Hu's second term

Hu Jintao's reelection to a second term as the CCP General Secretary in November 2007 coincided with Beijing's decision to cancel the USS Kitty Hawk's port visit to Hong Kong. Some China watchers took the incident as an indication that the Hu leadership had abandoned Deng Xiaoping's taoguangyanghui, or low-profile, policy. Where Deng sought to avoid controversial global affairs and focus on China’s immediate interests, Hu seemed to have reoriented Chinese foreign policy toward a more aggressive direction in light of China's rising global power status.

For China as a rising power, having an active foreign policy has become a necessity, not a luxury. China has therefore engaged more actively with and become more assertive in world affairs. However, China's international diplomatic activism does not necessarily mean that the Hu leadership has altered China's foreign policy in a more aggressive direction, as China is still juggling its passive foreign policy with its new role as a global power. One defining tension in Hu's foreign policy agenda is to find a balance between pursuing international influence and downplaying its aspirations to being a global power.

Coping with transition as a rising power

China certainly feels more secure and confident in international affairs than it did before its rise. However, it has a peculiar sense of frustration related, ironically, to its rising power status. There are three aspects to this frustration.

First, many Chinese analysts have been frustrated about the so-called structural conflict between China as a rising power and the US as the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world. They worry that the US has a hidden agenda to prevent China from rising as a peer power. As a result, they are cynical about US criticism of China's human rights records and lack of democracy and do not believe that the US wants to see even a democratic China become richer and stronger than itself.

Second, its rapid economic growth has brought China an unprecedented resource shortage. Many Chinese elites are frustrated that China's global search for resources has met with what Chinese perceive to be unfair pressure from the western powers. Chinese scholars often cite the example that China's CNOOC had to abandon its takeover bid for Unocal Corp in early 2005 because of unusual political intervention from the US Congress.

Third, China's rising power status, showcased in winning its bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, has brought not only celebration of China's achievements but also intense international scrutiny of China’s domestic and foreign policy performance on issues such as pollution, human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, etc. China is also expected to take more responsibility and work with the international community to find solutions to crises from Darfur to Burma to North Korea. Beijing is worried that if China can match heightened foreign expectations, its cooperation is generating "excessive responsibilities" that the government cannot or should not take.

This frustration has sustained a rather broad-based nationalist sentiment. Seeking status, acceptance, and respect on the world stage and holding the government to accountable to fulfill its promise of safeguarding China's national interests, popular nationalists have charged the Chinese government with being too soft in dealing with the foreign powers. They urge the government to abandon the passive low-profile policy and play the role of a "great power" (daguo).

The Chinese leadership has devised a two-pronged response toward the popular nationalist demands.

On the one hand, they have tolerated and even encouraged popular expression of nationalism to make their own policy positions more credible on issues involving China's vital interests.

On the other hand, they have been very cautious to prevent nationalist sentiments from getting out of hand and causing a backlash in both domestic and foreign affairs.

This two- pronged response comes from the realization that nationalism is a double-edged sword: both a means for the government to legitimate its rule and a means for the Chinese people to judge the performance of the state. If the Chinese government cannot deliver on its nationalist promise, it could become vulnerable to nationalistic criticism. To avoid raising expectations that the Chinese government cannot meet, the Hu leadership has continued to reiterate the low-profile policy.

In a February 2007 article that the Chinese Foreign Ministry called a key policy statement, Premier Wen Jiabao stressed that “Precisely by not raising our banner or taking the lead internationally we’ve been able to expand our room for maneuver in international affairs."

Wen asked rhetorically whether that stance should change as other countries pile demands on China. "The answer is emphatic - there is no reason whatsoever to alter this policy."

As a matter of fact, Deng's policy is not simply a passive posture of keeping a low profile in international affairs. It also calls for active efforts to build up China's capabilities in order to expand China's international room for maneuver. Emphasizing the active part, the Hu leadership has concentrated on developing China's comprehensive national strength (zhonghe guoli), composed of international competitiveness, an efficient and flexible diplomacy and a compatible military capability.

Because this national strength grows out of economic power, the Hu leadership, like his predecessor, has held economic modernization and political stability as the overarching national objectives and pursued them enthusiastically, as indicated by its slogans of quanxin quanyi mufazhan, yixin yiyi kao jianshe (wholeheartedly seeking development and single-mindedly working on reconstruction).

To enhance the comprehensive national strength, the Hu leadership's foreign policy priority is creating and maintaining a stable and favorable international environment for its modernization program.

Since 9/11, China has found a more favorable environment for its modernization drive because, as an influential foreign policy scholar in Beijing elaborated: "The United States now needs China's help on issues such as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the maintenance of stability in the Middle East. More and more, Washington has also started to seek China's cooperation in fields such as trade and finance, despite increased friction over currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights and the textile trade."

However, the Hu leadership believes that although the US needs cooperation from the major powers in its war on terrorism, its ultimate objective is world hegemony, and that, seeing China as a potential obstacle to this, the US has never given up the policy of containing China.

To avoid any confrontation with the US that could subvert China's modernization program, the Hu leadership has made a preemptive effort to build an image of a rising China as a peace-loving and responsible power by promoting the new concepts of "China's peaceful rise/development" and "a world of harmony" and coped with international affairs mostly in light of their relevance to China’s modernization objectives.

Chinese foreign policy under Hu

The Hu leadership has continued the pragmatic engagement strategy begun by Deng. Its pragmatist strategy is ideologically agnostic, having little or nothing to do with either communist ideology or liberal ideals. It is a firmly goal-fulfilling, national interest-driven behavior conditioned by China's historical experiences and geostrategic interests.

The Hu leadership has tried to avoid identifying enemies and friends in foreign relations and to cope with international affairs mostly in light of their relevance to China's modernization objectives.

At the Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in August 2006, the Hu leadership proposed a strategic guideline to China's foreign relations: daguo shi guanjian, zhoubian shi shouyao, fazhanzhong guojia shi jichu (big powers are the key, periphery countries are the priority, and developing countries are the foundation).

1) China's big power relations

Seeing the big powers, particularly the US, as key in China's foreign relations, the Hu leadership, like its predecessor, seeks (a) to build a network of strategic partnerships with virtually all the major powers and regional blocs, and (b) to actively promote a multipolar world in which all major powers balance and cooperate with each other.

Since the end of the Cold War, while acknowledging the US' dominance in the international system and making pragmatic accommodations to it, Beijing's foreign policy-makers have tried to resist the formation and persistence of a unipolar world that it does not perceive to be in China's favor.

To find an alternative, China has actively promoted a multipolar world in which all major powers balance and cooperate with each other. The Hu leadership's coming to office coincided with 9/11, and it is certainly a relief to them that the US engagement in the Iraq War has not only tied up much of the US national strength but also demonstrated that the US has failed to develop an effective strategy for controlling the globe unilaterally. To manage its relationship with the US in the context of actively pushing for a multipolar world, the Hu leadership has continued to build a network of strategic partnerships on both bilateral and multilateral bases, covering virtually all the major powers and regional blocs, including Russia, France, the US, the UK, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the EU, South Africa, Canada, Brazil, India, Mexico and Japan.

The Hu leadership, emphasizing the desirability and likely emergence of a multipolar world of sovereign states mutually respecting the principle of non-interference and retaining its independent power aspirations by building a network of strategic partnerships, admits that the US remains the sole superpower. As a Chinese scholar said, despite frustrations with the significant ups and downs of its relationship with the US, the Hu leadership continues "learning to live with the hegemon."

The Hu leadership readily accepted the Bush administration’s characterization of the US-China relationship as "complex" and welcomed then Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick's invitation in a 2005 speech for China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system.

As a China Daily commentary suggested, the invitation to be a "responsible stakeholder" indicated that the Bush administration, like the previous six administrations, had come to see China as a "strategic partner." Chinese leaders particularly liked Zoellick's remarks that the "China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s: it does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies; it does not see itself in a twilight conflict against democracy around the globe. It does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism; it does not seek to overturn the fundamental order of the international system.

This pragmatic policy paid off as the Sino-US relationship has maintained a good momentum in recent years. In particular, the Hu leadership was pleased to see the Bush administration working with Beijing to stop outgoing Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's March 2008 referendum on Taiwan’s joining the UN in its own name.

2) Tackling controversial issues in China's relations with third-world countries

Although third-world relations are a priority for the Hu leadership, it has found them very difficult to handle lately. China's rise has brought with it the expectation of responsible behavior on a broad range of international issues, including on controversial issues involving third- world countries with which it has dealings.

For one thing, China's bilateral relations with countries like the US can no longer be disentangled from certain difficult third-country issues. These third countries are most often China's third-world allies, such as Iran and Sudan. China has had to be more responsive to US diplomatic concerns about the behavior of its friends in Africa and Asia.

Under these pressures, although China has kept its traditional friendships with its third-world allies, Beijing joined Washington in denouncing North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006, voted to impose and tighten sanctions on Iran, supported the deployment of a UN-African Union force in Darfur and even sent some of its own military engineers to join the force in 2007. China also condemned a brutal government crackdown in Burma in early 2008. These are bold steps for a government that claims not to meddle in other countries’ domestic affairs.

This does not mean that China has undergone an underlying shift in its values and discontinued working with troubled third-world regimes. But it does indicate some new thinking in Chinese foreign policy.

First, China has slowly relaxed its principle of noninterference in other country's internal affairs and learned to take a more flexible attitude toward the issue of sovereignty, reflecting the new reality of an interdependent world. It has become fully engaged in addressing such transnational concerns as terrorism, trafficking in arms, drugs and humans, health pandemics and climate change.

Second, China no longer sees its role as simply to defend its third-world allies against Western interference, but also to promote their long-term stability and responsible behavior. As one study indicates, although China is often accused of supporting a string of despots and genocidal regimes, in recent years, "Beijing has been quietly overhauling its policies toward pariah states… China is now willing to condition its diplomatic protection of pariah countries, forcing them to become more acceptable to the international community."

China's new thinking in its relations with third-world countries, however, has been constantly tested, particularly since its dependence on overseas energy supplies has increased steadily and it has to cultivate good relations with many third-world energy resource-rich countries, many of which have behavior problems in relations with the US and other western powers.

China's global energy drive has focused mostly on the Middle East. Iran, a country under US sanctions, has been the largest Middle East oil supplier to China. Since the Iraq War began in 2003, the Hu leadership has turned to Africa and Latin America in its search for energy stocks. China has successfully expanded its relations with many oil-rich African countries, including Sudan, a country accused by the US of genocide in its western region of Darfur, as well as Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, Angola and a number of other sub-Saharan nations. A relative newcomer to Latin America, China has quickly become an important partner with many countries in the region, including Hugo Chavez' Venezuela.

China's search for energy is welcomed by some third-world countries, as it has allowed them not only to exploit yet untapped resources but also to gain leverage to negotiate better deals with other oil-importing countries. But China's strategy has raised concerns among some in western countries, particularly the US, that China is not only challenging the US' historic dominance in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America but also undermining Western efforts to promote transparency and human rights in these developing countries, damaging US interests and values as it has searched for energy resources in some of the most unstable parts of the world, often ignoring the promotion of transparency, good governance and responsible behavior with its partner nations.

This has become a controversial issue in China's relations with the West. To cope with it, China has had to weigh its economic and political interests in these troubled states against its relations with the US and other western countries. For one thing, the Hu leadership does not want be perceived as a defender of authoritarian regimes responsible for human suffering. In addition, with its increasing investment in the resource-rich but often unstable third-world countries, China has to devise a more sophisticated approach to protecting its economic interests in these countries. Chinese leaders began to pressure Khartoum for a solution to the Darfur crisis not only because they have been under heavy pressure from the West to play a positive role there, but also because continuation of the crisis could undercut the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended decades of war in southern Sudan and lead to new fighting that could shut off oil production entirely and damage China's oil interests.

3) China's neighboring relations

The Hu leadership puts China's relations with neighboring Asian-Pacific countries at the center of China's overall foreign policy because China's security still relies heavily upon maintaining good relations with these neighbors.

China often calls its Asian neighbors "periphery countries" (zhoubian guojia), and Hu has faced some serious challenges in dealing with them. Problems with its most important neighbors have loomed all along China's frontiers.

On the northern border, although the Sino-Russian relationship has seemed to be going along well against the perceived US unilateralism, Russians are deeply wary of what some fear could be a creeping Chinese annexation of scantily populated regions in the Russian east.

In the south, India is another rising power that could easily become a potential rival. To the east, China faces a dispute with Japan over maritime boundaries in an area thought to be rich in oil and gas.

To the southeast, China faces several Southeast Asian countries with which it has unresolved maritime territorial disputes. Tempers flared in recent years when China stepped up its claims to the Spratly Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

To work with its neighbors and create a favorable peripheral environment for economic modernization, Chinese leaders have made a deliberated effort to formulate an integrated zhoubian zhengce (periphery policy) known as mulin zhengce (good neighbor policy) since the 1980s, aimed at exploring the common ground with Asian countries in both economic and security arenas and conveying the image of a responsible power willing to contribute to stability and cooperation in the region.

Hu has continued the good neighbor policy; and two developments in recent years are favorable for this policy. First, China has become an engine for economic growth for the whole region, and many Asian economies have benefited greatly from their economic relations with China. The second is that the US has diverted its attention from the region as the war in Iraq continues.

In these circumstances, the priorities of Hu's periphery policy are twofold: One is to dramatically increase China's economic interactions with Asia-Pacific countries, the other is to foster China's positive image and rebuild its historical status as the region's indispensable power by actively engaging with the Asia-Pacific countries. For these purposes, the Hu government has made use of the full range of foreign policy instruments, such as foreign aid, cultural exchanges, peacekeeping and a dizzying array of leadership meetings and agreements with Asian countries and the growing number of Asian regional organizations.

As a result, China has become the largest trading partner of many Asian neighbors, and its image has been further improved since Hu came to office, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Korea.

Conclusion

While the Hu leadership has insisted that it is continuing the low-profile policy, Chinese foreign policy has become more active, beyond its immediate interests. But China has not taken a more aggressive foreign policy direction.

The Hu leadership has learned to adapt to some aspects of the prevailing norms and values of the international system, but it has been slow and reluctant in many aspects.

How to work within the international system as a responsible stakeholder and align its interests closely with the US and other powers while vigorously pursuing its own national interests are still a difficult challenge to the Hu leadership in its second term.