The four nos of the Middle Kingdom
This month’s English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique has a long and detailed article by Martine Bulard on China’s global strategy (China: middle kingdom, world centre). It’s well worth a read for an insight into how the Chinese ruling class is thinking about geopolitics and strategy at the moment. I’ll just comment on a couple of passages that struck me.
The first one concerns the possible arms race developing between the US and china:
The second crucial event was the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were no regrets over the disappearance of this rival communist regime but many academics recall that the USSR wore itself out in a fruitless confrontation with the US and a financially ruinous arms race. According to an anonymous defence expert: “The US presses for competition and an uncontrolled increase in military spending but we should confine ourselves to modernising the weapons required to strengthen our defences.” This counsel of moderation is more show than substance, since military spending already accounts for 2.4% of China’s GDP, but it is worth deploying against the general staff, which would like it to be much higher.
Clearly there is an understanding in Chinese elite circle of the US strategy of encirclement and military competition. The problem, it seems to me, is that understanding is one thing, and actually being able to overcome it is another. The Chinese ruling class want their country to become an economic superpower in a multipolar world, where they play a central role but not the central role. However, military and economic competition in the capitalist system have a logic of their own that is not so easily shaped by participants.
Might it not be that China’s current obsession with ’stability’ and Hu Jintao’s ‘Four Nos’ that Bulard quotes…
“No to hegemony, no to force, no to blocs, no to the arms race”
… are actually just the outward expression of the strategy most appropriate to China’s current stage of development as a world power and not some sort of new paradigm as some seem to be suggesting. I doubt the Chinese ruling class would hesitate to dispense with its objections to any of the above ‘nos’ when the time was right.
One other good aspect of this article is that it pays due attention to the relationship between China and Japan (some US/British commentators appear to have forgotten that Japan exists when they discuss the rise of China).
