The Chinese Century
Time Magazine
Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007 By MICHAEL  ELLIOTT 

The railroad station in the Angolan town of Dondo hasn't  seen a train in 
years. Its windows are boarded up, its pale pink facade  crumbling away; the 
local coffee trade that Portuguese colonialists founded long  ago is a distant 
memory, victim of a civil war that lasted for 27 years. Dondo's  fortunes, 
however, may be looking up. This month, work is scheduled to start on  the local 
section of the line that links the town to the deep harbor at Luanda,  Angola's 
capital. The work will be done by Chinese construction firms, and as  two of 
their workers survey the track, an Angolan security guard sums up his  feelings. 
"Thank you, God," he says, "for the Chinese."

That sentiment, or something like it, can be heard a lot these days in  
Africa, where Chinese investment is building roads and railways, opening textile  
factories and digging oil wells. You hear it on the farms of Brazil, where  
Chinese appetite for soy and beef has led to a booming export trade. And you  
hear it in Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand, where  
locals used to subsist on whatever they could make from farming and  
smuggling--until Chinese engineers began blasting the rapids and reefs on the  upper 
Mekong so that large boats could take Chinese-manufactured goods to  markets in 
Southeast Asia. "Before the Chinese came here, you couldn't find any  work," 
says Ba, a Burmese immigrant, taking a cigarette and Red Bull break from  his 
task hauling sacks of sunflower seeds from a boat onto a truck bound for  
Bangkok. "Now I can send money back home to my family."


You may  know all about the world coming to China--about the hordes of 
foreign  businesspeople setting up factories and boutiques and showrooms in places 
like  Shanghai and Shenzhen. But you probably know less about how China is 
going out  into the world. Through its foreign investments and appetite for raw 
materials,  the world's most populous country has already transformed economies 
from Angola  to Australia. Now China is turning that commercial might into 
real political  muscle, striding onto the global stage and acting like a nation 
that very much  intends to become the world's next great power. In the past 
year, China has  established itself as the key dealmaker in nuclear negotiations 
with North  Korea, allied itself with Russia in an attempt to shape the future 
of central  Asia, launched a diplomatic offensive in Europe and Latin America 
and  contributed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. With the 
U.S.  preoccupied with the threat of Islamic terrorism and struggling to 
extricate  itself from a failing war in Iraq, China seems ready to 
challenge--possibly even  undermine--some of Washington's other foreign policy goals, from 
halting the  genocide in Darfur to toughening sanctions against Iran. China's 
international  role has won the attention of the new Democratic majority in 
Congress. Tom  Lantos, incoming chair of the House of Representatives Foreign 
Affairs Committee  and a critic of Beijing's human-rights record, told TIME that 
he intends to hold  early hearings on China, on everything from its censorship 
of the Internet to  its policies toward Tibet. "China is thinking in much more 
active terms about  its strategy," says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University 
of Michigan, who was  senior director at the National Security Council Asia 
desk under President Bill  Clinton, "not only regionally, but globally, than it 
has done in the past. We  have seen a sea change in China's fundamental level 
of confidence."

Blink  for a moment and you can imagine that--as many Chinese would tell the  
tale--after nearly 200 years of foreign humiliation, invasion, civil war,  
revolution and unspeakable horrors, China is preparing for a date with destiny.  
"The Chinese wouldn't put it this way themselves," says Lieberthal. "But in  
their hearts I think they believe that the 21st century is China's  century."
That's quite something to believe. Is it true? Or rather--since the  century 
is yet young--will it be true? If so, when, and how would it happen? How  
comfortable would such a development be for the West? Can China's rise be  managed 
peaceably by the international system? Or will China so threaten the  
interests of established powers that, as with Germany at the end of the 19th  century 
and Japan in the 1930s, war one day comes? Those questions are going to  be 
nagging at us for some time--but a peaceful, prosperous future for both China  
and the West depends on trying to answer them now.


WHAT CHINA  WANTS--AND FEARS

If you ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear  about China--20% of 
the world's population, gazillions of brainy engineers,  serried ranks of 
soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack of  doom--remember this: 
China is still a poor country (GDP per head in 2005 was  $1,700, compared with 
$42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders face so many problems  that it is reasonable 
to wonder how they ever sleep. The country's urban labor  market recently 
exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension  system is 
nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia, its cities' air foul  beyond 
imagination and its clean water scarce. Corruption is endemic and  growing. Protests and 
riots by rural workers are measured in the tens of  thousands each year. The 
most immediate priority for China's leadership is less  how to project itself 
internationally than how to maintain stability in a  society that is going 
through the sort of social and economic change that, in  the past, has led to 
chaos and violence.

And yet for all their internal  challenges, the Chinese seem to want their 
nation to be a bigger player in the  world. In a 2006 poll conducted jointly by 
the the Chicago Council on Global  Affairs and the Asia Society, 87% of 
Chinese respondents thought their country  should take a greater role in world 
affairs. Most Chinese, the survey found,  believed China's global influence would 
match that of the U.S. within a decade.  The most striking aspect of President 
Hu Jintao's leadership has been China's  remarkable success in advancing its 
interests abroad despite turmoil at  home.

Surprisingly for those who thought they knew his type, Hu has  placed himself 
at the forefront of China's new assertiveness. Hu, 64, has never  studied 
outside China and is steeped in the ways of the Communist Party. He  became a 
party member as a university student in the early 1960s and headed the  Communist 
Youth League in the poor western province of Gansu before becoming  
provincial party chief in Guizhou and later Tibet. Despite a public stiffness in  front 
of foreigners, Hu has been a vigorous ambassador for China: the pattern  was 
set in 2004, when Hu spent two weeks in South America--more time than George  
W. Bush had spent on the continent in four years--and pledged billions of  
dollars in investments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba. While Wen Jiabao,  
China's Premier, was visiting 15 countries last year, Hu spent time in the 
U.S.,  Russia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. In a three-week period 
toward  the end of 2006, he played host to leaders from 48 African countries in 
Beijing,  went to Vietnam for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation 
summit, slipped  over to Laos for a day and then popped off for a six-day tour of 
India and  Pakistan. For someone whose comfort zone is supposed to be 
domestic affairs,  that's quite a schedule. 

"Look at Africa, look at Central America,  look at parts of Asia," says 
Eberhard Sandschneider, a China scholar who is head  of the German Council on 
Foreign Relations. "They are playing a global game  now."
As it follows Hu's lead and steps out in the world, what will be  China's 
priorities? What does it want and what does it fear? The first item on  the 
agenda is straightforward: it is to be left alone. China brooks no  interference in 
its internal affairs, and its definition of what is internal is  not in 
doubt. The status of Tibet, for example, is an internal matter; the Dalai  Lama is 
not a spiritual leader but a "splittist" whose real aim is to break up  China. 
As for Taiwan, China is prepared to tolerate all sorts of temporary  
uncertainties as to how its status might one day be resolved--but not the  central 
point that there is only one China. Cross that line, and you will hear  about it.

This defense of its right to be free of interference has a  corollary. China 
has traditionally detested the intervention by the great powers  in other 
nations' affairs. An aide to French President Jacques Chirac traces a  new Chinese 
assertiveness to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying, "They felt they  can't 
allow that sort of meddling in what they see as a nation's internal  affairs." 
But the same horror of anything that might smell of foreign  intervention was 
evident long before Iraq. I visited Beijing during the Kosovo  war in 1999, and 
it wasn't just the notorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in  Belgrade that 
year that outraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO's  rearranging 
what was left of Yugoslavia. Wasn't the cause a good one? That  didn't matter.

China's commitment to nonintervention means that it  doesn't inquire closely 
into the internal arrangements of others. When all those  African leaders met 
in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by  2009, train 15,000 
professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000 students, and  help Africa's 
health-care and farming sectors. But as a 2005 report by the  Council on 
Foreign Relations notes, "China's aid and investments are attractive  to Africans 
precisely because they come with no conditionality related to  governance, 
fiscal probity or other concerns of Western donors." In 2004, when  an 
International Monetary Fund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected  corruption, 
China ponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and  money to 
Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused of  massive 
human-rights violations.


Most notoriously, China has  consistently used its place as a permanent 
member of the U.N. Security Council  to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the 
Sudanese government to stop the  ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinese 
state-owned company owns 40% of the oil  concession in the south of Sudan, and there 
are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops  there protecting Beijing's oil interests. 
(By contrast, despite the noise that  China made when one of its soldiers was 
killed by an Israeli air strike on a  U.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there 
are only 1,400 Chinese troops serving in  all U.N. peacekeeping missions 
worldwide.) "Is China playing a positive role in  developing democracy [in 
Africa]?" asks Peter Draper of the South African  Institute of International Affairs. 
"Largely not." Human Rights Watch goes  further: China's policies in Africa, 
it claimed during the Beijing summit, have  "propped up some of the 
continents' worst human-rights abusers."
China  doesn't support unsavory regimes for the sake of it. Instead China's 
key  objective is to ensure a steady supply of natural resources, so that its 
economy  can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lid on unrest 
at home.  That is why China has reached out to resource-rich democracies like 
Australia  and Brazil as much as it has to such international pariahs as Sudan 
and Burma,  both of which have underdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There's 
nothing  particularly surprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave 
when  domestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustain 
their  economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behavior in 
Africa  might remember their own history on the continent.) But China has never 
needed  such resources in such quantities before, so its politicians have 
never had to  learn the skills of getting them without looking like a dictator's 
friend. Now  they have to.

WORKING WITH CHINA


Assuming a bigger  global presence has forced Beijing to learn the art of 
international diplomacy.  Until recently, China's foreign policy consisted of 
little more than  bloodcurdling condemnations of hegemonic imperialism. "This is 
a country that 30  years ago pretty much saw things in zero-sum terms," says 
former Deputy  Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. "What was good for the U.S. 
or the West was  bad for China, and vice versa." Those days are gone. Wang 
Jisi of Beijing  University, one of China's top foreign policy scholars, says one 
of the most  important developments of 2006 was that the communiqué issued 
after a key  conference on foreign affairs for top officials had no reference 
to the tired  old terms that have been standard in China's diplomatic  
vocabulary.

Washington would like Beijing to go further. In a speech in  2005, Zoellick 
invited China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in  international affairs. 
China's national interest, Zoellick argued, should not be  narrowly defined, 
but would be "much better served by working with us to shape  the future 
international system," on everything from intellectual-property  rights to nuclear 
nonproliferation. Says Zoellick: "I'm not sure anyone had ever  put it quite in 
those terms, and it clearly had a bracing effect."
That would  imply that China's behavior has changed of late. Has it? A U.S. 
policymaker  cautions, "It's important to see the 'responsible stakeholder' 
notion as a  future vision of China." In practice, this official says, "They've 
been more  helpful in some areas than others." When the stars align--when 
China's  perception of its own national interest matches what the U.S. and other  
international powers seek--that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North  
Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S.  
As North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the 
 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.--which would have implied 
 doing little to rein in Pyongyang--or stiffing its former protégé.

Hu's  personal preferences seem to have helped shape the choice. He is known 
to have  been stingingly critical of Kim in meetings with U.S. officials. 
Michael Green,  senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council 
until  December 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups of 
Americans his  skepticism about Kim's intentions. When the North finally tested a 
nuke last  fall, China joined the U.S. and other regional powers in condemning 
Kim and  supported a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Pyongyang. 
Says a  senior U.S. official: "If you asked experts several years ago, Could you 
imagine  China taking these actions toward a longtime ally in cooperation 
with us and  Japan? Most people would have said no."

But nobody in Washington is  getting carried away. Beijing has been helpful 
on North Korea because it's more  important to China that Pyongyang not provoke 
a regional nuclear arms race than  it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support. 
Contrast such helpfulness with  China's behavior on the dispute over Iran's 
nuclear ambitions. In December,  China signed a $16 billion contract with Iran 
to buy natural gas and help  develop some oil fields, and it has consistently 
joined Russia in refusing to  back the tough sanctions against Tehran sought 
by the U.S. and Europe. "It's  hard to say China's been helpful on Iran," says 
a senior U.S. official, and  there is little sense that such an assessment 
will change any time  soon.
Within its own neighborhood, there are signs that China's behavior is  
changing in more constructive ways. China fought a war with India in 1962 and  
another with Vietnam in 1979. For years, it supported communist movements  
dedicated to undermining governments in nations such as Indonesia, Singapore and  
Malaysia. Yet today China's relations with its neighbors are nothing but  
sweetness and light, often at the expense of the U.S. Absorbed by the arc of  crisis 
spreading from the Middle East, the U.S. is simply less visible in  Southeast 
Asia than it once was, and China is stepping into the  vacuum.


While American exports to Southeast Asia have been  virtually stagnant for 
the past five years, Chinese trade with the region is  soaring. In the northern 
reaches of Thailand and Laos, you can find whole towns  where Mandarin has 
become the common language and the yuan the local currency.  In Chiang Saen, 
signs in Chinese read CALL CHINA FOR ONLY 12 BAHT A MINUTE. A  sign outside the 
Glory Lotus hotel advertises CLEAN, CHEAP ROOMs in Chinese. It  is not aid from 
the U.S. but trade with China--carried on new highways being  built from 
Kunming in Yunnan province to Hanoi, Mandalay and Bangkok, or along a  Mekong River 
whose channels are full of Chinese goods--that is transforming much  of 
Southeast Asia.
Nor is China's smiling face visible only to its south. In  a cordial state 
visit last year, Hu reached out to India--an old rival with  which it still has 
some disputed borders. The two countries pledged to double  trade by 2010 and 
agreed to bid jointly for global oil projects on which they  had previously 
been competing. Hu has also sought to mend ties with Japan,  another longtime 
rival, with whom China's relations have deteriorated in recent  years. Last 
October, Hu met the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in  Beijing just days 
after Abe took office, a visit Hu called a "turning point" in  frosty 
relations between the two countries and which Premier Wen described as a  "window of 
hope."

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