Commentary | Jeremy Garlick, China’s influence-building campaign in the global South: implications for the liberal international order
In the West, there is a widespread impression that China is failing both domestically and internationally. According to Foreign Affairs, the flagship magazine of the US Council on Foreign Relations, its economy is supposed to be falling apart. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is said to be struggling to maintain control of the nation. Globally, it is claimed, China is unpopular. The CCP’s soft power charm offensive has failed. President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is a bust, lacking substance and results. Broadly speaking, such is the image emanating from much mainstream media coverage and expert opinion.
Yet, at the same time, government officials view China as a threat to the US and Europe. For instance, the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has called China a “threat to our open and democratic way of life.” Its companies are said to be infiltrating Western markets, stealing intellectual property and extracting profits. Its military is aggressively expanding its reach into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It is conducting cyberattacks and espionage around the world. China’s influence is spreading throughout the global South, undermining the liberal international order established by the US and other Western countries.
“It is difficult to reconcile these two images of China: ‘weak and failing’ versus ‘aggressive and threatening’.”
Clearly, it is difficult to reconcile these two images of China: “weak and failing” versus “aggressive and threatening.” China is viewed as simultaneously imploding and as being a strong challenger to Western global hegemony. Can two such contradictory interpretations, often juxtaposed in media reports, really represent a true picture of modern China?
Of course, logically both cannot be correct – at least in such extreme versions. As with many things, the reality lies somewhere along a spectrum from failure to threat. Yet, at the same time, both depictions contain inherent bias: they are pictures painted from a wholly Western perspective.
There are, as I suggest in my recently published book, Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption, two other viewpoints to take into account. First, there is the Chinese understanding of their present situation and position in the world. This includes respect for the CCP’s role in steering the nation through China’s “economic miracle”: four decades’ worth of sustained growth during which around 800 million people have been raised out of grinding poverty. Then there is the “China dream” of overcoming the sense of national humiliation which arose from defeat at the hands of Europeans in the nineteenth century Opium Wars. One key to understanding contemporary China is to acknowledge the strong drive many Chinese have to rebuild their nation as a global powerhouse to regain the respect of the world. This impulse to reclaim what Chinese see as their rightful position gives the CCP a far stronger support base among the majority Han population than most outsiders realize. According to an authoritative survey conducted by an American scholar, more than 70% of Chinese people support the state’s long-term goals.
Second, there is the perspective of the global South countries regarding China’s growing influence. For instance, it is not true, just because most of Europe and North America (as well as their close allies such as Japan and Australia) view China negatively, that China is unpopular everywhere. For instance, China is surprisingly popular in countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, and Kenya. One poll conducted in 2019 found that 70% of Nigerians had a favorable opinion of China. Another conducted in 2022 discovered that 85% of Pakistanis had a more positive view of China than three years previously. Such data run counter to Western beliefs that China is becoming more unpopular everywhere.
Neither viewpoint – China’s or the global South’s – is sufficiently covered in Western media or scholarly accounts of China. Both perspectives are subsumed, whether consciously or unconsciously, under the Western understanding of China as the only possible interpretation. Undoubtedly, the West needs to look more seriously at China’s view of itself as a peacefully rising leader of the global South. However, just as importantly, the West should take the time to understand how countries in the global South view the competition for influence between China and the West in their backyard.
Part of the explanation about why China’s popularity is growing in some parts of the global South is that Chinese rhetoric about “win-win cooperation” and building a “community of shared destiny” appears to be finding fertile ground. In the Pacific, the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste appear to be siding with China despite recent overtures from the Biden administration towards small nations in the region. In March 2023, Beijing brokered a peace deal between long-time regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Both countries joined the China-led BRICS group in August. Loans-for-infrastructure deals give Beijing huge clout in developing countries long neglected by the West such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Angola. Tellingly, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has used language which echoes Chinese phrases, most notably the key slogan “community of shared future.”
Since the 1960s, China has steadily persuaded more and more countries to switch allegiance from Taipei to Beijing. Just thirteen sovereign states – including the Vatican – still maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. In Africa, there is now only one country which sustains ties with Taiwan: tiny Eswatini. The present situation contrasts strongly with the 1960s, when more African countries (nineteen) sided with Taiwan than China. In Latin America and the Caribbean, although eight countries still retain ties with Taiwan, none of them are among the major regional players. In the region, Chinese attention is focused overwhelmingly on Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Ecuador, where loans-for-infrastructure deals are being used as an incentive to gain access to raw materials such as oil and soybeans.
Then there is China’s involvement in BRICS (which takes its acronym from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). China is the largest economy in this group, and this gives it clout there. At the August 2023 BRICS summit, six nations – Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – were invited to join the group as full members. Noticeably, these are all countries from the global South in which Chinese influence is growing. There is no sign of Western countries being invited to participate in BRICS, which implies a Chinese-led attempt to forge a new international order based on consensus between global South countries. Shortly after the BRICS meeting, Xi Jinping declined to attend the G20, sending a clear signal of Chinese intentions to prioritize multilateral institutions which Beijing sees as steered by its own rather than Western interests.
In short, the US and Europe need to take seriously China’s challenge to the system of international order which they have created since the Second World War. To do this, they need to acknowledge the reality not only of what China regards as its right to claim a leading position in the world, but also of the needs and views of countries in the global South. For too long, the West has assumed that the global South just needs to be given aid while being told how to spend it correctly. Both China and the global South have not been regarded as actors in their own right who demand respect and a place at the global roundtable of ideas and order-building.
Gone are the days when the West could assume an automatic position of dominance. Attitudes – both at the top and among officials, scholars, journalists, and the general public – must change if Europe and the US are to win friends in the global South and continue to promote a persuasive vision of a just global order based on Western norms.
Jeremy Garlick is Director of the J. Masaryk Centre of International Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies, Faculty of International Relations at Prague University of Economics and Business, His new book, Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption, was published by Bloomsbury Academic on 2nd November 2023.
To cite this essay please use the entry suggested below:
Jeremy Garlick, “China’s influence-building campaign in the global South: implications for the liberal international order,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, October 6, 2023; https://doi.org/10.52698/OASU3073.