China must leave its foreign policy to the experts
Lanxin Xiang says China’s diplomacy must be conducted by those with strategic vision, rather than the technocrats who have fumbled over the past decade, to set a policy that inspires trust
For years, China's leaders have been struggling to find a new concept to reset, if not redefine, the Sino-US relationship. So far, they has come up with only vague ideas such as "peaceful rise" and, more recently, "a new type of international relations between major countries".
With the re-election of Barack Obama as US president and the transfer of power in China to a new generation, one of the biggest challenges facing Obama will be finding a strategic and economic role for the United States in Asia that is acceptable to its strong network of allies and friends without alienating the Chinese.
The biggest challenge facing the new Chinese leadership in the region is how to repair relations with China's neighbours, and its image. In the past decade, Chinese foreign policy cannot be called a success, for two reasons.
First, the leadership has been obsessed with the search for an overarching concept to guide foreign policy, but no such concept works or even sticks. The early years of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao regime witnessed the quick rise and fall of the idea of "peaceful rise". As soon as the Americans countered with the "responsible stakeholder" concept, outlined by then deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick, "peaceful rise" fizzled out, for China was hardly ready or willing to take up responsibilities as a great power. Indeed, China always claims it does not want to be a great power.
Later, Hu came up with the concept of "the harmonious world". This time, the confusion was even more evident. The real world is far from harmonious. To extend a political slogan at home - "a harmonious society" - to the anarchical world system not only looked silly, but also seemed to demonstrate China's hidden agenda of "harmonising the world" through efforts to change the rules of the game.
Besides, the leadership has failed to maintain domestic harmony, as widespread corruption and social tension have pushed China closer to revolution. Indeed, Chinese bloggers have ended up using the phrase "to be harmonised" to indicate web censorship.
More shockingly, in the past three years, China has somehow managed to squander its remarkable achievement in establishing good rapport with its neighbours, losing a reservoir of goodwill that several generations of leaders had accumulated over more than six decades. The goodwill was founded on the smart and effective "periphery policy" (). Its loss provided fertile ground for the US to successfully build a containment strategy in Asia and the Pacific, at minimal diplomatic and material cost.
