China: what responsibilities come with a rising power status?

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In this article, Professor Yongjin Zhang, former director of the New Zealand Asia Institute and now at the University of Bristol’s Centre for East Asian Studies, examines the different perceptions of the European Union, the United States and China itself in relation to the rising Asian power’s potential new role and responsibility in the global system.

China has been actively advocating governance reform of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Increased representation for emerging economic powers was top of the agenda at the recent June meeting of BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Yong Li, China's deputy finance minister, (pictured here with Brazil's finance minister Guido Montega) urged for a more swift reform of IMF governance.

The current global financial crisis has presented rising China with an unexpected—and certainly unsolicited—intellectual and policy challenge. What is the responsible role that China could and should play that would serve concurrently three main purposes? It must serve, in the best possible ways, China’s grand strategy of national economic development; it must be most effective in promoting global collaborations in dealing with the current global financial crisis; and it must be most appropriate to China’s rising power status and in promoting its image as a responsible power.

In an interview with Lionel Barber of the Financial Times on 2 February, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made emphatically three points in this regard. First, the Chinese leadership does not think that using a large chunk of China’s $2 trillion foreign currency reserve to recapitalise IMF can effectively deal with the global financial crisis and the imperative is to reform the global financial system. Second, it does not see it as China’s role to ‘save capitalism from itself’; and third, to quote Premier Wen, ‘I firmly believe that running our own affairs well is the biggest contribution [China can make] to entire mankind’.

The expectations from the international community seem, however, quite different. A most recent policy report sponsored by the European Council on Foreign Relations released in late April contains some trenchant criticisms of China’s behaviour at the G20 summit in London. It contends that efforts to get Beijing to live up to its responsibility as a key stakeholder in the global economy ‘have been largely unsuccessful’. ‘The G20 summit in London in early April 2009’, the report asserted, ‘demonstrated Beijing’s ability to avoid shouldering any real responsibility; its relatively modest contribution of $40 billion to the IMF was effectively payment of a “tax” to avoid being perceived as a global deal-breaker’.

Not only is there disagreement between the European Union and China. Even the EU and the United States may not necessarily agree here. In a speech made at Peking University on 1 June, Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, readily acknowledged that G20 leaders ‘agreed on an unprecedented program of coordinated policy actions’ to deal with the global financial crisis. He then went on to say that ‘China and the United States are working together to help shape a strong global strategy to contain the crisis and to lay the foundation for recovery’. ‘How successful we are in Washington and Beijing will be’, in his words, ‘critically important to the economic fortunes of the world’. Further, ‘China is already too important to the global economy not to have a full seat at the international table, helping to define the policies that are critical to the effective functioning of the international financial system’; and ‘Global problems will not be solved without US-China cooperation’.

Geithner was effectively articulating the idea of a G2, consisting of the United States and China, which had been ironically rejected by Wen Jiabao publicly while attending the 11th China and European leaders’ meeting in May in Prague.

These three different positions and disagreements regarding China’s responsible role are revealing. By evoking the question of China being a responsible power, they have, perhaps inadvertently, brought forward both the agenda and the imperative for rising China to reposition itself in the global system, seeking to understand and to accept global responsibility commensurate with its rising power.

At the same time, it seems to have encouraged the US re-assessing the role that it wishes China to play in the global political economy. Finally, it may also prompt and compel a re-examination of, and deep reflections upon, current ‘Western’ approaches to dealing with China, which is, after all, ‘always an amalgam of seeming contradictions’.

Images:

1) Guido Mantega, Brazil's Finance Minister, with Yong Li, Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Finance, China

2) World leaders at the London G20 summit, April 2009