Inscrutable China !
Napoleon Bonaparte once said ”China is a sleeping giant, when she awakes, she will shake the world, better to let her sleep”. Henry Kissinger observed that for many years, China was the ”middle kingdom” of the world, surrounded by various small and insignificant states which threatened invasion, which led to the construction of a strategic body of thought. Since then, China watchers have racked their brains in trying to understand the inscrutable China with little success.
Until very recently, China found itself a victim of the Western-imposed international order, not an independent actor within it. China was too weak to participate in shaping the balance of power as a system of regional order and found itself conducting much of its domestic and foreign policies as an adjunct of the European powers. China’s emancipation from foreign dominance was, for the most part, violent and bloody, starting with the Chinese civil war (1927-49), the Korean War (1950-53), the Sino-Soviet conflict (1955-80), a Chinese-Indian war (1962), a Chinese-Vietnamese war (1979), to mention the major conflicts it found itself in. After years of internal turmoil and institutionalised poverty, China has undergone a dramatic transformation, bringing prosperity and economic dynamism to millions of its people. While maintaining a Communist government, it has built an economy rivalling that of the United States.
Much of that newfound prosperity has been diverted to building a military to rival America as it looks towards a national-interest-based foreign policy, challenging the United States’ hegemony in the Indo-Pacific while quietly building the foundations for future involvement in the Middle East.
Both China’s Indo-Pacific and Middle East ambitions pose an implicit threat to the West, as they send mixed messages about the use of military force in pursuit of its core national interests. China-U.S. rivalries in the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters are a potential powder keg, set to explode if either party miscalculates the other’s intentions.
Given the Chinese Communist ideology and narrow form of government, very much resting in the hands of one man, President Xi Jinping, there is theoretically little room for ambiguity as to the nature of China’s power ambitions, and all analysis has to be seen in the light of China’s cultural legacies and history, where in good and bad times, subordination to the Emperor meant Chinese protocol ordered the universe.
This remains true under Xi Jinping and all calculations must be with this in mind
