How Xi Jinping Sees the World…And Why

ORDER from CHAOS Foreign Policy in a Troubled World ASIA WORKING GROUP PAPER 2 | FEBRUARY 2016 How Xi Jinping Sees the World…and Why JEFFREY A. BADER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Suggestions that helped in drafting this paper came from a number of my Brookings col- leagues, notably Cheng Li, Kenneth Lieberthal, Jonathan Pollack, Martin Indyk, Bruce Jones, and Mireya Solis. Gail Chalef provided important assistance in preparing the paper for pub- lication. The views in the paper are my own. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides to any support- er is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment, and the analysis and recommendations of the Institution’s scholars are not determined by any donation. ABOUT THE ORDER FROM CHAOS PROJECT In the two decades following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced an era characterized by declining war and rising prosperity. The absence of serious geopolitical competition created opportunities for increased interdependence and global cooperation. In recent years, however, several and possibly fundamental challenges to that new order have arisen— the collapse of order and the descent into violence in the Middle East; the Russian challenge to the European security order; and increasing geopolitical tensions in Asia being among the foremost of these. At this pivotal juncture, U.S. leadership is critical, and the task ahead is urgent and complex. The next U.S. president will need to adapt and protect the liberal international order as a means of continuing to provide stability and prosperity; develop a strategy that encourages cooperation not competition among willing powers; and, if necessary, contain or constrain actors seeking to undermine those goals. In response to these changing global dynamics, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings has established the Order from Chaos Project. With incisive analysis, new strategies, and in- novative policies, the Foreign Policy Program and its scholars have embarked on a two-year project with three core purposes: • To analyze the dynamics in the international system that are creating stresses, challenges, and a breakdown of order. • To define U.S. interests in this new era and develop specific strategies for promoting a revitalized rules-based, liberal international order. • To provide policy recommendations on how to develop the necessary tools of statecraft (military, economic, diplomatic, and social) and how to redesign the architecture of the international order. The Order from Chaos Project strives to engage and influence the policy debate as the Unit- ed States moves toward the 2016 election and as the next president takes office. How Xi Jinping Sees the World…and Why JEFFREY A. BADER ince the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China Shas gone through a series of phases marked by sharply differing con- ceptions of what its leaders believe the international order should look like. These changing views reflect an underlying ambivalence toward the existing order, which has played out differently in different times. China is presently going through a new phase, whose meaning can be understood more fully if we first understand how China’s leaders got to where they are today in their thinking about the global order. Reflecting on both the continuity and the changes of these last seven decades will allow us to dis- tinguish better what is genuinely new and different from what is familiar. There is a temptation to see changes in a country’s trajectory as reflecting the vision of the country’s leader, in this case China’s President Xi Jinping. Xi has already demonstrated that he is a decisive leader, stronger than his predecessor and determined not only to manage China but to transform it to meet huge unsolved challenges, primarily at home but also abroad. But in thinking about the potential impact of China’s leader on a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, it is sometimes useful to recall that, in 1972 when President Nixon said to Chairman Mao that “the Chairman has changed the world,” Mao famously replied, “No, I have just changed a few things on the outskirts of Beijing.” Mao’s modesty on that occasion was excessive, and to be sure he and to a lesser extent Xi have changed China’s course. But his comment reminds us that large national transformations are more often the product of historical forces than the writ of one powerful leader. Understanding how Chinese views of international order since 1949 have evolved should help to clarify, not obscure, Xi Jinping’s particular contri- butions to the way China sees and wishes to interact with the world. ORDER from CHAOS Asia Working Group 1 How Xi Jinping Sees the World…and Why Mao Zedong — Hostility toward the International System From Mao Zedong’s assumption of power in 1949 until Deng Xiaoping put China on a different course in the 1970’s, China was essentially a revolutionary power, not only in its domestic policies but in its attitude toward the international order. Beijing regarded the international order as illegitimate, representing the triumph of the strong over the weak, of the impe- From Mao Zedong’s rialists and colonialists over their victims, of the rich over the poor, of the assumption of power in developed over the undeveloped, of the capitalist over the socialist, and of 1949 …. Beijing regarded the white over the non-white. In none of these views was the perspective of the international the Chinese Communist Party unique. This viewpoint was widely shared order as illegitimate, among the countries of the Nonaligned Movement, and had found pow- representing the triumph erful international expression at the Bandung Conference in 1954. These of the strong over the views underlay a Chinese rejection of the international order and actions and calls for its replacement by a more “democratic” international system. weak, of the imperialists and colonialists over These perspectives came naturally to a Communist Party steeped in Marx- their victims…. ist-Leninist ideology. They also reflected the legacy of the Chinese expe- rience during the so-called “century of humiliation” (1840s-1940s) of occupation and invasion by outside powers. And they were reinforced by a post-1949 U.S.-imposed isolation of China and exclusion of it from the international community. This meant that all of the major multilateral and plurilateral international institutions were under attack by Beijing. Beijing was long interested in joining the United Nations, but was blocked by the United States. But as for other U.N. organizations, it seemingly had no interest, and even after joining the U.N. in 1971, it made no rapid movement to join these other bodies that it had long denounced as pillars of an unjust international order. Thus, by its own choice and that of the West led by the United States, China was excluded from all of the organs of the United Nations system—the U.N., the World Bank, the IMF, the GATT, and the U.N.’s specialized agencies. Taipei represented China as the “Republic of China” (ROC) in most of them, and since Beijing refused to join any organization that recognized the government in Taipei, there was no ques- tion of China joining any without replacing the ROC. Besides the U.N. system, Beijing reserved particular ire for the U.S.-dom- inated organizations and arrangements that it viewed as similarly hostile. ORDER from CHAOS 2 Asia Working Group How Xi Jinping Sees the World…and Why NATO, the U.S.-Japan alliance, and other U.S. security alliances and related basing arrangements around the world were seen as designed to project American hegemony and intimidate Third World countries like China. Beijing rejected the global nonproliferation regime as a tool of the super- powers, joined the nuclear weapon nations’ ranks in 1964 in defiance of the Test-Ban Treaty, and declined subsequently to join the Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty, which it condemned. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD was seen as a rich countries’ club setting ground rules designed to preserve capitalist rule, in response to which China supported calls for a New World Economic Order. The West- ern media were seen not as free institutions but rather as tools of West- ern domination, and China supported Nonaligned Movement calls for creation of a New International Information Order that would break the Western media monopoly. At the height of this revolutionary period, China actively supported in- surgent movements in many Southeast Asian countries, fought alongside North Korea in its war against South Korea and the United States, and provided support for revolutionary movements in far-flung parts of the world, notably in Africa. These struggles were characterized by Beijing as “wars of national liberation,” meaning that they sought to replace pro-Western, “neo-imperialist” governments with socialist regimes. But China kept itself at arm’s length from the main organizations articulating the anti-colonialist ideology, the Nonaligned Movement and the Group of 77, during this revolutionary phase. Rather it adopted a kind of splendid isolation, associating itself with the general policy lines of these two organizations while main- taining a free hand. This isolation was consistent with Mao’s larger objective, which was to keep the world at bay. Mao’s China was weak, a desperately poor country having emerged from decades of war and occupation and a century of international humiliation. While pursuing sporadically high-risk foreign initiatives, Mao mostly wanted China to be left alone to undergo a revolutionary transformation without outside interference. Deng Xiaoping — Joining the International System With China’s opening to the United States, beginning in 1972 at the time of President Nixon’s visit and accelerating much more dramatically after ORDER from CHAOS Asia Working Group 3 How Xi Jinping Sees the World…and Why U.S.-China normalization of relations in 1978, Beijing substantially re- thought its approach to the international system.

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