Tao of China's diplomacy

West should accept the world has changed and relinquish its obsolete mentality of 'you are like us or against us'

Thirteen years ago the influential Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall endorsed the Asia 2025 report, in which the idea of Sino-American synergy was not even considered. "A stable and powerful China will be constantly challenging the status quo in East Asia, an unstable and relatively weak China could be dangerous because its leaders might try to bolster their power with foreign military adventurism," it said.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001, the United States modified the orientation of its foreign policy for a decade, but six months after the last US troops withdrew from Iraq, and as its troops prepare to withdraw from the Afghan quagmire, Marshall's assessment on China resurfaced and has provided the fundamental rationale for US President Barack Obama's grand "pivot to Asia".

If Marshall's reasoning was taken seriously by the vast majority of US analysts when Chinese GDP represented only 10 percent of US domestic product, how much more resonance must it have now the value of the Chinese economy has grown to be half the value of its US counterpart.

However, in assuming that the main challenges to US national security are the result of external factors and not domestic inadequacies, the US "return to Asia" illustrates what Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, calls "the new American militarism". A diversion from what really matters, the solidity of internal conditions, is a regrettable corollary of this policy.

The global financial crisis caused by Wall Street's hubris and a national credit addiction has accelerated China's relative rise, and a decade before its economy is expected to surpass the US' GDP, the most recent survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project concludes that China is already perceived by many as the world's leading economy.

Despite pervasive China-bashing, gross misrepresentation of Chinese society and the gap between the US and Chinese instruments of soft power, it is remarkable that the public perception is the US does not lead the world any more, at least in economic affairs.

More generally, China has demonstrated a unique ability to navigate a world of paradoxes where multipolarity is concomitant with interdependence. In this unprecedented environment, the relevance of the US' spectacular "return to Asia" underlines the US outlook in which Beijing is framed as a power to contain and a 21st century China that operates beyond East-West exclusive opposition.

But if the US believes that Beijing will opt for an antagonistic posture, it miscalculates Beijing's intentions. The subtle core of Beijing's global strategy is to remain non-confrontational.

Moreover, China's socioeconomic progress should not be seen as a threatening development to be circumscribed. As long as it is synonymous with stability and prosperity, the Chinese re-emergence does not weaken the US' Asian allies but offers them additional sources of growth.

Last year, while the value of Sino-Japanese trade reached $342 billion, the value of China-ASEAN commercial exchanges rose to $362 billion. China's economic links with Central Asia are increasing and the value of its trade with Russia or India will approach $100 billion by 2015.

The uncertainties in the global economy and the persisting turbulence in the eurozone have pushed Northeast Asia toward a collective rebalancing and diversification, but this significant redefinition of commercial and financial flows was not a scheme targeting any adversary; it was simply a reaction to the West's economic deficiencies.

China, Japan and South Korea have agreed to promote the use of their foreign exchange reserves to invest in each other's government bonds. The three countries, which account for 70 percent of Asian GDP, are also moving toward setting up a trilateral free trade zone. Beijing and Seoul have already announced the launch of FTA talks, which are expected to be completed before the end of 2014. China and Japan have started direct trading of their currencies in a policy that boosts the trade ties between Asia's two biggest economies.

The new Northeast Asian dynamics are also redesigning the Southeast Asian landscape. At the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila in May, China, Japan and South Korea, along with the 10 ASEAN members, agreed to expand a regional liquidity safety net by doubling the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization to $240 billion.

The highly indebted US - more than 100 percent of its GDP and on track to add three times more debt than the eurozone over the next five years - chooses to create the conditions for the bipolarization of the Asia-Pacific region 20 years after the end of the Cold War. Instead of a "pivot to Asia", the US should have refocused on its economy, which is the real long-term threat to its national security, and beyond, and on a rethinking with European leaders of Atlantic relations.

Fundamentally, while contemporary China has learnt to coexist with the West and continues to use it as a catalyst for the renewal of its ancient civilization, the West has not yet fully accepted the reality of a unique Chinese modernity.

By sticking to an obsolete world outlook that "either you are like us or you are against us" - China avoids such a dualistic mindset - the West risks becoming isolated.

China's vision of international relations is deeply influenced by the "Tao of Centrality", a philosophy and a practice whose aim is to balance opposites and to mediate between contradictory forces. The intelligence of centrality, zhong, presupposes contrary forces but it targets equilibrium and harmony and so transcends the logic of exclusive opposition. The grandeur of the Tao of Centrality is it seeks no victory of the East against the West but their mutual nourishment.

A global village where one power dominates over the others is no longer tenable. With interdependence considerably increasing the price of tensions, the Tao of Centrality is powerfully effective.

At a security conference in Singapore a month ago, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said all the US military services are "focused on implementing the president's guidance to make the Asia-Pacific a top priority". Meanwhile, China concentrates on its domestic transformation and, gradually and peacefully, regains centrality.

Although the counterproductive "pivot to Asia" complicates Sino-Western relations, it is not too late for the West to consider the Chinese renaissance with wisdom. It would not only contribute to its revitalization but also take the global system into an unprecedented era of cooperation and prosperity.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School, and founder of the Euro-China Forum.

(China Daily 07/07/2012 page5)