Some of the Communist Party's darker currents are bubbling to the surface.
THIS week China became the last major power to recognise
Libya's National Transitional Council. Last week it admitted
government-controlled companies had touted $200 million in weapons to
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, despite China signing up to a United Nations
arms embargo five months earlier.
China's foreign policy is famously pragmatic, but even
Beijing is having trouble reconciling how it "respects the choice of the
Libyan people" with the fact that only weeks ago its companies were
spruiking vast quantities of guns, rocket launchers and missiles to be
used against them.
For China's leadership there is much more at stake than
Libya's oil. The rolling ''jasmine revolution'', the NATO military
intervention in Libya and the fall of Gaddafi each go to the core of
the Communist Party's conceits and insecurities.
The conceit is that the US-led West is programmed for militaristic
global domination and "containing" China's rise but is now in crisis,
perhaps even terminal decline. There is no moral quality to American
power - "power comes from the barrel of the gun," as Chairman Mao put it
- and the US has a record of waging war wherever it does not face
credible resistance.
In this narrative NATO's bombing of Libya belongs in the
Iraq family of military misadventure, another step of amoral overreach,
and is the overt expression of subversive American interference that was
seen or imagined in Egypt, China and elsewhere. Whether it is North
Korea, Iran, Pakistan or Gaddafi's Libya, the enemy's enemy is naturally
a friend.
The insecurity is that "the people are unsatisfied", as a
senior security officer plainly put it to me, and each apparently
successful revolution leaves China's dictatorship a little more exposed.
Chinese people might see unhelpful parallels between the authoritarian
conditions that triggered uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya
and what they experience at home.
"When are we going to respect the choice of the Chinese
people?" asked Yang Hengjun, a Chinese Australian writer who has
millions of online followers, using the Chinese Foreign Ministry's words
against it after its U-turn in support of the rebels.
Some of the Communist Party's darker undercurrents have
been bubbling to the surface recently as it wrestles with its future in
the lead-up to next year's leadership transition.
One man to watch is General Liu Yuan, the son of former
president Liu Shaoqi. Many pundits say he is on his way to being the
most powerful officer in the People's Liberation Army.
General Liu writes of a world where "history is written
by blood and slaughter" and he identifies with those who have resisted
Western military-imperialism dating back to China's Boxer rebellion.
"Plane strikes skyscraper, flesh bomb on the roadside … It's hard to
judge good and evil, general and gangster," he writes, before going on
to reject Western values and Western democracy.
"Look before you, everything except for chopsticks has been westernised. Is there anything we stand against?"
The general's essay was published this year as the
preface to a book by his friend Zhang Musheng. Zhang, an intellectual
and princeling in his own right, is also a man to watch. I asked him
whether Liu was as belligerent and hostile towards the West as he
seemed.
He spoke of 46 American expeditionary wars while lingering on Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and the two wars in Iraq.
"None of these wars are justified," said Zhang. "The US
regards all international affairs as its domestic issue, and vice versa.
Now it's making a claim for returning to Asia and having a core
interest in our East Sea. If China wants to avoid war it must possess
the capacity for combat and not go begging for 'no war'."
Zhang continued to echo and expand on the themes of
Liu's essay: "War is the extension of politics. Peace is the extension
of war. If you don't have mass destructive weapons, you will be attacked
by them. Liu Yuan is not hawkish at all, but realistic … Don't you now
say he is really a peace advocate?"
Zhang said Gaddafi was defeated because he paid
compensation to the Lockerbie victims and generally compromised with the
West. The lesson from Libya was not about modes of governance, or
morality, but that Gaddafi showed weakness and was repaid with war.
The Zhang-Liu world-view has implications for how the
Communist Party instinctively views its interests wherever America is
involved in conflict around the world, including Libya. It suggests
China's rapid military build-up may be just beginning.
The Chinese government says it didn't know its weapons
companies were negotiating one of the country's biggest arms deals with
Gaddafi representatives in Beijing and planning to disguise any sales
through third countries. But the government owns those companies, it
hires and fires their executives and it routinely uses them as tools of
foreign policy.
Last year Zhang Guoqing, the general manager of the
biggest of the arms companies, Norinco, told party and military
luminaries that his corporate group had done much to ''safeguard core
interests of the country and to promote the implementation of the
national diplomatic strategies''. He also added an aspiration "to keep a
low profile".
He might have achieved all three if Gaddafi's security
officials hadn't left a Norinco shopping list on a street-side rubbish
pile as they fled Tripoli.
John Garnaut is China correspondent.
Comments