An article in The Diplomat (6 July, 2012) by Dr. Michael Auslin, a scholar in Asian and security studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, claims that China's foreign relations are all about America, which has hampered Washington in forging a better relationship with Beijing. It alleges that China's outreach has been largely motivated by self-interests, and that the country's forging working relationships are seldom based on trust or a sense of truly shared values. Smaller nations are used as pawns in a larger game to counter the United States. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example, is no more than a symbolic counterbalance to America’s informal liberal bloc in Asia.

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Let's first appreciate that China is so full of domestic problems, economic, social, ethnic, political and ecological, that the country would be foolish to harbour global hegemonic ambitions, at least for now.

Besides, China's military is some 30 – 50 years behind the U.S..the United States in terms of technology, outreach, training and global surveillance, although there is no doubt that China's A2/AD (anti-access/area-denial) capabilities are increasing in the Taiwan Strait where her leading core interest lies, according to an overview in The Economist. Click here

But emerging from more than centuries of foreign aggression, China is extremely sensitive to any threats to her territorial integrity and sea channels vital to her economic survival, such as those in the South China Sea. This sensitivity is now pitted against America's re-engineered Pivot to Asia, taking the form of widening military ties and exercises with countries with conflicting territorial claims against China. In the circumstances, it is no wonder that China seems paranoiac about American intentions.

China's relations with her Asian neigbours are by no means antagonistic or exploitative. Indeed, many of China's neighbours have China as their largest trading partner and welcome China's economic partnersship, as evident from such regional trade blocs as ASEAN+1, +2, and +3, all including China. In these trade blocs, China often ends up as the net importer. Moreover, China has been careful not to take the lead as ASEAN remains the host.

In the light of increasing strategic importance of Central Asia, not least its potential for Muslim-inspired separatist terrorism, China, along with Russia, took the initiative of establishing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the wake of 9/11. Since then, the SCO has grown to be an influential regional partnership based on equival status and win-win cooperation in areas extending beyond the mitlitary to trade, investment, culture and much closer diplomatic exchanges. Such influence is by no measure symbolic as India wants to upgrade to a full membership and Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey are getting more involved in various forms.

Talking about shared values, the influence of the SCO is precisely the shared value of respecting ideological, political and developmental diversity instead of a single world view dominated by Western norms.

Lastly, America's recently re-energized Trans Pacific Partnership (PPP) deliberately sets out to exclude China. As China is at the heart of a regional production and supply chain, this hardly makes economic sense. So it is only natural that China is convinced that along with the Asian Pivot, this is yet another tool with which the United States wants to contain the rise of China, no matter what is openly claimed to the contrary.

So an incipient Cold War mentality against a rising China feeds into itself in a classic Security Dilemma with mutually reinforcing negative feed back loops.

Perhaps a better way to manage this fractious relationship between a status quo world power and a rising one is to work on areas where mutual trust can best be built rather than seeking manoevres that inevitably diminish such trust. The challenge is striking a sensible balance.

Best regards,

Andrew