Community of common destiny: China’s “new assertiveness” and the changing Asian order

China’s perception of international society

China’s historic experience with Western international society continues to shape its behaviour today. The roughly one hundred years between the start of the Opium Wars in 1840 and the Communist Revolution in 1949 were defined by repeated incursions, occupations, and concessions at the hands of the Western powers, Russia, and Japan. As the region’s preeminent economic and military power for centuries, imperial China had organized relations among regional states in what is popularly known as the “tribute system.” The sailing of British gunboats down the Yangtze signalled the beginning of the end of this traditional order in East Asia. With its dissolution, and upon the signing of the “unequal treaties,” the Celestial Empire entered a long and bitter period of subordination vis-à-vis colonial powers.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 marked the end of the “century of humiliation” and the beginning of self-imposed isolation from Western international society. The nascent Communist government, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, had a coherent worldview. To the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the international system was characterized by a trend of war and revolution against the Western imperial powers, and China placed itself at the vanguard of this global struggle against imperialism and colonialism. China remained an outsider to the Western liberal order until its rapprochement with the USA in 1971.

Starting in the 1970s, the PRC slowly returned to Western international society. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated the “reform and opening” policy, slowly transitioning China from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. Economic modernization required stable relations with the world’s largest and most advanced markets and a regional environment that remained open and free of any conflict that would dampen trade and investment flows. The massive change to the structure of the Chinese economy effected a revolution in China’s relations with international society. In a June 1985 speech to his top generals on the priorities of China’s foreign affairs, Deng told the audience, “We used to believe that war was inevitable and imminent.… [A]fter analyzing the general trends in the world and the environment around us, we have changed our view that the danger of war is imminent.” Deng now believed that “peace and development are the two outstanding issues in the world today.” ⁷

It was in this milieu that the now famous dictum of “biding our time” emerged. Understanding that in order to successfully modernize would take decades and require peaceful relations with the West, Deng issued a strategy that would be the guide for China’s foreign policy going forward: “hide our capacities and bide our time, but also get some things done” (taoguang yanghui, yousuo zuowei). This meant above all a pragmatic foreign policy, with economic development being the chief foreign policy goal to which all other goals, including military modernization, would be subordinated. This policy had support through the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao administrations. Hu’s top foreign policy official, Dai Bingguo, reiterated China’s intention to remain “modest and prudent, not serve as others’ leader or a standard bearer and not seek expansion or hegemony,” which suggested that Beijing was not interested in taking a leadership role alongside the USA. ⁸

During the Deng era, the PRC joined the major multilateral institutions of the liberal order, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1980, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. Today, China is a member of almost all major international organizations. China’s integration into the post-war Bretton Woods institutions was extraordinarily successful. In the decade after China’s accession to the WTO, its economy grew at an average of more than 10 percent annually. ⁹ But economic liberalization, which China has pursued gradually and continuously since Deng’s reform and opening policy began, came without the attendant political liberalization. This was not by accident. The CCP resists all that it can the “Western” values of constitutional democracy, rule of law, and an independent press, all of which would threaten its hold on power.

It is in this context that we should understand the “new assertiveness” of China under Xi Jinping. From a position of political and cultural supremacy for centuries, to the intrusion of the Western powers and the beginning of the Opium Wars when modern China reached its nadir, to the isolationism and revolutionism of Mao, and finally to the peaceful rise strategy of Deng Xiaoping, China is quickly returning to its original status in the world, albeit a world that is not of its making. A key question is how China will use its newfound riches to reshape regional and international order more in line with its own vision of a just and moral order. In the words of one prominent analyst: “If the United States prefers liberal institutions, democracy and human rights, in addition to strategic primacy, what does China prefer as its international ideals?” ¹⁰

Xi Jinping’s China

A common refrain heard after the 19th Communist Party Congress held in October 2017 was that Mao made China independent, Deng made China rich, and now Xi is making China strong. ¹¹ Nearly forty years of rapid economic growth has led to a China that is more self-confident and more willing to put itself forward as a model for emulation. ¹² At the 19th Party Congress, the twice-per-decade meeting to pick a new top leadership and set policy priorities for the coming years, Chinese president Xi Jinping pronounced that China had entered a “new era,” and that it was time for the country to take “centre stage in the world.”

China’s foreign policy under Xi Jinping’s first term (2012–2017) has been marked by three new trends not seen in past administrations.

First, there is a willingness to position the Chinese development model as an alternative for developing states. China’s impressive economic modernization over the past four decades has inspired confidence in its own development strategy—based on massive state-funded infrastructure projects to spur industrial development—as an alternative to the neo-liberal consensus. In his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2015, Xi said, “It is important for us to use both the invisible hand and visible hand to form synergy between market forces and government function and strive to achieve both efficiency and fairness.” ¹³ The emphasis on both the private market and state-led development policies is congenial to China’s own development path since 1978, and holds attraction for developing states that are weary of neo-liberal policies. The “China model” offers the dynamism of private markets without the state relinquishing the commanding heights of the economy. It is an alternative pathway to modernity. Beijing’s new grand strategy, the “Belt and Road Initiative,” by using state-to-state loans for major infrastructure projects and policy coordination between Beijing and recipient countries, extends the legitimacy of the Chinese state–market relationship internationally. ¹⁴ This is not to say that Beijing seeks to actively replicate its development model abroad the way the Washington Consensus has been exported globally. Shortly after the 19th Party Congress concluded, Xi emphasized that Beijing would not export its development model. ¹⁵ While Chinese elites have been vocal and confident in their mode of political and economic governance, recognition by the international community of the legitimacy of the Chinese model, rather than its spread, remains their primary concern. ¹⁶

Second, there is the dual strategy of reforming old international institutions and creating new ones. One analyst has it that China has initiated or been a major partner in the creation of at least twenty-two multilateral institutions, which together serve to constitute a “parallel order” next to Western-initiated and dominated institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. ¹⁷ Some of these Chinese initiatives are well known in the West: the much-publicized AIIB, for example, which has been modelled on established multilateral lenders and complements them by financing much-needed infrastructure projects in the region. Others, such as the BRICS New Development Bank, Contingency Reserve Agreement, and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), for example, have been less publicized, but are equally important as signposts in China’s emergence as a supplier of global public goods.

Third, there is a great power mentality. This is best illustrated by China’s willingness to take on a leadership role in global governance. At an internal national security conference in February 2017, Xi put forth the concept of “two guidances” (liangge yindao): China as a guiding force in global governance and international security. ¹⁸ China has used a series of multilateral fora to showcase its role as a responsible great power: hosting the G20 summit in Hangzhou in September 2016; promoting the BRICS grouping; and being a central diplomatic player in the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement and the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. This trend will not slow down, especially during the tenure of the Trump administration, whose unilateralist foreign policy provides an opening for Beijing to display its capacity for global leadership. Xi’s report to the 19th Party Congress, which sets out the leadership’s priorities for the following term, confirmed his intention to exert greater influence over global governance in the coming years: “China will continue to play its part as a major and responsible country, take an active part in reforming and developing the global governance system, and keep contributing Chinese wisdom and strength to global governance.” ¹⁹

To be sure, while Xi’s China has taken up a more prominent position in global governance reform, there remain important continuities in Beijing’s foreign policy: it remains a staunch supporter of the United Nations system, consistent in its insistence on the principle of non-intervention, and still interprets the international system as defined by the trends of “peace and development,” et cetera. Alongside these continuities has been the emergence of a more proactive China during Xi’s first term.

How should we interpret China’s “assertive” foreign policy under Xi Jinping? Part of the explanation is, as realists predict, the result of expanded capabilities. As China’s material power has grown, so have its interests around the world, and, like all states, it will continue to seek to preserve its core interests, however defined. ²⁰ In this reading, the recent Chinese-led initiatives such as the AIIB are a means for China to “balance” against the USA, which under the Obama administration began an explicit strategy of containment of the region’s rising power. ²¹ But also important are domestic ideas, leadership preferences, and national identity. Complementing those analyses that view the emergence of an assertive China as largely the result of expanding material interests, this paper locates Beijing’s shift to a more proactive foreign policy in China’s search for global legitimacy. The financial crisis of 2007–2008, which originated in the heart of the international system’s leading capitalist state, and more recently the rising tide of populism in Western democracies, manifested in the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, cemented the feeling among Chinese elites that dominant discourses in international society, that of liberal internationalism, are not legitimate, that China has successfully blazed its own path, and that it deserves greater say in how the world is run. ²²

Legitimacy and international society

The English School, with its principal idea of international society, offers a useful lens through which to understand China’s rise and its implications for global norms. The classic definition of international society was offered by Hedley Bull: “A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.” ²³

The underlying foundation of international societies is a set of what Christian Reus-Smit calls fundamental institutions. These institutions embody “sets of prescriptive norms, rules, and principles that specify how legitimate states ‘ought’ to resolve their conflicts, coordinate their relations, and facilitate co-existence.” ²⁴ The fundamental institutions of nineteenth-century Europe, especially after the 1815 Congress of Vienna—typically taken as an exemplar of a legitimate order—included the balance of power, sovereignty, international law, great power management, and diplomacy. Furthermore, the fundamental institutions of any international society are built upon deeper “constitutional structures,” metavalues that define legitimate and appropriate state behaviour. “Constitutional structures are coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles, and norms that perform two functions in ordering international societies: they define what constitutes a legitimate actor, entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood; and they define the basic parameters of rightful state action.” ²⁵

In Europe, the constitutional structures upon which international law and multilateralism were built were threefold: the moral purpose of the state being the augmentation of the individual, particularly in the economic realm; liberal sovereignty as the organizing principle; and legislative justice as the procedural justice norm. In East Asia, the constitutional structure of the tribute system was, as Yongjin Zhang and Barry Buzan argue, “informed mostly, if not exclusively, by Chinese culture and civilization”: the moral purpose of the state was to promote cosmic-social unity; the organizing principle was ordered inequality among sovereigns; and ritual justice was the norm of justice. ²⁶ In both the European and East Asian orders, the constitutive structures upon which institutions that manage interstate relations were built grew out of specific historical and cultural contexts, and were a reflection of the core state(s) who imagined, constructed, and sustained international order.

A crucial insight of the English School is that the fundamental institutions of international society, norms that define what counts as legitimate behaviour, evolve over time. The Westphalian principles of sovereignty and non-intervention that were institutionalized in the post-war years in the United Nations Charter came under increasing pressure in the post-Cold War period, in which insipient norms of “responsibility to protect,” human rights, and democratic governance became the new benchmarks for legitimate governance. ²⁷ As new actors rise to a position of preeminence, those states that are in a position of material primacy bring with them different ideas about how relations among states should be organized and what behaviour is considered legitimate. China’s rise today is important because of the effects it will have on extant foundational norms.

The emphasis on legitimacy lines up with Ian Clark’s recent effort to make the concept of international society more parsimonious by defining it as “a set of historically changing principles of legitimacy.” ²⁸ Some scholars are especially sanguine about the stickiness of global liberal norms. ²⁹ The argument goes that since China has integrated itself into the US-liberal order for the past forty years, it has little interest in overturning this order that has brought it such material benefit. China has certainly benefited from foreign investment, trade, and the joining of international institutions, and the success of the Chinese development model cannot be disassociated from the liberal order in which it took root. Moreover, the primary goal of Chinese foreign policy continues to be the maintenance of a peaceful and open neighbourhood to allow it to continue its economic development, for which an open trading regime is crucial. But this type of analysis ignores the Chinese domestic political structure as well as Chinese cultural and historical ideas about what constitutes a stable and just international order. This is even more important given China’s newfound wealth. The emergence of an “assertive” Chinese foreign policy after 2008, and accelerated under the tenure of Xi Jinping, should be viewed as a challenge to the normative anatomy of international society, and an attempt to reformulate which rules and norms of behaviour are accepted as legitimate among its members.

Can international society be Sinified?

In a sharp departure from the country’s hitherto passive foreign policy, Chinese leaders have begun positioning China as the torchbearer of an alternative world order. ³⁰ Such a reconfiguration requires China to offer a blueprint for order that is at least as attractive as the principles underpinning the liberal order. This is not lost on Chinese officials. According to Fu Ying, the former PRC vice-minister for foreign affairs, “many Chinese scholars are also working on the theoretical basis for future order.” ³¹ Indeed, between 2011 and 2017, China’s top international relations (IR) journal, World Economics and Politics, published forty-six articles that were concerned with order (zhixu).

China’s thinking on order is important because the material power that it now commands can be employed to enforce its normative vision. China’s share of the global economy is now 15 percent, second only to the USA. ³² A comparison of before and after the global financial crisis is striking: in 2006 the USA was the top trading partner for 127 countries, while China was the top trading partner for seventy. By 2011, this ratio had flipped: China was the top trading partner for 124 countries while the USA claimed seventy-six. ³³ Besides Canada and Mexico, China is now the largest trading partner for all of the countries in the Asia-Pacific. ³⁴ Its USD $11-trillion economy is the region’s largest, more than twice the size of second-place Japan. The USD $215 billion it spends on its military each year is more than quadruple second-place India. ³⁵ China is the leader, or has strong influence over, most of the region’s institutions—the AIIB, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, ASEAN+3. Furthermore, China has now begun providing global public goods in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative, tying states along the road and belt to its large domestic market. In short, China has re-emerged as the region’s dominant power. This strong position provides China with an opportunity to put its own imprint on regional order.

Imagining a new world order

Chinese scholars are beginning to conceptualize the normative foundations of a future new world order. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the field of IR, where Chinese scholars have been busy building a “Chinese School” of IR. ³⁶ Seeking to break away from mainstream US-dominated IR, Chinese theorists have sought to use the significant historical, cultural, and philosophical resources of China to develop new theories to answer contemporary problems, the most urgent being the peaceful rise of a power. Three Chinese contributions to IR theory have been much discussed: Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia, Qin Yaqing’s Relationality, and Yan Xuetong’s Moral Realism. ³⁷ In recent years there has been another innovation, this time from scholars based out of Shanghai: a Gongsheng School. ³⁸

Gongsheng, or symbiosis, is a concept originally found in evolutionary biology. It refers to the long-term interaction of different organisms in the same environment. H. A. de Bary, the German botanist who coined the concept in 1879, defined symbiosis as “the living together of unlike organisms.” Fudan University sociologist Hu Shoujun brought gongsheng into the social sciences. After this introduction into sociology, the gongsheng concept caught the attention of IR theorists, who noticed the applicability to an international system with many different types of political systems, cultures, and levels of development.

In 2013, two Fudan scholars, Ren Xiao and Su Changhe, separately published articles about gongsheng in World Economics and Politics, China’s top IR journal. ³⁹ “For a long time,” Ren begins his article, “writing on international relations has taken Europe as the core[;] IR theory has often used the European historical experience as the foundation [of theorizing].” ⁴⁰ An excessive reliance on European history and ideas has served to embed certain concepts that are central to the field: balance of power politics, competition, individualism, and conflictual relations.

Moreover, the contemporary US ideology of liberal internationalism, further deepened after the end of the Cold War, has propelled the USA to adopt democracy promotion as a foreign policy strategy. ⁴¹ This ideology is buttressed by the belief in one version of modernity: that liberal order is the only possibility for international order. As one of the most prominent US liberals writes, “A grand alternative does not exist.” ⁴² Chinese scholars certainly disagree. “Has history ended with Western-style ‘liberal democracy’?” Ren asks. “Absolutely not!” ⁴³

As part of their efforts to indigenize IR theory, gongsheng scholars have sought to re-theorize the East Asian tributary system as a gongsheng order. The paradigmatic description of the East Asian interstate order is the “tribute system,” developed by John King Fairbank in his well-known work The Chinese World Order. ⁴⁴ In Fairbank’s account, the tribute system is presented as a Sinocentric, hierarchical order. According to Ren Xiao, the traditional order in East Asia is better understood as a gongsheng order, whose long and peaceful tenure must, to a certain extent, be attributed to its consensual nature based on status roles. Among the major states in the region, and between big and small, strong and weak states, there was general compliance with norms dictating appropriate behaviour according to one’s status; chief among them was the exchange between small states of the recognition of the Chinese emperor as the ruler of all-under-heaven for the guarantee of ruling legitimacy and non-interference at home. ⁴⁵ In this order, peace prevailed when “small respected big, and big were tolerant of small.” ⁴⁶

This status differentiation bears striking resemblance to present-day China’s official stance on the future security order in the Asia-Pacific, as outlined in a white paper issued by the State Council Information Office in January 2017. Five nations are designated “major” powers—China, the USA, Japan, India, and Russia—who are instructed to “respect others’ legitimate interests and concerns,” while for the region’s junior members, the white paper counsels that “small and medium-sized countries need not and should not take sides among big countries.” ⁴⁷

Gongsheng is both an ideal about how the international should be structured—with different polities co-existing—as well as a claim about its equilibrium condition. The natural state of the international system is characterized by diversity—a myriad of differing cultures, religions, values, and political systems. “It has been [diverse] in the past, it is now, and will continue to be in the future.” ⁴⁸ As an ideal, this vision of pluralism is very different from the current liberal order, which gongsheng scholars define as homogenous (tongzhi) given the similar cultural, economic, and political constitution of its core members. ⁴⁹

The homogeneity of the liberal order clashes with elements of traditional Chinese thought that stress the universality of difference. In their discussion of the possibilities of moving toward a more pluralist international order, Ren Xiao and his co-authors point to a quote from the Confucian classics: “It is the nature of things to be different.” ⁵⁰ The quote, drawn from Mencius (372–289 BC), refers to the natural state of diversity among all things. Mencius continues: to disregard difference and to reduce all to the same standard is the cause of disorder (luan tianxia). Chinese president Xi Jinping is fond of referencing the phrase, often using it in his engagement with foreign audiences, including his visit to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and in an interview with The Wall Street Journal prior to his visit to the USA in 2015. ⁵¹ At the 2015 Boao Forum, themed “Asia’s New Future: Towards a Community of Common Destiny,” Xi again deployed Mencius’ quote to advocate his signature vision for the region. Xi followed the quote with a call for cultural pluralism: “between civilizations there are no distinctions between superior and inferior, only uniqueness.” ⁵² Xi is clear: this new regional order need not be based on identical values.

Building a community of common destiny

In October 2013, the CCP held a work forum on peripheral diplomacy, the first forum dedicated to peripheral diplomacy since the establishment of the PRC in 1949. ⁵³ The forum was notably attended by all seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most powerful decision-making body in the country, as well as State Counselors, various organs of the Central Committee, and Chinese ambassadors to peripheral countries. At the forum, Chinese president Xi Jinping laid out his vision for the future of Asia: “A Community of Common Destiny.” ⁵⁴

The economic foundation for this new China-centred regional order is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). First announced by Xi Jinping at a September 2013 speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, the BRI is a series of major infrastructure projects—oil and gas pipelines, sea ports, hydroelectric dams, airports, railways—in countries spanning Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. This ambitious geopolitical project is now a core element of China’s foreign economic policy. ⁵⁵ The provision of global public goods through the BRI is not only in the self-interest of China, whose steel plants only operated at two-thirds capacity in 2015—by linking the interests of developing states to the Chinese domestic market, Beijing also gains considerable muscle to promote new global norms. ⁵⁶

As David Arase notes, the organizational anatomy of the BRI differs from the liberal order in four consequential ways: (a) it is not multilaterally negotiated, but bilaterally negotiated between China and each linked state; (b) it is not treaty-based liberalization that removes legal barriers to trade, but trade facilitation using infrastructure corridors and state development policy coordination; (c) membership qualification and rules are not objective and non-discriminatory, but negotiated with China on a case-by-case basis; and (d) it does not rely on free markets and private sector initiative, but on national development plans and policy coordination between states. ⁵⁷

Two important points follow. First, the fact that the BRI depends on national development plans and policy coordination means that China’s state-led model of development will be partially replicated in participating states, further increasing its status as a legitimate alternative to market-led growth. Second, the fact that the BRI is negotiated bilaterally means that China has greater bargaining power than it would have in a multilateral trading regime. The structure of the BRI contradicts Beijing’s recent attempt to position itself as an advocate and leader of multilateralism and free trade. ⁵⁸

Gongsheng scholars point out that Asian regionalism, with the BRI as its new engine, rests on different foundational norms than the European experience. While European integration was based on both political and economic integration among its constituent members, China’s vision for Asia ultimately calls for an order based on economic integration without political integration. ⁵⁹ The eschewing of political integration based on any one ideal-type of political system is not only deemed the most appropriate international arrangement in a region defined by a plurality of political systems and diverging levels of development, but is also congenial with the Confucian tradition of harmony without sameness (he er butong) as well as the PRC’s long-standing policy of Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence; this ideal of co-existence of a plurality of heterogeneous states also underpins the Community of Common Destiny concept.

Conclusion

China’s rise holds importance not only for the material balance of power in the international system, but also the normative anatomy of international society. Returning to Clark’s notion of international society as “historically changing principles of legitimacy” helps bring into clarity China’s new assertive foreign policy. From Beijing’s perspective, the 2008 financial crisis threw into doubt the Western economic model, and the rise of populism eight years later exposed weaknesses in the Western political model. Beijing is more confident that its own model of governance offers a legitimate alternative. Moreover, in the wake of its economic rise, China now has the means—and with Trump, the opportunity—to offer its own solutions to problems of global governance.

Beijing is now active in reforming the current order to better reflect its preferred principles. While China during the four decades of “reform and opening” was basically a passive integrator into the liberal economic order, Xi Jinping’s China is more willing to take a leadership role in global governance, more active in making changes to international institutions and norms, and more confident in its insistence that a plurality of states can co-exist. This, of course, means that Xi expects China’s own authoritarian political system to be tolerated, if not respected, as an equal to Western liberal democracies. With China poised to soon overtake the USA as the world’s largest economy, this vision might well be on the way to fruition. At the most recent national congress, China’s legislature agreed to amend the constitution to eliminate term limits for the presidency, setting Xi Jinping to rule well beyond the end of his second term in 2023, a remarkable expansion of personal power. The response from the White House? It was “a determination for China to make, not something for the United States to weigh in on.” ⁶⁰