The international system watched in awe as China jettisoned the basics of Marxist economics and greedily embraced the market system to get to the top of the financial hierarchy among nations. There has, however, always been an anxiety whether the dragon’s rise will be peaceful and peace-inducing, regionally and internationally. That
apprehension, alas, hasn’t been quieted with the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy. In the early years of its effort to raise the living standards of its people, Beijing tactically played nice and sweet with its neighbours, taking care not to induce fears. In the past decade or so, this appears to be changing. Now China gives every impression of being a noisy power, threatening all and sundry with consequences when its every wish is not met, and adopting a hectoring tone with neighbours on boundary disputes. Thus, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia and Japan find themselves in the firing line, not to mention Taiwan and Tibet over which China claims sovereignty. Of late India, too, has seen many instances of unreasonable Chinese conduct. The latest example of Beijing’s negative international behaviour is the bullying tone of its exchanges with Norway following the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese dissident activist Liu Xiaobo. Given the nature of its own political system, Beijing finds itself incapable of comprehending that the committee that awards the Nobel Prize is unconnected with the Norwegian government.
Signs of peaceful nationalist assertions in Xinjiang and Tibet have been routinely quashed by the Chinese authorities with brute force. Over the decades, these regions have seen a systematic effort by Beijing to change the population mix through the expedient of large-scale settlements of the majority Han people in a move to convert ethnic majorities into minorities in their own native space. A pity the world has witnessed these developments without perturbation. It was different, however, when the Chinese leadership sent tanks into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crush the popular pro-democracy movement of the Chinese people that was sought to be demonised as being part of an imperialist plot against China. Mr Liu, the Nobel laureate, was a leading figure of that movement.
The heart of the problem is that China has failed to modernise its political system. That would require it to democratise, to listen to its own people, and to moderate, modify and eventually jettison the one-party dictatorship it runs underpinned by its massive military machine. None of this is winning hearts and minds anywhere, including inside China itself. The Chinese Communist Party is so jumpy it seeks to bring the house down with clamorous protests at the first hint of dissident activity. Even the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement, has been hounded as the Party fears it might grow into a rival centre of power. Those asking questions within the Party apparatus are struck down or sent for “rectification”. The way things are, is there any surprise in the fact that Beijing’s closest allies are countries such as Pakistan and North Korea, which revel in being bad boys of the world system and are considered by many internationally as being beyond the pale? The language employed by Beijing in reaction to the Nobel award to Mr Liu is several shades worse than the one used by the Iranian clerics in denouncing the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi in 2003. This is no advertisement for a power that seeks to play a role on the world stage.