When in 1972, President Richard Nixon visited Mao Tse Tung in China, this visit to the People’s Republic, executed in deep secrecy, signalled to the rest of the world, and in particular America’s major partners, that the United States had recognized a force in the world that would not permit its exclusion from global affairs. This admission of China’s potential elevation to major player status was not in itself a revelation to many of the US’s Nato partners. For while surprising, it demonstrated to them that the United States, driven in the post-World War II period by a deep ideological antagonism to the communist powers, was beginning to perceive that both the Soviet Union and China were themselves starting to see the world beyond their frontiers and the world communist system, as a necessary element in their further development and search for status.
The relative rapidity with which China, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, moved to regularize relations with the Western economies through its negotiation for entry into the World Trade Organisation, consolidated this view of a reconstructed Chinese policy. This reconstruction coincided largely with the new Western strategy of progressive liberalization of international economic relations, with its philosophy of the necessity to function within an economy perceived as a globalised whole, that President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to symbolize. And this view of a Western world appearing to be victorious with its economic ideology, seemed to be consolidated when Russia’s Gorbachev turned to his own strategy of glasnost and perestroika (opening and restructuring); and then, with the Soviet Union’s collapse, his successor’s (Yeltsin’s) turn to an open capitalism.
China certainly drew the conclusion from the Russian experience, that the acceptance of a form of capitalism in a country of a variety of nationalities, spread over extensive territory, required the maintenance of a strong state, under the guidance of the prevailing Communist Party. Unlike what many analysts in the West advocated and predicted, China saw no inevitability between the acceptance of capitalism and the emergence of a liberal, or multi-party state. And China, watching the swift collapse of the Soviet Union, obviously quickly consolidated its own view that the extensive and deep presence of the Communist Party was necessary for the presence in the world system of a geopolitically unified, historic China. The regime’s unyielding attitude to the desire of Tibet, supported in Western circles, for greater autonomy has made this clear.
The Western powers have, certainly in the last ten years or so, come to recognize the importance for China of being accepted as one of the world’s great powers, with a desire to extend its policies to ensuring an appropriate sphere of influence in its own immediate geopolitical arena, while sharing in the decision-making on the evolution of the nature of the political world emerging after the demise of the Soviet Union. But what they did not recognize as clearly were two things. First, that China would not be content to quietly accept its incorporation into the emerging globalised economy on a basis whereby the United States, the world’s acknowledged largest and dominant economy, would continue to play the determining role. And secondly, that the simultaneous economic emergence of large nations like India in the Asian arena, would induce the United States to come to terms with another major Asian power desirous of drawing up its own rules as to how the post-communist Asian geopolitical sphere would emerge. That new India would also want to ensure that there was a balance of relations that was more than a two-sided game between the United States and China, with India playing a relatively passive role, such as post-war Japan played in relation to the US – that is as a major economic power, but a relatively subservient geopolitical player.
What has been transpiring – to take the issue of China’s location in the global economy first – is that the United States has been finding that the Chinese are unwilling to accept the rules about participation in the globalised economy, even though they have accepted the basic ones pertaining to participation in the WTO. China’s attitude in the ongoing controversy about the role of its currency, suggests that it is determined, if not to rewrite the rules, at least to ensure that it is a full player in the determination of how new rules evolve. This, from the US perspective, is a new and strange attitude, for she has been dominant for so long in international financial relations, as evidenced in her traditionally determining role in the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
At the same time, India’s emergence in the global economy, with, like China, the maintenance of a more than respectable growth rate in the midst of the current global recession, has induced that country to raise its own profile in international economic negotiations. The country is now asserting an entitlement to be almost equally placed in the hierarchy of non-Western powers which now need to be listened too, as the tussle continues over how the global economy is to evolve.
In the sphere of emerging global geopolitics, one thing will not have been forgotten in this span of almost forty years since Nixon’s visit to China, is that the visit was arranged via the intermediation of Pakistan, historically a country with which India has not had completely normalized relations. In addition, as India will have watched the emerging relationship between the US and China, particularly prior to the current pre-recession phase, its leaders will not have forgotten either, the 1962 Chinese invasion of India, which, from all accounts, is still considered there as a humiliation. It is therefore not surprising that as India has moved to advance the liberalising of her economy with substantial US investment and the consequent enhancement of its exports to the US, she has insisted in recent years that she should have de facto recognition as a nuclear power, on terms acceptable to the US and herself. Thus the Indo-US Civilian Nuclear Agreement signed by George W Bush with the Indian leaders in 2008, which places the country on par with other developing countries, while placing itself also on par with Pakistan, long accepted by the United States as possessing a nuclear capability, virtually legitimately and not as a “rogue state.”
The emerging role of both China and India in the wider Asian arena is seen as they take up autonomous diplomatic positions both on the Afghanistan issue and the issue of Iran’s possession of some form of nuclear capability. On these issues, the United States finds itself playing a role of minimizing the diplomatic pressure which it is trying to place on these two states, while pressuring other emerging powers like Brazil and Turkey to pursue a line more to its own liking.
But both in the economic and political spheres a new game of balance, and competition for influence, is being played directly in the Asian arena. There, China seeks to insist on certain claims to territories in the East China Sea also claimed by Japan; the Soviet Union insists on its jurisdiction over the Kurile Islands captured at the end of the Second World War; and China seeks to maintain a certain geopolitical influence vis-à-vis both North Korea and North Vietnam, the latter a country now the recipient of extensive Western economic investment.
China sees a weakened Japan economically, given its prolonged recession, and a chance to regularize the relations between the two countries which it still seems to perceive as not sufficiently balanced, in spite of extensive Japanese investment in China itself.
In all this, the United States has obviously been devising a strategy of arranging a countervailing balance vis-à-vis China, one which extends beyond the Asian sphere itself – the subject of further comment.
