ABSTRACT
In 1989, exactly 20 years ago, few were able to imagine that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its institutions would remain in power for two more decades (and even longer), let alone that the regime would increase its global influence to the degree that it now has. At that time, world Communism had collapsed, first in Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union, with some scholars in the West proclaiming the ‘end of history’ and the ultimate victory of market and democracy in human progress.2 In China, the senior leaders of the CCP were widely condemned at home and abroad for their bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests. Calls for democratic change in China were silenced by tanks and machine guns, but the regime paid a tremendous political cost, as its legitimacy was questioned even more severely and widely than before the event.3 All major industrial democratic states imposed economic sanctions on China, with a temporary shift of the focus of the Cold War from the arms race between Washington and Moscow to the political and ideological confrontation between the West and the People’s Republic of China. Winds change swiftly, however, and so does the atmosphere of politics. As
history arrives at the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen military crackdown, the Chinese regime continues to maintain that its actions were necessary and right, with the more recent development of apparently convincing the Chinese people and the world, including Western democratic nations, to accept this argument in place of the prevailing belief in 1989 that China also needed democracy. In the relatively short span of 20 years, China’s relations with the world have
been deeply and profoundly transformed, mainly due to the spread of market globalisation and China’s involvement in and benefit from such global participation. In particular, China’s relations with the industrial democracies of the West have experienced dramatic change, travelling far from the political and ideological antagonism experienced in the days immediately following Tiananmen, and far from the geopolitical and strategic considerations that in the 1970s caused China to join the Western anti-Soviet ‘united front’ and that in the early 1990s, prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, briefly influenced the George H.W. Bush
administration’s decision making in favour of post-Tiananmen China.4 It is a cliche´ to say that the relationship has become complicated, multidimensional, and interdependent, but that does not mean we already deeply and fully comprehend the complexities of China’s behaviour in its global involvement, or the extent and implications of China’s economic interdependence with the world in general and with the Western industrial democracies in particular. In the observations to be presented in this paper, economic interdependence greatly empowers authoritarian China to impose political influence over state behaviour and civil liberties in Western democracies, rather than vice versa. This contradicts the conventional assumption that the economically advanced and supposedly politically advantaged Western democracies can effectively entice and push an authoritarian developing nation in the direction of political democratisation through economic engagement. This observation brings a theoretical challenge to students of comparative political studies and Chinese politics, as it questions some of the fundamental assumptions with which we have long framed our understanding of China’s market reforms and their implications for China’s external relations. Most studies of China’s rise have focused on its material dimensions, including
the economy, trade, military, and sometimes technological development. Even more commonly adopted in analyses of China’s position in the world is a realpolitik approach to the rise of China, overwhelmingly concerned with how China’s ascendancy challenges the status quo powers and their preferred national interests.5
This strategic line of reasoning is of course helpful for better understanding contemporary global and Chinese politics, but it is insufficient if the political values implied in China’s rise are neglected, and if the impact of domestic political institutions on international political economy is ignored. Even when the so-called ‘soft power’ of China comes under the scrutiny of Western scholars, the foci of research and analysis are more on the competition between powers for international popularity, national image, and cultural influence than on the moral and institutional principles that organise their political, economic, and cultural life, and that global powers may use to affect the freedom of human societies. Thus the rise of China occasions either admiration or fear, while the moral implications of that rise are often obscured. This paper is an effort to remedy this shortcoming in studies of China’s foreign relations behaviour. In the pages that follow, this paper will investigate how China’s success in
economic development negatively influences the civil liberties and democracy practised in the West, and looks into the reasons why the growing economic interdependence between China and the global economy has enabled China to intervene in the political conduct of leading democracies, but not vice versa. Empirically, this paper will examine a series of Chinese actions in foreign relations in which China uses its economic connections with various leading industrial democracies to bend the international and domestic political behaviour of those democracies, in particular in relation to the Dalai Lama’s visits to Western
countries. It will then highlight how economic interest in the Chinese market makes multinational corporations vulnerable to Beijing’s political pressure, and analyse why international capital is easily lured to cooperate with the Chinese repressive state to curb freedom inside and outside of China. Wal-Mart and Yahoo will be taken as two major examples in an analysis of the material and informational connections between China and the world that multinational corporations have helped to construct. The paper will go on to suggest a new political economy of globalisation in the post-Cold War era that explains the rise of this kind of dictator’s diplomacy. This new political economy is characterised by state-market collaboration in promoting material prosperity, to the shaping of which postTiananmen China has greatly contributed, and, accordingly, through which China gains a structural advantage by reversing its ‘dependent relationship’ with advanced capitalist countries.
