Saturday 17 October 2009

China’s thorny ‘near abroad’


China is seemingly on a diplomatic honeymoon with its neighbours. Over the last fortnight alone, Chinese leaders have met the leaders of eight of the 14 countries with which China shares a border - Russia, North Korea, Mongolia, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

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Guanyu said...

China’s thorny ‘near abroad’

Diplomatic flurry masks underlying strains in ties with its neighbours

By Peh Shing Huei
17 October 2009

China is seemingly on a diplomatic honeymoon with its neighbours. Over the last fortnight alone, Chinese leaders have met the leaders of eight of the 14 countries with which China shares a border - Russia, North Korea, Mongolia, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Throw in the visits to Beijing by leaders of Japan and South Korea last weekend and friendly neighbourliness was very much in the air in the Chinese capital.

Coming just after the People’s Republic celebrated its 60th National Day on Oct 1, these diplomatic exchanges further burnished the country’s credentials as a diplomatic heavyweight. A state media Global Times’ editorial proudly tagged it as ‘China’s golden autumn diplomatic blitz’ on Tuesday. It is no doubt a ‘win-win’ situation - as Mr. Yang Cheng of the Centre for Russian Studies in the East China Normal University put it - for China and its neighbours that it has had such an intense diplomatic calendar.

But scratch the surface and one will find that all is not that well, especially between China and its neighbours - relations that traditionally have figured among China’s top priorities.

On the same day that Beijing splashed reports of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s visit to China across the front pages of major newspapers, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sent a strong warning to India.

Beijing said it was ‘seriously dissatisfied’ by the visit of an unnamed Indian leader to the state of Arunachal Pradesh, a disputed Himalayan region. The reference was obviously to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had travelled to the mountainous state to canvass for votes in an area that China lays claim to as its ‘southern’ Tibet.

Chinese spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement: ‘We demand the Indian side pays attention to the serious and just concerns of the Chinese side, and does not provoke incidents in the disputed region, in order to facilitate the healthy development of Sino-Indian relations.’

Observers noted that while China has routinely protested against the visits of Indian leaders to Arunachal Pradesh before, the language used in this instance was unusually strong.

It came after a spate of reports in the Indian media of Chinese border incursions. Also, New Delhi had earlier protested against a Chinese embassy policy of issuing different visas to residents of disputed Kashmir.

It was not all smooth sailing between China and North Korea either. Despite a high-profile visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Pyongyang recently, Beijing has obtained precious little from the North Koreans.

While North Korean leader Kim Jong Il rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Wen and even welcomed him personally at the airport, Beijing-based analyst Kato Yoshikazu said that Mr. Wen returned home with no concessions on the biggest agenda on the table - resumption of six-party talks for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

‘Kim said that they will restart the six-party talks if they get to talk to the United States first,’ noted Mr. Yoshikazu. ‘That has been their stance all along.’

‘China’s relations with North Korea are at their worst ever. It’s obvious that North Korea does not listen to China any more. They only want to talk to the Americans.’

North Korea’s firing of short-range missiles days after Mr. Wen’s visit was seen as a slap in the face for China and further evidence that Pyongyang bows to no one.

Guanyu said...

Even in the case of China’s ties with Russia, observers here urged caution rather than optimism. Though Mr. Putin signed some US$3.5 billion (S$4.9 billion) worth of deals with Beijing, tensions remain between these communist rivals turned capitalist allies. Russia remains wary of Chinese influence in its Siberian Far East region, where local governments do not always implement Moscow’s policies.

‘The mistrust between China and Russia is deep and has led to war and years of suspicion,’ said analyst Ding Peihua. ‘This is not something which can be resolved in a year or two.’

The difficulties between China and its neighbours should not be surprising. As scholar David Lampton wrote in his book The Three Faces Of Chinese Power, China does not fully trust any of its neighbours. ‘It has no Canada along its vast boundaries,’ Professor Lampton noted wryly.

Among China’s four contiguous land neighbours, four have nuclear weapons - Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Since the communists came to power in 1949, it has fought with four neighbouring states - Russia, India, Vietnam and South Korea.

The lengthy and vast border regions of China have long been used by foreign forces to undermine Beijing. The United States worked through the Tibetan frontier region during the Cold War, and the former Soviet Union used its Central Asian states, as well as North Korea, as leverage against the Chinese.

Further back in history, China was occupied by neighbouring foreign forces, from the Mongols to the Manchus and the Japanese.

To the Chinese, exerting influence over its periphery is of paramount importance. But as Prof Lampton argued, how China deals with its neighbours is also taken as an indicator of how it will use its growing strength in the world.

‘China’s neighbours are the proverbial canaries in the mine for the rest of the world,’ he wrote.

It is thus critical for China to be sensitive to its ‘near abroad’. The stakes - such as territories and environment degradation - are usually higher than in other regions of interest to Beijing.

It won’t be easy. The rough neighbourhood can test and provoke even the most disciplined diplomats.

But if China is intent on maintaining the status quo - or wants to ‘keep a low profile and avoid the limelight’ in the words of former leader Deng Xiaoping - as it grows in power, it has to resist the temptation to flex its muscles, whether economic or military.

The honeymoon needs to be dragged out for as long as possible.