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January 12, 2015

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

Global tensions create a delicate field for Chinese diplomacy, Fudan report says

By Ni Tao | January 12, 2015, Monday | Print Edition

THE past year was fraught with conflicts and instability all over the world, including the Ukrainian crisis, the rise of the terrorist group ISIS, and the spread of the Ebola virus.

These crises and tensions will last well into 2015 and pose challenges to both the world governance and China’s diplomacy and geopolitical relations, says a recent Fudan University study.

The outgrowth of the study is a report titled “Imbalance and Restructuring: Fudan International Strategic Report 2014,” which analyzed the current hot-button global issues and identified trends in the year ahead.

At the meeting where the report was released, Wu Xinbo, director of the American Studies Center at Fudan University, said that US President Barack Obama has become a “lame duck” president at a time of declining US supremacy.

As the US dominance of global affairs continues to wane, its diplomatic and military entanglements abroad will be restricted to areas where it has major or key interests. And the use of military power will be more discreet, said Wu.

He also argued that emerging countries will be asked to play a bigger role in global governance, and an increasing number of multilateral regimes will be put to work without US leadership or even involvement.

Professor Xin Qiang at the same center concurred. The US strategic “pivot” to Asia has scarred its relations with China, as the US chose to take sides with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam on territorial disputes against China, said Xin. However, confronted with the uncertainty about Ukraine and the Mideast crisis, a preoccupied US will have limited means to press ahead with the “pivot,” not to mention the risk of ratcheting up tensions with both China and Russia, Xin noted.

Restoring trust

Since the Obama administration aims to leave its legacy on such fronts as fighting terrorism, global warming and Ebola, it needs to woo China for cooperation and support. Xin thus predicted that in 2015 the US government might take measures to restore the compromised strategic mutual trust between China and the US, so as to enable the two countries to resume positive interaction.

Looking back on Chinese diplomacy in 2014, the forging of a “connectivity strategy” is no doubt the biggest highlight, said Su Changhe, deputy dean of the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan. The goals outlined in this strategy are to strengthen ties with China’s neighboring countries and speed up their exchanges in terms of people, capital, goods and ideas, said Su.

He observed that though the scale and scope of such exchanges are already huge, they have room to improve, calling for the need to reduce barriers to better connectivity.

That’s where the “One Belt and One Road” strategy comes in, meaning the Silk Road Economic Belt as well the Maritime Silk Road in the 21st century.

According to Su, President Xi Jinping specified at a meeting in November that progress needs to be made in the following areas: policy coordination, infrastructure linkage, smoother trade and capital flow, and people’s closer ties.

The bright prospects notwithstanding, Su noted that better connectivity entails greater diplomatic wisdom on China’s part. For instance, the term connectivity needs to be mentioned more often than regional integration, to assuage some countries’ fears. This is because Asia is a disparate bloc, comprised of a mega-sized economy and smaller ones.

Another thorny diplomatic test that needs to be handled with extreme care is the Sino-Japanese relationship, which has been strained by Japan’s lack of remorse toward its atrocious past, among other things.

Opportunistic desire

Since the success of the so-called “Abenomics,” named after Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, depends largely on the vast Chinese market, Abe vowed to mend fences with China, if only to a certain extent, after he won the election in December, said Hu Lingyuan, deputy director of the Japan Studies Center at Fudan. He added that the diplomatic risks posed by Abe’s reign lie in the balance between his opportunistic desire to cash in on economic cooperation with China and his obsession with shaking off the pacifist straitjacket imposed on Japan.

China-Japan ties may stabilize in the short term, but we can expect that Abe’s plan to change the constitution and rely on the US to contain China will stay unchanged and manifest itself in various ways this year, said Hu.

Chinese Views


 

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