One model, two interpretations

Relabelling relations between China and America has not resolved the underlying tensions

By Banyan

CHINA has long stressed that its rise as one of the world’s great powers will be “peaceful”. 

But it is also aware that, historically, peaceful rises are the exception. 

Speaking on a visit to Washington on September 20th, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, referred to a study of 15 different countries. 

In 11 cases “confrontation and war have broken out between the emerging and established powers.” 

So the stakes are high when Chinese leaders speak of their hopes for a “new type of great-power relations”, or, in the humbler phrase they now prefer as a translation for the Chinese formulation, “a new model of major-country relations”. 

American officials echo the “new model” talk. 

Since neither side wants confrontation and war, they can be assumed to be sincere. 

Less certain is whether they mean the same thing.
Xi Jinping unveiled the concept on a visit to the American capital last year, before he took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. 

His informal “Sunnylands” summit with Barack Obama in June was portrayed as the “model” in action. 

As elaborated by the smooth Mr Wang in Washington, it is an admirable idea, based on Mr Xi’s formula of “no conflict or confrontation”, “mutual respect” and “win-win co-operation”. 

Nor is there much disagreement about how to achieve this: by reducing strategic mistrust through building habits of co-operation.
Although America and China seem to line up on the opposite sides of so many international issues, optimists can point to progress in some areas of co-operation. 

The two countries have in recent months avoided the periodic crises that used to test their ties. 

China has reacted calmly to allegations of American cyber-espionage against it, for example, enjoying the chance to turn the tables thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, a disaffected American former security-services contractor.
Military co-operation is also being stepped up. 

Next year China’s navy is to join those of America and a score of other countries in a big maritime exercise. China is negotiating an investment treaty with America. 

It also wants to join one American-led free-trade negotiation, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), and has said it is studying another, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, once seen as part of an American effort to contain China.
On some international hotspots, too, China and America find themselves closer than for some time. 

America will have been pleased that China this week showed its anger with North Korea, banning a long list of items for export there. 

China has welcomed the agreement between America and Russia on destroying Syria’s weapons. 

Mr Wang raised Afghanistan, which he predicted might next year overtake Syria as a global concern, as another area with “great potential” for enhanced co-operation. 

This is true both because co-operation has so far been minimal, but also because, as Mr Wang pointed out, both have an interest in the country’s stability after most foreign troops leave in 2014. 

China worries about Islamic extremism seeping across the border to infect its own Muslim minorities, and about the security of its massive proposed investment in the Aynak copper mine.
In all these areas, however, co-operation is hampered by strategic distrust and profound differences. 

Cynics think that China’s interest in the TiSA, for example, is that of a spoiler. 

The Chinese want the Americans to go back to long-stalled talks with North Korea and regional powers; the Americans want the North first to promise to get rid of its nuclear arsenal. 

In Syria, China opposes any threat of military action against the Assad regime. 

And it is unclear just how it hopes to help stabilise Afghanistan. 

It remains officially wedded to a policy of non-interference, even as its new global weight makes that policy increasingly obsolete.
For all America’s constant refrain that it welcomes China’s rise, and has a vested interest in its prosperity, China’s leaders often seem unconvinced. 

The perpetual bugbear of America’s friendship with Taiwan is seen as an obstacle to “reunification” with the island. 

Nor do Americans necessarily believe Mr Wang when he says that China respects America’s “traditional influence and immediate interests” in the Asia-Pacific. 

The new sort of relationship is supposed to ease such suspicions. 

As John Kerry, the secretary of state, said before meeting Mr Wang, an important part of it is “a commitment to engage in frank discussions on sensitive issues, particularly where we disagree, where misunderstanding could lead to a miscalculation”. 

That is all to the good.
On the new model itself, however, the two sides often give the impression of talking past each other. 

Both agree that it is one where America has so far accommodated China’s rise. 

Where they may differ is over whether China agrees in return to continue to accept America’s role as the predominant military power, even in the Chinese backyard of the western Pacific. 

Americans find it hard to imagine why China, which has fared so well under the current arrangements, should want to challenge them.

Same bed, different dreams
Yet Douglas Paal, a former senior American official now at the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think-tank, argues that, for China, the new model requires the Americans to acknowledge that it “has a new role in parts of the world where the US used to be pre-eminent.” 

China also thinks it means American agreement to respect its self-defined “core interests”. 

America’s backing for Japan over the Senkaku islands is seen not just as a difference of opinion but as a breach of trust.
Trust remains in short supply. 

With no immediate threat to its security (beyond the unpredictability of North Korea) and America the only potential long-term threat, China continues a rapid military build-up. 

And America, for all the distractions of the Middle East, remains committed, rhetorically at least, to its strategic pivot to Asia. 

This reassures allies alarmed by China’s rise, but looks less like a 21st-century “new model” relationship than a very old-fashioned 19th-century sort of strategic rivalry.