Future of the expanded East Asia Summit

Text of speech by Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd at the Asia Society, New York, January 13

[Continued from yesterday]

As a Western, democratic nation of largely Judeo-Christian origin, fully engaged in practically all of the institutions of Asia, Australia finds itself in a unique position of experiencing the winds of change earlier than most.

The key questions are as follows:

• First, what does China want for the future of the regional and global order?
• Second, what does America want?
• Third, what do the rest of us in Asia want?
• Fourth, is this diverse range of national values and interests capable of being accommodated?
• Fifth, if so, how can this be given institutional effect?

The view from Beijing

China’s attitude to its role in the global order has many parts.

First, the Chinese have long argued that modern China must operate within an international system, rather than outside it, as it did during the cultural revolution. For China this has been important for its own interests (e.g. WTO accession) as well as its international standing as a respected power.

But second, this has always been accompanied by a call for the reform of the international system as well.

China has long objected to a uni-polar world and instead called for ‘the democratisation of international relations’ in the context of a genuinely multi-polar world.

This has taken many forms – a new order based on three poles of the US, China and Europe; or more recently a new order which accommodates a new power bloc of emerging economies like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Importantly, China has not officially embraced any programme for UN Security Council reform that would dilute its own power against say Japan, India or even Germany.

But the diffusion of US power through a more ‘democratic’ and ‘multipolar’ order remains a continuing Chinese objective.

Third, critically, China in the late 1970s eschewed the export of its own ideology as part of its own international relations policy.

Imagine for a moment if China was still in the business of exporting revolution as it was for the first half of the history of the People’s Republic. Today, China’s so-called ‘united-front’ actively continues but is totally engaged with the ever-growing Chinese Diaspora around the world ‘to help build the motherland’.

Fourth, China resents any attempt to use the international system to export Western ideology (i.e. human rights, religious belief systems or democracy) to China. Or to hold China to account for failing to meet these standards.

Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd

Fifth, China instead, through Hu Jintao, has argued for what is called a ‘harmonious society’ at home, mandated by a ‘harmonious world’ abroad.

While many in the West may find such a formulation banal (in fact with China, many political concepts can literally be lost in translation) the fact remains that this represents a Chinese attempt to accommodate a diversity of values, and a diversity of interests in the international order, and a commitment to peaceful dialogue, not sabre-rattling conflict, as a means of dealing with difference. I have also long argued this concept of a harmonious world (hexie shijie) which has deep resonance in classical Chinese philosophy, is a concept which the West can work with.

Finally, above all, Beijing, consistent with most states, seeks to use the international system to advance its national interests. China wants a peaceful regional and global environment in order to grow its own economy and in so doing achieve the overriding social objectives of lifting its people out of poverty, giving jobs to its youth and raising the living standards of working people so that they can enjoy a better life, better than the mass deprivations of the past. At the same time, China’s leadership seeks to lift international prestige as a proud people with arguably the oldest continuing civilisation on earth.

These two factors are also core to the continuing legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

The uncertain question for many in the West is whether these national goals, and the national and international policies that give them effect, are either tactical or strategic.

This hangs very much on a long-standing debate of Deng Xiaoping’s core maxim of 'hide your strength, bide your time' – a maxim that was recently, explicitly and at some length revisited and re-explained by China’s leading foreign and national security spokesman, State Councillor Dai Bingguo.

Some argue that the concept of 'hide your strength, bide your time' means that China’s current adherence to international norms consistent with the concept of a 'harmonious world', is purely tactical – i.e. that once China has actually obtained national wealth and power it will increasingly act unilaterally.

Others argue that China’s acceptance of the multilateral rules-based order is now an enduring and possibly permanent condition for China.

While there is acute debate on this in Beijing among the ever increasing number of official and semi-official think tanks, my own view remains very much the latter. This is because it will remain in China’s overwhelming national interest to continue to support a multi-lateral rules-based order that has served it so well in the past, China will seek to influence and shape that order in the future, but not to defy it.

Nonetheless the fact remains that many regional states are likely to take active measures to hedge against the alternative possibility (i.e. a more unilateral China in the future) so that they are not caught unprepared.

The view from Washington

Henry Kissinger has made plain in his landmark work 'On China', that a core difference between American and Chinese worldviews is American exceptionalism. This is the view that the political and economic freedoms that are the heart and soul of the American tradition, are not only a birth-right for every citizen of the United States, but they also represent a 'light on the hill' for every citizen of the world.

With this tradition there is of course a debate about means and ends - with regime change at one end of the spectrum; moral suasion based on international norms (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) at the other; and an activist human rights diplomacy somewhere in the middle.

But the critical difference is this; the Chinese government fundamentally disagrees with the universality of western perceptions of human rights.

China argues that it is the right of all states to develop their own form of government; that states should not pry beyond the borders of other states as this offends national sovereignty which remains a cornerstone of the international system; and that in China’s case many 'Western political values' are deeply incompatible with Chinese values, not only for post-1949 China, but throughout China’s 2000 year old Confucian tradition.

Second, beyond human rights, the United States still sees itself, as do most of its friends and allies, albeit with varying degrees of explicit enthusiasm, as the ultimate strategic backstop of the current global and political rules-based order. From Korea, to Kosovo, to Kabul, this has been a constant since the Second World War.

There are obvious tensions within this tradition: when to intervene and when not to; whether all such interventions should be authorised by the UNSC because in the case of Iraq, this was spectacularly not the case; and critically whether the US continues to have the global military capacity and the national political will to intervene in international theatres way beyond its immediate spheres of national interest. To be continued