There has been a lot of ink spilled in high impact journals evaluating the intentions of Chinese leadership to uphold, revise or drastically overturn the “Global Order.” Chinese sources have not shied away from stressing the fact that the rules of the international system were shaped at a time of Chinese weakness when the millennia old civilization was struggling to modernize and deter invasions by imperial nations.
Yet Chinese rhetoric has not been followed by decisive revisionist actions. While there are on-going regional disputes with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam concerning maritime borders, Beijing has peacefully resolved its territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. In addition, it has taken concrete steps to provide global public goods through commitments towards climate change, UN peacekeeping operations and promotion of grants and official development assistance (ODA). Whereas the U.S. has boycotted UNESCO, China has raised its monetary contribution in support of multilateralism and cultural exchanges.
Moreover, a comparison of Chinese acts in the past decade – a period when China's GDP (measured in purchasing power parity terms) surpassed that of the U.S. - with U.S. acts when Washington rose to global prominence in the late 19th and early 20th century could further illuminate the character of Chinese foreign policy.
By mid 1880s, the U.S. GDP had surpassed that of Britain – the world's hegemon – with an empire on which the sun never set. Empowered by its massive industrial output, the United States was determined to revise the rules that Britain and European continental powers had imposed and create its own sphere of influence. In less than a decade, the United States orchestrated Panama's independence from Colombia to build a canal, annexed Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, set up a puppet arbitration committee to steal territories from Canada in its borders with Alaska and built a mega-fleet to project global power abroad.
By any definition, the United States had overturned the old order in the Western Hemisphere and had proceeded on its own “civilizing mission” as Theodore Roosevelt himself put it in what is known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Yet along with U.S. political norms, Washington imposed unbalanced economic deals and extracted rents from the regions it coerced; the Panama Canal treaty being a prime example.
While America was imposing its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, European powers were busy fighting for continental supremacy, eventually ushering in two apocalyptic world wars. With Europe destroyed and Britain a shadow of its former might, the Americans had no obstacle to now revise the global order. Nowhere was this more striking than in the negotiations over the global commercial order at the Bretton Woods. Unable to counterbalance logically the arguments of the British negotiator, the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, the American negotiator, declined a “clearing union” and imposed an unbalanced deal over the British, turning the U.S. dollar into a global reserve currency – something that general de Gaulle of France would later frame as an “exorbitant privilege” which continues to this very day.
A comparison of China's recent actions to those of America when the latter became the largest economy in the world reveals that Beijing has exercised a more restrained application of its new-found power and only addressed assertively maritime disputes across its periphery. The reason why China has exhibited such calculated restrain of course is not easy to decipher. It could be that Chinese leaders as enculturated actors in anti-imperial post-modernity have looked towards new norms of interstate relations. Deng Xiaoping himself, after all, declared that if “China ever pursues imperialism then it is an obligation for the people of the world to expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
If this constructivist argument is not persuasive, then studious students of international affairs could point out that China's regional environment has operated as an automatic balancer to Beijing's rising material capabilities. While in the early 20th century the United States had enjoyed unmatched regional primacy, China today is surrounded by other big economies with modernized militaries: India, Russia and Japan. In addition, the United States continues to enjoy a significant military and strategic advantage over Beijing with a net of global military bases, countless security allies and overwhelming maritime power projection with 11 Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups. If China narrows the gap, will Beijing continues to act with restrain or march to overturn the global order?
Yet even if Beijing does narrow the power gap with the United States, China will hardly ever manage to outmatch the combined capabilities of the U.S., Japan, India and Russia, and thus by any realist criterion of national power, it will have to tame its ambition and negotiate its rise in peace.
Be it a response to postmodern enculturation or the balance of power, China's actions are not adequate to frame it a “revisionist power.” Diplomats on both sides should work hard to ensure that Trump's declaration that China is a revisionist power will not become a self-fulfilling prophecy as aggressive unilateral actions and facile preconceptions would unleash a “diplomatic doomsday machine.” On these grounds, negotiations over issues that have strained the relationship like trade and market reciprocity should not be seen as a struggle for world domination. They should be instead addressed by a civilized bilateral dialogue that aims to advance the welfare of the middle class in China and the United States in a positive sum game for economic development and social inclusion.
