For three decades now, a reality has been imposed on the world: China is becoming a greater economic and political power, and it is already impossible to conceive of international agreements that do not have it as an essential active player. In addition, thanks to the nationalist and isolationist turn of the US, symbolized by Donald Trump, the Asian giant is increasingly trying to present itself as the great world hegemon, the “Empire of the Center”. And the international community, for its part, has to learn to live with a new reality: that the key country is a single-party authoritarian dictatorship.
The reality of this fact is clearly seen in the coronavirus crisis. The disease, which emerged in the country, was hushed up by party officials who feared Beijing’s reaction. The investigator who first raised the alarm was arrested for “spreading rumours” and died weeks later. The slow response to alerts favored international expansion. And many experts doubt the veracity of their figures: the Washington Post denounced that the incinerators in Wuhan, the origin of the tragedy, have burned more than 45,000 deaths this year, compared to just over 3,000 deaths recognized by Beijing.
China makes it clear that its political system is exclusively its own and cannot be easily adapted to the rest of the world
This situation, to a certain extent, goes back to the years of the Cold War. At that time, the world geopolitical order was quite clear. There were two great hegemons, the US and the USSR, each with its completely opposite models of economic, political and social system, and both did everything possible to attract their neighbors into their orbit, sending tanks if necessary. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world seemed to be reduced to a unipolar system, until the rise of China has returned the planet to the competition between two giant countries.
At first, it might seem that China and the USSR are very similar. Both are (were) single-party communist dictatorships, with a tight grip on society. But his way of facing the rest of the world is very different. For one main reason: China makes it clear that its political system is exclusively its own and cannot be easily adapted to the rest of the world. Their theory of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries is also applied to others: they are neither disgusted with negotiating with capitalist democracies nor do they advise anyone to implement a dictatorial system like theirs if they do not believe it is convenient.
The Silk Road
To this is also added that China, unlike the USSR, is perfectly happy with capitalism and private enterprise, as long as the ultimate control of the State over the economy is maintained. In practice, this means that it has no problem signing investment and product purchase agreements at market prices with third countries.
The clearest effect of this mix is seen in the , a multibillion-dollar investment program that China has signed with 138 countries. Among them there is everything: from consolidated European and Asian democracies, to dictatorships of all kinds. In fact, Chinese money is very attractive for countries that, because they have authoritarian regimes, have many problems receiving foreign aid and investment from institutions such as the IMF or the World Bank. China, unlike them, does not complain about lack of human rights or demands controls against possible corruption of the leaders who manage these loans.
China’s justification for this plan is that they only want to be good neighbors to the whole world and cooperate commercially with them in a way that benefits both, leaving it up to the leaders of each country to decide what they understand as the best for their territory. . A message, that of friendship, which is printed on the pallets with the sanitary products that they sell these weeks.
international silence
But the secondary effect of the greater importance of China in the market and international relations is the increasing silence in the face of the acts of oppression that the Asian country exercises against its own population. Beyond the fact that in a country famous for its strict internet censorship, or that the countries that ask authoritarian regimes in the rest of the world to hold fair elections lower their tone before the Chinese dictatorship, there are even more graphic cases.
Without going any further, a sample is the reactions to the situation in Xinjiang, a Chinese province in the northwest of the country. There, the local ethnic group, the Uyghurs, of the Muslim religion, have been treated for years as suspected terrorists in a generic way. to be re-educated, which the Chinese government preferred to call “vocational education centers”. The rest are under constant surveillance.
The US Congress raised a formal complaint against their situation and the EU foreign representatives – with Spain among them – showed their “concern”, but the protest did not go much further. China insists that this is an “internal matter” in which no other country should interfere.
But if the states already struggle to speak out against them, the more difficult it is for the multinational companies to resist their pressures. When soccer player Mesut Özil protested the plight of the Uyghurs, China censored Arsenal’s games and demanded that he be removed from video games like FIFA 2020. And when an NBA team supported Hong Kong protests against the Hong Kong government Beijing, the American sports organization went out to distance itself from its own member for , which cost it up to 500 million dollars.
Similarly, the country requires airlines and many foreign companies operating there to define Taiwan, territory that China considers its own, as a Chinese province. The small island cannot even participate in the WHO, even in the midst of the current health crisis, and is called “Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics.
The time has come?
The big question that comes now is whether the time has come for China to abandon the slogan that Deng Xiaoping imposed, which advocated “keep a low profile and wait for the moment.” With President Xi Jinping, who advocates the “Chinese Dream” of a strong country that rubs shoulders with the developed world, it is possible that the giant will begin to raise its profile and be even more decisive in international relations, filling the gap left by USA.
For the moment, the reaction to the spread of the virus has been based on hiding its slowness at the origin of the crisis and selling products to other countries, with some donations included to improve its image. But the harsh quarantine can be expensive: the FAES foundation calculates a cost of 13% of its GDP, higher than the 12% estimated for Spain. And , putting an end to his curious streak of increases of that same figure.
And in recent years, its most prominent interventions have been for and the Paris Agreement against climate change, but its neighbors do not lose sight of their intention to take full control of the South China Sea, ignoring the UN Convention over the Sea, which gives sovereignty over it to many other countries, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, which it is trying to expel.
Although the challenge facing China is that its population is aging rapidly, and the success of the one-child policy – a test of the power of an authoritarian system – has caused fertility to fall to such an extent that there is no renewal generational and pensions are already beginning to be in doubt. The risk is that in a few years, China will find itself in an internal position closer to that of the EU than to that of the US, before having reached the same level of wealth.