XV. China and the Greater Middle East: Globalization No Longer Equals Westernization

China and the Greater Middle East • 377

Kurt W. Radtke

Abstract

The reshaping of the domestic social, political, and economic structures all over East Asia takes place in the context of a restructuring of the international (security) order. Despite China’s increasing acceptance of international institutions and regimes, the divergence of vital security interests of the United States (US) and Japan vis-a-vis those of China has raised the specter of increased polarization. This article seeks to answer the question of whether China is about to consciously challenge the power of the US and its allies not only in Asia, but also in the Greater Middle East (GME), mainly through China’s impact on the economics, political, and social structure of those countries rather than through rivalry in the eld of military power. China’s conceptualization of the current global order is also shaped by historical memories of an age in which China was merely an object of Great Power politics which also directly affected the wider region, including the heartland of Eurasia, Southeast Asia, and in particular Japan and the Korean peninsula with their direct impact on China’s security equation. To some Chinese strategists, the Indian Ocean and countries of the GME have acquired a vital importance not only with regard to the supply of raw materials (including those obtained from Africa). Continuing Western strategic dominance in this large area would also have an important negative impact on China’s global strategic position. For the rst time in its history, China has become critically dependent on the acquisition of foreign resources-raw materials, investment and technology, as well as earnings from exports. China’s economic activities in near neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, and Iran are also strategically important due to the impact on domestic and international politics of these countries. The US tends to interpret such in uence in terms of Chinese power projection. This article interprets the linkages between 378 • Kurt W. Radtke

domestic events and international strategies on the network of global security relations in terms of neo-geopolitics rather than mainstream US scholarship.

INTRODUCTION This chapter deals with Chinese perception of and strategies toward countries in the Greater Middle East (GME), keeping in mind that the GME does not exist as a regional concept in Chinese policy-making. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, below abbreviated as China) the GME was, if anything, merely a sideshow for China. After a brief, but failed attempt at global revolutionism, mainly in the 1960s, China gradually adopted a holding defensive strategy in the face of US-led globalization that also affected China’s traditional buffer zones after the collapse of the Soviet Union with the rise of newly independent states in Central Asia. The creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 1996 was the beginning of Chinese attempts to limit US in uence in the heart of Eurasia, followed in particular by initiatives in numerous other countries of the GME since 2004. It is argued that China’s policies can only be fully understood when we realize that Chinese historical experience, and changing PRC conceptualization of the global international order push China to interpret current events differently from mainstream United States (US) perceptions, dominated by neo-realism and its relatives, liberalism and constructivism. Like the US, China favors a largely non-ideological global order supported by secular sovereign states and favors leadership by a limited number of “large countries” (daguo). At home, China persists in modi ed ideology, market socialism, and adopts an ambivalent attitude towards market democracy. China does not follow the US classi cation of Iran and North Korea as “rogue states,” but is likewise concerned about destabilization resulting from religious extremism that undermines the basis of sovereign, secular nation states. In the Chinese perception, the US pursues attempts to encircle China, and China aims to counter such attempts. A key role is played by Iran. US failure to bring about a regime change also amounts to a victory of sorts for China, since it will make it so much more dif cult for the US to increase its strategy of encirclement, for which basic changes in Iran and North Korea are essential.1

1 The most recent survey of Chinese-Iranian relations is Calabrese, J. 2006 “China and Iran: Mismatched Partners,” Occasional Paper (August), Washington, D.C.: The Jamestown Foundation.