America’s Two Cold Wars by Alfredo Toro Hardy

Author:Alfredo Toro Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811695032
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Reputational Problems

Three key issues, however, are affecting China’s reputation and by extension its capability for convergence building: Its abrasive nationalistic outreach with reference to several of its neighbors (an area where it has become aggressively revisionist); its authoritarian handling of the situation in Hong Kong and very particularly in Xinjiang; and the highly confrontational style of its “wolf warrior” diplomacy, that intimidates and harass countries that criticize or antagonize China and which is the exact opposite to soft power. The question is: Can these issues neutralize the benefits derived from China’s active cooperative multilateralism and the economic opportunities that the country offers so many?

The late Lee Kuan Yew, probably the upmost interpreter of East Asian realities, believed that China’s economic sway would be extremely difficult to fight. This included even those of its neighbors with whom it maintained contentious issues. In Lee’s view, China was sucking the South Asian countries into its economic system, and not even Japan or South Korea would be able to avoid being sucked by it as well. On its part Charles Dunst, a Eurasia Group associate, asserts that China’s neighbors value economic cooperation more than security ties and China’s development financing for the region vastly outpaces that of the United States, who remains security-focused. Not surprisingly, a 2018 Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed that even with geopolitical contentions very much alive in its own region, China tilts 45 percent in its favor versus forty-four against it (Allison, 2018 [2, p. 23]; Shambaugh, 2020 [2, p. 362]; Siow, 2021).

If that is the case for countries that directly resent the Chinese abrasive nationalism, presumably in faraway regions, where economic benefits clearly outweigh other considerations, China’s convergence capacity would not be seriously affected. Paradoxically enough, at a global level many consider China to be the epitome of the international liberal order. Indeed, it has become a paradigm of cooperative multilateralism, international cooperation, integrated supply chains, and multilateral lending. Generally, the liberal international order has been characterized by tree distinct principles: Political liberalism, which includes democratic systems and respect for human rights; economic liberalism, that comprises economic exchanges and investments among states; and cooperative multilateralism, which is tantamount to the management of international relations by way of multilateral institutions. Under this light, Beijing has become the most accomplished practitioner of two of those three principles. At the end, the most influential power will be the one better suited to set agendas, mobilize support and come across as the most reasonable. Within this context, Kishore Mahbubani posed the question of which of the two superpowers of the day was swimming in the same direction of the majority of the other 191 nation-states of the planet. The answer admits no doubt: China (Cooley & Nexon, 2020 [7, Chapter 2]; Dyer, 2014, p. 15; Mahbubani, 2020b [4, p. 13]).

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