Xivilization: China targets sea change in global diplomacy race with West - Pak Kiu (Nikkei Asia)

 ‘Xivilization’ – China’s authoritarian answer to crisis: At first glance, China's Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) may appear to be simply the latest iteration of what the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum calls China’s sharp power. But it is "more sophisticated. It’s more strategic, more long-term oriented,” said Moritz Rudolf, a research fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.

ASIA INSIGHT

China targets sea change in global diplomacy race with West

As Blinken calls, Beijing wields 'Xivilization' to promote China worldview

PAK YIU, Nikkei staff writerJUNE 20, 2023 06:00 JST

Nikkei Asia, 

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/China-targets-sea-change-in-global-diplomacy-race-with-West

HONG KONG -- For three years, COVID kept China's global diplomacy goals on ice. Now, with the U.S. enmeshed in a domestic election campaign and the international community preoccupied with war in Ukraine, Beijing is back, ramping up a drive to promote its own alternative to the West's "rules-based international order."

From offering to foster Palestinian-Israel relations, to floating peace proposals for Ukraine, President Xi Jinping, China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has stepped up his global influence game amid soured ties with the U.S.

While Antony Blinken met the Chinese leader on Monday during the first trip to Beijing by a U.S. Secretary of State for five years, in recent months Xi has rolled out the red carpet in Beijing for leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, France's Emmanuel Macron and the heads of several Central Asian countries.

All this has come against a backdrop of growing tension over Taiwan, the democratic island claimed by China as its own: last week Xi hosted Honduran President Xiomara Castro for an embassy opening after her country broke off ties with Taipei. At the same time, China has launched the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) -- the last of a trio of Xi's ideological frameworks -- as being central to "cultivating the garden of world civilization," or "Xivilization" as state media have termed it.

Opaque in language, Xi's initiative advocates for "common aspirations" of humanity, pitching a message that says, "Join our club, we won't tell you what to do -- unlike the West." But scholars say collegiality will come at the expense of human rights protections.

Compared to how China has acted in the past, "It's more sophisticated. It's more strategic, more long-term oriented," said Moritz Rudolf, a researcher and fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center. "It's a vision that China's putting out on the table, while Western countries are currently in a sort of an identity crisis, figuring out how to deal with a lot of challenges ... in a complex world.

"And then China just has an authoritarian answer to this."

China's vision of reshaping global norms has long been laid out but without much detail. First came the Global Development Initiative in 2021, a large pool of cooperative projects aimed at assisting developing countries reeling from COVID, the impacts of climate change and poverty. The Global Security Initiative came last year, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Now with the GCI, Beijing is fleshing out its foreign policy by creating alternative institutions for global cooperation that are more ambitious than ever -- ringing alarm bells for some.

Unveiling the GCI in a speech earlier this year, Xi made at least one aspect clear -- no one should tell China what to do. "Countries need to keep an open mind in appreciating the perceptions of values by different civilizations and refrain from imposing their own values or models on others and from stoking ideological confrontation," he said, speaking to senior international political figures in a videoconference in March.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim remains the only national leader to publicly support the GCI. Some observers say not all Asian countries would subscribe to the initiative given the delicate balance of maintaining ties with the U.S.

But should Western nations continue to frame the competing agendas as "autocracy versus democracy" -- as U.S. President Joe Biden has described it -- that could help China's cause, some analysts warn.

In Southeast Asian countries, "At the political level there is a lot of alignment actually with the Chinese," said Hoang Thi Ha, senior fellow and co-coordinator of the Regional Strategic and Political Studies Programme at the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

"The idea of 'Don't just use values such as liberal Western values to dictate your foreign policy with us'" carries weight in some capitals, Hoang said.

Beijing's diplomatic push comes as Xi, now in his third five-year term, steps up efforts to deliver on a mission of rejuvenating the Chinese nation. Observers trace the ambitions of the world's second-largest economy back to the experience of colonial subjugation, what China calls the "century of humiliation," from 1839 to 1949.

The foundations for China's vision of a multipolar world began to take shape as early as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched a decade ago, with more than $962 billion of infrastructure development investments across 147 countries since then, according to a report by Fudan University's Green Finance & Development Center. While huge, the BRI has come in for criticism of late over exacerbating debt in poor countries, as well as the quality of some projects.

Since Xi came to power as the head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, the country's foreign policy has become bolder, in step with its economic rise.

Alongside its Taiwan agenda, Beijing has made sweeping claims in the South China Sea, rapidly building islands in strategic waters and militarizing the region. Non-Western-centric organizations, meanwhile, have provided Beijing with platforms to boost its vision of a new world order, including the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, an alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As China steps forward to play a greater role in global diplomacy, Western nations are trying to figure out how to deal with the new reality. The Group of Seven major industrialized countries took a united stand against what they called China's economic coercion at last month's summit in Hiroshima and called on China to play by international rules.

But while the Ukraine war has solidified Western nations' alliances in general, some observers warn their grip on global politics will rapidly wane.

"This may end up being the biggest geopolitical turning point revealed by the war: that the consolidation of the West is taking place in an increasingly divided post-Western world," the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank wrote in February.

Prolonged Western dominance in the world has led those Western nations to believe their values are universal, and that the reshaping into a multipolar world has become more a "moral challenge" than political, said George Yeo, Singapore's former foreign affairs minister, speaking at a forum in December.

According to Yeo, multipolarity would provide economic, cultural and political benefits to the global community, and the U.S. should stop seeing China as an adversary.

However Western nations respond, observers of China's foreign policy foresee no let-up in Beijing's push to become a bigger global player. Some point to Afghanistan and the Middle East as areas where China will be more involved, while others have noted China's keen interest in Central Asia.

At a meeting of BRICS foreign ministers earlier this month, a call was made to rebalance the global order away from Western nations. But resistance to China, and Xi, in some quarters makes that a more difficult goal: since COVID, unfavorable views of China have been at historic highs, along with opposition to Xi's vision of China as a global leader, according to Pew Research Group.

Amid the prospect of competition and even potential conflict between major powers, China could find itself achieving its ambition of playing a bigger role in a multipolar world. But that world faces an increasingly uncertain future.

"So long as we do not slip into kinetic warfare, I do not foresee a total freeze in relations between Beijing and Washington," said Brian Wong, associate fellow and adviser on strategy at the Oxford Global Society, speaking before Blinken's visit to China. "However, this does not mean that bilateral relations will improve any time soon, short of demonstrable resolve from the bureaucracies and political establishments across both sides of the Pacific."