China’s Shifting Views on Korean Unification Fei-Ling Wang
III. The PRC Experience in the New East Asia
also push for an expansion of the Chinese Qin-Han world order in the name of global revolution. His more pragmatic, arguably less imperial and less ambitious successors quietly abandoned the pretention of global revolution after Mao’s death in 1976 and remained content with the power and privilege of ruling a country of 1.3 billon people. Deng Xiaoping wisely seized the opportunity offered by the Westphalian world order and actively pursued wealth and power chiefly through the globalization of the world market. In a grand exchange with international (mostly Western) capitalists, the PRC catered to foreign investors, inventers, and consumers. In return, Beijing has mustered world’s fastest economic growth and largest foreign currency reserves over the last three decades. China also formally entered into many international agreements and regimes, acting like a typical sovereign nation competing within the Westphalian system of international relations for wealth and power, while forcibly maintaining a domestic political system that was essentially unchanged at the fundamental level from the old Qin-Han Empire (under the banner of the so-called Four Cardinal Principles.)13Deng Xiaoping wished for his “Basic Party Line” to be followed unwaveringly “for one hundred years” until the CCP succeeded in establishing an “advanced socialism in China” and reached the level of a developed country in terms of power and wealth, hopefully by the mid-21st century.14
13“To uphold the leadership of the CCP, to uphold socialism, to uphold the people’s democratic dictatorship, to uphold Marxism-Leninism.” First proposed by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 in his speech titled “jianchi sixiang jiben yuanze”
(Uphold the four cardinal principles), Deng Xiaoping wenxuan(Selected works of Deng Xiaoping), Vol. 2, Beijing: Renmin Press, (1983)1994, p. 158-84.
14Deng Xiaoping, “Nanfang tanhua” (Speeches in the South), February 1992.
Deng Xiaoping wenxuan(Selected works of Deng Xiaoping), Beijing: Renmin Press, 1993, p. 370-1.
This vision has been reaffirmed and elaborated since then by his successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
In foreign relations, the PRC first (1972-89) acquired recognition and safety and gained crucial access to Western capital, technology, and markets in the name of joining the fight against the subversive force of the former Soviet Union, which was in fact instrumental to the creation of both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PRC.
During that time, Mao (and later Deng) was largely working out an expedient alliance-like deal with the U.S. and the West to deal with the main enemy of the day. Beijing gradually moved from firmly supporting Korean unification on North Korean terms to maintaining the status quo on the Korean Peninsula and tacitly (and later openly) accepted the US-ROK alliance.
Then, after the political crisis of the Tiananmen uprising and crackdown in 1989, and especially after the end of the Cold War in 1991, China managed to continue its crucial access to world markets despite the sharpening of its political differences with the West. The CCP recognized the great need to make realistic and pragmatic adjustments and retreats. Not only did Beijing totally gave up any pretention of pursuing world revolution in either words or deeds, it deliberately adopted a low-key diplomatic stature as instructed by Deng’s famous taoguang yanghui (lie low and bide for time) strategy, first elaborated in September of 1989. Beijing made extraordinary and largely successful efforts to paper-over its political and ideological differences with the West and quietly but firmly played the games of geopolitics and power politics. China showed greater cooperative and integrationist efforts by opening up progressively but selectively to the foreign
business community, culminating in its entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001. A key event was the establishment of diplomatic relations between Beijing and Seoul in 1992 and the explosive growth of economic ties and personnel exchanges between them ever since.
Over the past three decades, the PRC remained steadfastly realistic and pragmatic by playing the game under the current, Westphalian, world order. However selectively, the PRC has participated in the current system and behaved accordingly, while maintaining its traditional Chinese politics at home. Despite setbacks such as its loss of credibility with its comrades in Pyongyang, Beijing’s pragmatic and low-key policy of integrationist moves has been very well rewarded.
China has risen greatly over the past two decades. The Chinese economy expanded by several folds over the past 30 years to become world’s second largest. The revenue share of the PRC state has grown even faster, making the PRC perhaps the richest government in the world. Beijing’s tax revenue alone has been growing every year at a rate 2-4 times faster than the already-fast growth of the Chinese GDP for the past two decades, something “unprecedented in history and unparalleled in the world,” as a Chinese scholar on the history of taxation commented.15
It is especially meaningful that Beijing now controls the world’s largest foreign currency reserves (over $3.4 trillion by late 2011), giving it a great source of financial power internationally. Furthermore, by 2011
15PRC State Administration of Taxation data, 1993-2011. Comments by Gao Peiyong, deputy director of the Chinese Institute for Fiscal and Trade Studies, in Zhongguo Caijing Bao(China Financial Daily), Beijing, August 21, 2007.
the PRC held over $1.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury bills, 26% of the total U.S. government’s foreign debt (or 8% of the total U.S. public debt) and had become by far the largest foreign creditor to Washington.16 The Chinese state has become a financial superpower at home and abroad. All of this has enabled Beijing’s extensive and impressively effective policies of “good neighbors” (mulin) and “enrich the neighbors”
(fulin) to proceed over the past decade.
Both the mulin and fulin policies are intended to help maintain the status quo of a peaceful environment in which for the PRC to develop itself further through friendly relations and sound economic measures.
Both policies have been impressively successful. China has managed to largely maintain the status quo (other than the hugely ego-boosting
“return” of Hong Kong and Macao), improved ties with just about all neighbors and is now enjoying perhaps the best relationship overall with its neighbors since the 19th Century. Furthermore, the economic and diplomatic success of the PRC has allowed for the clear rise of Chinese power in the region, leading to reassessment by China and its neighbors about the status quo and the trends that may potentially alter it.
Therefore, by the second decade of the 21st Century, we start to see a Chinese reassessment of its international environment in general with a noticed surge in discourse on the existing and “new” world orders and China’s role in them. More specifically, a shifting view of China’s policy towards the Korean Peninsula, and especially Korean unification,
16U.S. Department of the Treasury/Federal Reserve Board Release, Washington DC, February 28, 2011.
seems to be taking shape. What to do with China’s rising power, particularly within the region, has become a common and profound theme of foreign policy discourse in the PRC today.