Validation of a sort eventually came when the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature went to the Chinese author Mo Yan. Television programs were interrupted to announce the news, and the People’s Daily gushed the next day that the prize was “a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation—but even more so, it is a new starting point.” Mo is a particularly unusual talent, an internationally respected writer whose work is full of social criticism but who is also a vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers Association. It is a testament to his skills, both literary and political, that he has managed to walk this tightrope. But it has not always been easy. His reputation at home was damaged when he took part in the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, another one of those events which exposed the limitations of China’s soft-power push. As the guest of honor that year, Beijing saw the festival as an opportunity to promote Chinese literature and spent $7.5 million on the event, sending two thousand publishers to Frankfurt to promote the country’s authors. Mo gave a speech to the opening session, which was attended by then vice president Xi Jinping. Yet, from the start, the festival was marred by behind-the-scenes fighting between Chinese officials and the organizers over what would be discussed at the events. At a symposium before the festival, the German hosts asked dissident writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling to speak, but then withdrew the invitations after Beijing objected, only to reinstate them following a protest by German journalists. In the end, when the two writers stood to speak, the official Chinese delegation walked out. Mo was among that group.
A similar furor erupted at the closing ceremony, when Dai and Bei said they had initially been invited to speak, only to be barred again after another protest from Beijing. The result was a huge own-goal, with much more attention paid to Chinese political interference than to any of the writers actually present. As long as Beijing tries to control the definition of Chinese culture and to decide who will speak on its behalf, China will continue to punch well below its weight. “I had no choice,” Mo said in an interview a year later with a Chinese magazine, when asked to explain why he had walked out on other writers. “A lot of people are now saying about me, ‘Mo Yan is a state writer.’ It’s true, insofar as… I get a salary from the Ministry of Culture, and get my social and health insurance from them too.” He added: “That’s the reality in China. Overseas, people all have their own insurance, but without a position, I can’t afford to get sick in China.”
It was a Chinese liberal intellectual and diplomat, Hu Shi, who in the 1930s provided the best answer to those afraid of Chinese soft power. He was writing in another era of intense debates in China about how to modernize its society and whether it should follow a Western path. If there was anything really valuable in traditional Chinese culture, Hu Shi told his compatriots, then it would easily survive the entry of Western ideas into the country. “If our culture really contains priceless treasures that are able to withstand the power of the cleansing foreign attack, this indestructible part of our culture will naturally emerge even more fully after scientific culture washes over it,” Hu wrote. The threat to America’s soft power does not come from China, but from its own seeming inability to solve basic issues of governance. The U.S. should worry less about the attractiveness of China and more about getting its own house in order.
A few months before he left office in 2012, Hu Jintao gave another speech about soft power, this time with much harder edges. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu warned. Gone was the confident vision of a proud culture winning its due in the world, replaced instead by an insecure, enemies-under-the-bed nervousness. Hu added: “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.” The speech was an appropriate bookend for the hidden agenda behind the soft-power push. As a result of its slow-burning legitimacy crisis, the Communist Party has reached for any number of new props to replace its socialist ideals, from economic managerialism to nationalism. Confucius, the Olympics, and Nobel Prizes are all part of the same search for legitimacy. China is not really selling itself to the world: the party is trying to justify itself to the Chinese people.
7
“We Are Not the World’s Savior”
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND THE UN
WHEN BARACK OBAMA MADE his first-ever trip to China in November 2009, he got to meet most of the country’s top leaders, with one very notable exception. That same week, Zhou Yongkang decided it was the right moment to take a large Chinese delegation to Sudan. A member of the all-powerful nine-man Communist Party Standing Committee, Zhou had the day job of running China’s vast security apparatus. It was he who orchestrated the arrest of Liu Xiaobo. But Zhou [pronounced Jo] also occasionally dabbled in foreign policy. When the ailing Kim Jong-il unveiled his twenty-something son Kim Jong-un as his successor during a mass rally in Pyongyang in 2010, Zhou was standing right next to him on the platform. Zhou has also been one of the linchpins of China’s close ties with Sudan. During his trip to Khartoum, Zhou met with Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, who, partly as a result of U.S. pressure, had been charged four months earlier by the International Criminal Court in the Hague with genocide and crimes against humanity.
Back in Beijing, Obama was enduring a frustrating visit, every stage of which was carefully stage-managed by the government to limit open contact with ordinary Chinese people. At a joint “press conference” in the Great Hall of the People, there were no actual questions allowed from either the American or the Chinese media. Instead, the two presidents read out short statements and walked away in silence, looking as if they had just been to couples counseling. On the same evening, Bashir, who now faces an international arrest warrant, held a banquet for Zhou and the Chinese delegation in Khartoum. “As an old friend of the Sudanese president,” Zhou said in an after-dinner speech, “I got a full sense of the profound changes that have taken place in Sudan under your leadership as soon as I stepped on Sudanese soil.”
It is not hard to see why some in Washington might feel China is becoming the cheerleader for the world’s more authoritarian and anti-Western regimes. In the last few years, Beijing has gone out of its way to protect the Kim regime in North Korea, despite its increasingly dangerous behavior. China provided a financial lifeline to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and helped reduce international pressure on the Syrian regime as the country’s civil war escalated. China has even become an important backer of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, helping protect him from censure in the United Nations and elsewhere. When Mugabe celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday in February 2010, the Chinese Embassy in Harare put on a party for the president to mark the occasion, with more than a hundred guests invited. Mugabe was presented with a large cake, made from eight different layers. A group of Chinese diplomats sang the Zimbabwean national anthem for him in the Shona language. It was the first time Mugabe had visited an embassy in the capital in the three decades he has been in power.
Among all these relationships, however, the Sudanese connection has been the most controversial. Over the last two decades, China has invested $7 billion in the oil industry in Sudan, making it both the main customer and the biggest investor in Africa’s largest nation. With the possible exception of North Korea, Sudan is the nearest thing China has to a client state. Shortly after Omar al-Bashir took power in a coup in 1989, he found himself the subject of international sanctions as a result of his links to terrorism. (During the 1990s, Sudan provided a home for Osama bin Laden for several years.) As Western oil companies pulled out of the country, China stepped into the vacuum. China’s oil companies were in the first throes of their “go out” strategy, where Beijing encouraged selected companies to operate overseas, and Sudan provided the perfect opportunity, a country with ample reserves not already tied up by China’s Western riva
ls. Within a few years, the Chinese companies accounted for more than 70 percent of Sudan’s entire exports. As it happens, one of the executives at the helm of the oil industry who helped set up the Sudan investments was Zhou Yongkang, the security boss who in the 1990s ran China National Petroleum Corporation, the largest oil group. Relations between the two countries started to go well beyond oil. In its bid to curry favor with Khartoum, China trained Sudanese helicopter pilots and became one of the government’s main suppliers of arms. Twice during the Darfur conflict, a UN panel of experts noted that Chinese weapons were being transferred to Darfur by the Khartoum government. When Hu Jintao visited Sudan in 2007, at the height of the international furor over Darfur, he offered an interest-free loan to build a new presidential palace.
At the same time, China has also become the political protector of the Sudanese regime. During the very worst years of the slaughter in Darfur, in 2003 and 2004, China provided crucial political support using its position on the United Nations Security Council to block or water down measures aimed at the regime in Khartoum. At the UN, Darfur was a hugely divisive issue. The conflict exposed the stark difference between the way the U.S. and European nations now understand the world, and the way China does. For many in Washington, the events in Darfur were “genocide,” a grotesque series of crimes by the government against its own citizens, which made some sort of outside intervention a moral imperative. Beijing argued that the violence was an internal affair of Sudan and that heavy outside intervention in the country would only destabilize it even further. The rest of the world had no right to override Sudan’s sovereignty. China effectively put up a large sign saying: “Keep out.”
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If the twentieth century saw fierce ideological battles between fascism and liberal democracy and between capitalism and communism, then one of the central dividing lines in this century will be the issue of state sovereignty. As China has become more powerful over the last decade, Washington and Beijing have started to compete over the basic rules at the heart of the international system, about the duties and responsibilities of what is sometimes called “the international community.” In part, it is a battle for the soul of the United Nations, where many of these disputes are played out, but it is also a bigger discussion about the role of human rights in international affairs. In one corner, the U.S. and Europe urge greater outside intervention in states that are conducting massive abuses against their citizens; in the other corner, China and Russia defend a belief that absolute sovereign rights are the bedrock for a stable international system. Sudan was a warm-up act for this clash between two very different philosophical views about the way the world should work. Beijing would like to use its new influence to set the tone for how international politics will be organized and to check what it sees as Western moralizing and meddling.
This tension has been at the heart of the UN ever since it was founded in 1945, created out of the ashes of the Second World War by men scarred by the experience of Nazism. The UN’s architects aimed to establish a world free from foreign invasions by territory-hungry great powers. The defense of sovereignty was proclaimed as a core value. Article II, Part 7, of the UN Charter reads: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Over the next decade, the UN was closely involved in the process of decolonization, which added to its doubts about outside interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The number of member countries has risen from fifty at the start to 194, and the leaders of these new nations had little intention of letting the UN become a rubber stamp for meddling in their politics by former colonial masters. Decolonization, as the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra puts it, was “fueled by an intense desire among humiliated peoples for equality and dignity in a world controlled by a small minority of white men.”
Yet, right from the start, the UN was also squarely focused on human rights and the protection of minorities. The same shattering war experiences encouraged world leaders to sign in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at a conference in Paris. Having seen the paralysis of the League of Nations, the UN’s founders did not intend to create an organization that would be impotent in the face of wide-scale abuses. This debate about sovereignty lay dormant during the Cold War, when the U.S.-Soviet rivalry neutered the effectiveness of the UN. But by the time the Berlin Wall fell, it was clear that many of the greatest humanitarian problems in the world were caused no longer by wars between nations, which had declined, but by abuses taking place within nations—from Uganda to Cambodia. The growing awareness of environmental degradation has only added to the perception that sovereignty has its limits.
The end of the Cold War prompted a wave of optimism about the creation of a new, coherent international community which could put the stale arguments of the previous decades aside, and which would never again be too late to the scene. Yet this confidence was short-lived. The recurring crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Rwanda, where eight hundred thousand people were massacred, reinforced the uncomfortable reality that the UN lacked the tools to deal with the worst humanitarian crises. Stung by its failure to do anything to stop the bloodshed, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan launched a discussion about when it was right for the international community to intervene to protect vulnerable populations. The negotiations were tortuous, in part because of the objections of those developing countries which did not want to provide an excuse for the U.S. and other Western powers to send in the marines every time there was a crisis. But in the end, a committee led by Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister, and the Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, came up with a formula which was approved unanimously at a UN summit in 2005 and which became known as the “Responsibility to Protect.”
The end result was a carefully crafted compromise. Military action was held out only as a very last resort; instead, there would first be a whole spectrum of policy options for the UN to take, from pressure and diplomacy to sanctions and referring leaders to the International Criminal Court. But, for all the caveats, the governments of the world committed themselves to take action in cases of genocide or grave crimes against humanity. The combination of the Rwanda disaster and the disappearance of Cold War ideological divisions gave the UN an opening to promote a new international philosophy about the defense of innocent civilians from rapacious governments. Robert Mugabe may have denounced it as a “phony principle,” but for its supporters, “Responsibility to Protect” was an attempt to enshrine a series of basic guidelines that would underpin the international community in a new century. Martin Gilbert, the British historian of Winston Churchill and the Holocaust, called it “the most significant adjustment to national sovereignty in 360 years.”
China voted in favor of “Responsibility to Protect,” but right from the start Beijing was deeply anxious about the whole project. Under Mao, China had been a revolutionary power that occassionally looked to export its model around the world and saw international forums as a stage for occasional tantrums. But since the late 1970s, it has put its firm support behind the old Westphalian notions that sovereign nations should keep out of one another’s affairs. The survival instincts of the party demanded as much. During an era when democracy has spread rapidly, this aggressive defense of sovereignty is a way to deflect attention from China’s own affairs and to help make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party. After all, how can Communist China shield itself from overseas criticisms of its own political arrangements if it routinely sticks its nose into the affairs of others? China has worked assiduously to make sure that the UN Human Rights Council, which is supposed to report on abuses around the world, has remained a toothless talking-shop.
Yet there is more to China’s position than just opportunism. China has its own arguments for why a policy of strict nonintervention is a strong foundation for the international system. Rather than weakening the international community, China beli
eves it is creating a more equitable world, a “democracy between nations” in which each state is treated equally by the rest of the international community. Beijing sees its friendship with dictatorial regimes as part of an approach that is better for the developing world than the bullying interventionism of the West. Whereas the West values human rights and transparent governance, China places emphasis on stability. Beijing argues that only when a poor country has a solid government, whose sovereignty is respected by other nations, can it then introduce the sorts of coherent, long-term policies needed to promote growth and reduce poverty. Even when the Western powers have a good point about abuses, Beijing claims, the initial intervention on humanitarian grounds often becomes an excuse for prolonged colonial interference that makes the situation worse. For Beijing, nonintervention is a firewall against destabilizing meddling.
The irony is that, from Beijing’s point of view, the U.S. is the radical, revolutionary power trying to change the rules of the game. While the West has become more animated about tackling humanitarian catastrophes since the end of the Cold War, China believes it is defending tried and tested ideas about how states should behave, which took root in Europe four centuries ago and are a better guide for international stability. From Sudan to Zimbabwe, China believes it is defending a status quo the West once established but now wants to tear up.
In conversations and interviews about this subject, Chinese officials would occasionally try to play Europe off against the U.S. “We want the same multipolar world that Europe wants,” a senior diplomat once told me. “Europe’s view of the world emphasizes system building, rules, dialogue, and discussion, as opposed to a view of the world that stresses confrontation.” But mostly I would be on the receiving end of a finely honed series of talking points about how Western or American interference was a big part of the problem in the developing world. “Look at Liberia,” a lunch companion from the Foreign Ministry told me. “It has had lots of U.S. help and influence and money, but it is not a mini-America. You cannot govern another country from the outside.”
The Contest of the Century Page 24
