The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  The real issue is not U.S. rhetoric: it is U.S. practice. Developing world democracies are not opposed to the idea of outside interference in human-rights disasters, but they are worried about the potential manipulation of these rules by the U.S. to justify the sort of behavior countries like India and Brazil consider to be bullying. Skepticism about American motives did not begin with the invasion of Iraq. But the way the war was conducted—the attempts to railroad the UN, the manipulated intelligence, the character assassinations of those who stood in its way—confirmed the very worst fears that many governments hold about the U.S. UN diplomats from developing countries still talk about the contempt for the institution that they felt they received from John Bolton, when he was George W. Bush’s ambassador to the UN. The Libya conflict in 2011 added to their mistrust. Like China and Russia, some of the governments were dismayed by the way the Libya operation in 2011 developed, when the U.S., U.K., and France quickly transformed UN approval for a humanitarian operation in the east of the country into a military campaign to oust Muammar Qaddafi. “We never said it was OK to go for regime change,” one Indian diplomat told me. Many of the new swing powers agree on the need to respond to humanitarian crises, but they are loath to underwrite a new set of rules which could become a blank check for further U.S. unilateralism.

  If the West wants to establish legitimacy for its new agenda of humanitarian activism, then it needs to find a way to overcome some of these reservations among the new swing states. As it happens, Brazil is the country that has offered up the most interesting olive branch. In late 2011, Dilma Rousseff’s government published a little-noticed document it called “Responsibility While Protecting.” The basic idea was to try and find a way to regulate and monitor foreign interventions that are approved by the UN. It would establish clearer rules for what sort of military behavior is permitted, and a monitoring mechanism to review interventions as they are conducted. For some U.S. officials, the Brazilians are more interested in grandstanding than in providing constructive leadership. Rousseff’s initiative was dismissed by many as the actions of a “spoiler” government with no interest in working with Washington. But in reality, it was a serious attempt to start a debate about ways to make Western intervention work. Brazil was offering itself as a mediator between the West and other sections of the developing world. This is a conversation the U.S. needs to engage in, for the balance of influence in these global debates will depend heavily on where the new swing states position themselves. If the U.S. cannot build a common understanding with the largest democracies in the world, it will be hard work to retain its position at the center of the conversation.

  GREAT POWER BURDENS

  For a country like South Sudan, which is the newest in the world and one of the very poorest, it probably helps a little to have a leader who is physically imposing and highly recognizable. At six foot four, with a bushy black beard, Salva Kiir towers over most of the other presidents and prime ministers he meets. He also stands out because of the black cowboy hat he always sports, whether addressing the United Nations or having coffee at the White House. His first ten-gallon Stetson was a present from George W. Bush, who played an important role in South Sudan’s independence campaign, and Kiir liked it so much he bought a large collection for himself. It is tempting to speculate what the Chinese made of Kiir when he made his first trip to Beijing in 2007. If they thought of him then as a folkloric figure with his black cowboy hat, they certainly do not now. For Kiir’s 2007 visit turned out to be a groundbreaking moment in China’s relations with the rest of the world.

  The Darfur conflict in the 2000s is not the only war that has torn apart Sudan since it gained independence in 1956: the country also suffered a two-decade-long civil war. In 2005, Kiir took over the leadership of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the political group from the south of the country that fought the government in Khartoum, when their leader, John Garang, died in a helicopter crash. In the same year, he became vice president of Sudan after a peace agreement was signed ending the war. It was in this capacity that he visited Beijing two years later. Given its huge oil investments in the country, China was delighted by the end of the civil war, but the relief was short-lived. Around three-quarters of Sudan’s oil reserves are in the south of the country, and according to the 2005 peace agreement, the south would be given a chance in 2011 to vote on independence. When he was in Beijing, Kiir met with President Hu Jintao and a series of other senior leaders, and at each appointment he presented his Chinese hosts with two documents. One was a copy of the oil map, showing just how many of the wells China had invested in were in the south of the country. The other was a copy of the peace agreement guaranteeing the south’s right to secede. “He placed the two documents on the table and said, ‘You figure it out,’ ” a South Sudanese official later explained. Kiir put China on the spot in a way that had never quite happened before. Support our bid for independence, he suggested, or lose your oil. He was calling Beijing’s bluff on its principle of never interfering in the politics of another country.

  Noninterference is a luxury that great powers sometimes cannot afford. The policy was a perfect adjunct to Deng Xiaoping’s advice about keeping a low profile, but it is running up against the reality of China’s global footprint and its expanding overseas interests. China’s economy is now fed by iron-ore mines in Peru, copper mines in Congo’s Katanga Province, and oil fields in South Sudan. This web of interests is gradually drawing a reluctant China into the life of countries whose affairs it was once completely unconcerned about, a slow-burning but profound shift in China’s global role. In a sense, China is beginning to experience its own split between foreign-policy realists and idealists. Chinese idealists push for a rigid policy of noninterference, but the realists suggest that China would be better off letting principles slide and defending the new interests that it is developing. Over the last decade, China’s capacity to stand aloof from important events around the world has been slowly compromised.

  One element of these new obligations is the way Beijing has been forced to respond to the growing number of Chinese workers who are now overseas. As a result of China’s new network of global interests, there are probably around six million Chinese living abroad now, some in the most dangerous and unstable places in the world. There are forty-five thousand Chinese in Nigeria, around twenty-five thousand in Sudan, and ten thousand in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as another ten thousand in Pakistan. In 2007, seven Chinese oil workers were killed during an attack on a Sinopec facility in Ethiopia. In Pakistan, there have been several kidnappings of Chinese workers, including the 2007 abduction of a group of Chinese women in Lahore, an event that led to the siege of the Red Mosque.

  In the space of a decade, Beijing’s response to such problems has been revolutionized. In 2000, a long-simmering ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands erupted in Honiara, the country’s capital, when the prime minster was seized by an armed gang. Lawlessness broke out, and mild panic ensued. Honiara has a sizable Chinese population, which began to feel itself under considerable threat. Messages were sent to Beijing asking for help. But the Chinese government had few options at its disposal. It did not even have an embassy in Honiara, because the country recognized Taiwan, not the People’s Republic. In the end, Chinese diplomats in Papua New Guinea managed to get through to one of the rebel leaders on the telephone to negotiate safe passage for the Chinese residents who wanted to leave. A commercial ship owned by the state-owned group COSCO picked them up. The navy was asked if it could launch a rescue operation, but it was unable to do so. When China faced a similar dilemma just over a decade later, in February 2011, when the security situation in Libya was becoming precarious as a civil conflict intensified, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made a staggering announcement. There were, it said, thirty thousand Chinese working in Libya, on construction sites and at oil facilities, making them by far the largest group of overseas residents apart from those from Libya’s direct neighbors. As law
and order broke down across the country, several of the Chinese facilities in Libya were attacked—which some in Beijing suggested was because the assailants did not fear any comeback from the Chinese authorities. This time there was no prevarication in Beijing. China sent the frigate Xuzhou to help evacuate its workers—the first time ever that a Chinese warship has been on active operation in the Mediterranean Sea, and a striking example of China’s emerging capacity to project naval power.

  As well as protecting vulnerable overseas residents, China now also has to deal with volatile, nationalist reactions to such incidents. When the workers in Ethiopia were killed in 2007, the Internet in China exploded with calls for revenge. Chinese officials privately admit that they now feel considerable public pressure to take more decisive action when Chinese workers are at risk, as they were in Libya. China is still a long way from having the capacity or political desire to intervene militarily in such conflicts on its own, but it is not too hard to imagine that in the future it might launch an armed operation to get its people out of a particularly dangerous situation. At the very least, the perils that Chinese workers are now exposed to are forcing Beijing to be less sanguine about the internal politics of some of the places where it is doing business.

  The real baptism by fire, however, has been in Sudan, where Chinese ideas about nonintervention have been steadily undermined by its interests. During the Darfur crisis, Sudan had been Exhibit A for those who believe a powerful China will block efforts at humanitarian intervention and defend a strict interpretation of state sovereignty, undercutting Western ideas for a more active international community. Yet it is precisely Sudan where Beijing has been confronted with the contradictions of its expanding global interests, where its investments have suffered a head-on collision with its political principles. Much to its discomfort, Beijing has found itself thrust into the unfamiliar role of power broker in a distant land.

  When China started to invest in Sudan in the early 1990s, the Darfur conflict was still years away, but the country was mired in the fierce civil war between the government in Khartoum and the south of the country. Whereas the north of the country is largely desert and populated by Muslims, including the groups who dominate the government in Khartoum and who consider themselves Arabs, the south is more lush and is populated by Christians and animists. As many as two million people died in the civil war, which lasted for more than two decades and left the south of the country a wasteland.

  China was not even a signatory to the 2005 peace treaty, which the Bush administration helped broker, preferring to keep its distance from the whole process. And on the face of it, the cease-fire was good news for Beijing, reducing the risk of attacks on its facilities and opening the prospect of new business opportunities. Yet, as the biggest investor and biggest customer of Sudan’s oil, China was caught right in the middle of a new political dilemma. Around 75 percent of Sudan’s oil was in the south of the country, but from there it traveled by a Chinese-built pipeline that traverses the border and goes all the way up to Port Sudan, on the northeastern coast. And as Salva Kiir made clear to his Chinese hosts in 2007, the south would be allowed to hold a referendum four years later on outright independence. Every observer who knew the country predicted overwhelming support for secession.

  The situation in Sudan presented a series of different diplomatic nightmares for Beijing. Not only does China like to avoid getting involved in internal politics, but it is particularly allergic to any move that endorses the breakup of multiethnic countries. Beijing fears that such campaigns could encourage similar demands from its own ethnic regions, such as Tibet and the heavily Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang, as well as encouraging an independence push by Taiwan. When Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, China refused to recognize the new state. In addition, Beijing was intensely suspicious of the role of the U.S. in the Sudan situation. In its early years, the SPLM had adopted a leftish posture and had received support from Cuba, but gradually it began to win heavy backing from conservative groups in the U.S., many of whom were mobilized by the prospect of a group of Christians being oppressed by Muslims. (Some South Sudanese see themselves as the descendants of the Biblical “Kushites,” an identity that is embraced by some of their American sympathizers.)

  Some Chinese officials and scholars thought that the U.S. was supporting the referendum as a way of trying to engineer a regime change in Khartoum. Others suggested it was part of a plot to slow Chinese progress in Africa. So at first Beijing stuck with its principle and supported the maintenance of a united Sudan. Yet, as the independence vote approached, Beijing began to realize the trap it was facing. If it opposed the referendum, it could face hostility from an independent government in the south that would see China as the principal backer of its enemy. To the South Sudanese, China had never been a neutral political force in their country—on the contrary, Beijing’s heavy oil investments and weapons sales to Khartoum made it a partisan supporter of the government side in Sudan’s civil war. For them, China had already taken a side.

  Salva Kiir’s 2007 visit to Beijing turned out to be the start of a process whereby China quietly but decisively changed its policy 180 degrees—from protecting the sovereignty of Sudan, as it did over Darfur, to endorsing the country’s breakup. In 2008, China opened a consulate in Juba, the main city in the south. Before long, officials from both countries were exchanging regular visits. China intervened in 2010, when reports surfaced that the Khartoum government might try to delay the referendum. Liu Guijin, Beijing’s special envoy for Africa, insisted the vote go ahead on time and called for international help to make sure the process was credible. China itself donated $500,000 to the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission and sent observers for the vote—in which independence was approved by 97 percent of the people voting. In the past, China might have claimed indifference to the internal problems in Sudan and turned a blind eye if Khartoum had used violence to sabotage the referendum. But in this case, Beijing found itself promoting an orderly vote for independence—and on the same side as the U.S. Whatever its initial reservations, China became one of the midwives for the birth of an independent and democratic Southern Sudan. To defend its oil, Beijing decided to tear up its pledge of noninterference. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan declared independence. Wei Zhixin, China’s housing-and-infrastructure minister and a close confidant of President Hu Jintao, traveled to Juba to witness the occassion. The highlight of the seven-hour-long ceremony was the moment when the flag of Sudan was electronically lowered at the same time as South Sudan’s new flag was raised. Two Chinese engineers were on hand to make sure the remote-control system worked properly.

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  In some ways, the partition of Sudan was only the start of China’s political dilemma in the country. Even once Juba had declared independence, many of the main issues between Sudan and South Sudan remained unresolved—including where the actual borders lie, control of some of the oil wells, and the division of oil wealth between the two governments. China was again caught right in the middle of the new disputes. Beijing’s first response was to try and retreat back into its shell. Li Zhiguo, China’s ambassador to South Sudan, insisted there was no need for China to get involved in mediation: “The issue is an internal affair of the two brothers of Sudan.” Events on the ground, however, swiftly undermined Beijing’s policy of studied indifference and sucked it back into the toxic politics of the “two brothers.” By November, four months after South Sudan declared independence, negotiations between the two governments were floundering, with Khartoum asking for $36 for each barrel crossing its territory and Juba offering $1 (which was closer to international levels). Khartoum halted all exports of oil from South Sudan until the payment situation was resolved, and impounded several shipments of oil. In effect, China’s oil imports were being held hostage.

  South Sudan responded to this brinkmanship by trying to put pressure on Beijing. Juba felt that China could do more to restrain Khartoum and tried to use its own lever
age to force Beijing’s hand. Chinese oil executives in South Sudan were summoned to a meeting in Juba, where they were told once again that if China continued to take Khartoum’s side passively in the dispute, it could lose its oil contracts in South Sudan. Unsatisfied with China’s response and Khartoum’s tactics, Juba upped the ante in January 2012 by shutting down its entire oil industry. And a month later, just to make sure that Beijing understood what Juba believed to be its complicity in the dispute, South Sudan also expelled from the country Liu Yingcai, the president of Petrodar, the China-owned company which dominates the industry. The disputes between the government and Petrodar were long-running and complex, but the principal allegation was that the Chinese company had been siding with Khartoum.

  At the same time that the oil dispute was heating up, violence in the border areas intensified, with Chinese interests again stuck in the middle. Two of the border provinces contained large numbers of guerrillas who had fought with the SPLM. Bashir had alleged (probably correctly) that Kiir was giving the rebel groups unofficial support and threatened to “chop off their hands.” When South Sudan shuttered the oil industry, Bashir stepped up his military activities, sending warplanes to bomb oil fields in the south. At the same time, rebels linked to South Sudan captured a large oil field in Heglig, on the Sudanese side of the border. To make matters worse for the Chinese, twenty-nine Chinese oil workers in South Kordofan were kidnapped by rebel groups, prompting a huge outcry at home. They were released ten days later.

  Finding itself squeezed on all sides, China was forced to get involved in crisis mediation. In April, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi traveled to Addis Ababa to meet with Salva Kiir, while, at the same time, Jia Qinglin, one of the most senior Communist Party officials, visited Khartoum. Chinese leaders were also feeling pressure at home, where different groups wanted the government to take more decisive steps to try and resolve the standoff. As one official told the International Crisis Group, in a comment that perfectly encapsulates the new dilemma of the reluctant great power: “We are bystanders: we cannot just be bystanders, we need to be a player. Can you imagine how any Western country would engage if they had all these interests?”