".

Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, called Shi "one of China's most independent minds on foreign policy".

One reason that Chinese public opinion is often at odds with official government positions, he said, is the lack of independent sources of information that could provide analysis and ideas that would call government policies into question.

According to Pei, the government-controlled press and government propaganda are often bombastic toward Washington and "raise public expectations" that the government will take a hard line toward the United States.

China's initial reaction to events like the Belgrade bombing, he said, are frequently "quite clumsy". Pei added that when the propaganda bureaus "jump the gun", they force the leadership to "climb down from the limbs they have created".

Bates Gill, director of the Centre for North-east Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, said Shi's comment that a rising China will be a "perplexed China" raises interesting questions that should be kept in mind as China becomes a "more influential and powerful player in the international system".

As China becomes a key player in institutions like the WTO and Asian regional security forums, he said it is important for China's leaders to define what their country represents. "It is easy to say what China is against," he said. "Much work needs to be done to determine what China stands for."

During his Feb. 21-22 visit to China, President Bush will likely meet with Hu Jintao, China's vice president who is considered the leading candidate to succeed Premier Jiang Zemin. Bush leaves Feb. 16 for a six-day tour of China, Japan and South Korea. (IPS/2002)