On China policy, the game has moved on

The Beijing Olympics have seemed destined to be about something – anything – other than the games. Last year, we were preparing for the ‘Genocide Olympics’. Then the ‘Burmese Junta Olympics’. This year the ‘Oppressed Tibetan People Olympics’. More recently, the prospect of a ‘Robert Mugabe Olympics’ loomed. The usually neglected Uighurs made a late bid for the stage with a grenade attack in North-West China. And a predictable list of internal problems have taken the headlines in the last few days, whether Beijing’s dire air; foreign journalists whose promised freedom-of-movement was curtailed by a policeman’s boot; visas denied to potentially troublemaking Olympians, or the spottily lifted restrictions on the internet.

At every stage, a disparate coalition of groups has argued that a threatened boycott of the opening ceremony – or the entire Games – would provide the necessary leverage over China to solve whatever problem was at hand. Yet instead of an embarrassing no-show, today we see the largest line-up of political leaders outside a UN General Assembly, including the U.S. President and excluding Beijing’s election-stealing friend from Harare. Veteran China-watcher James Mann notes the contrast with major U.S. presidential visits in the 1990s: despite a set-piece speech from President Bush in Bangkok about China’s domestic political situation, this visit is not going to coincide with a toughly negotiated set of concessions on the human rights front. In fact, there seem to have been few concessions from China on any front. It was thought that Beijing would be too nervous about its party being spoiled to block a UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on senior Zimbabwean officials. It vetoed. The scale of public outrage over Tibet was supposed to force China into serious dialogue with the Dalai Lama. There are no serious talks taking place. There have been modest, pragmatic shifts for the sake of international public opinion – support for a peacekeeping mission in Darfur and a few protest pens in Beijing – but no deviation from the bottom line.

The mystery is why we thought it would be otherwise. While the Chinese government still hears the same 1990s language coursing around western politicians’ speeches, it knows that human rights – at home or abroad – don’t make the A-list of the agenda any more in its dealings with the major powers. For the United States, the economic stakes are too high for Chinese macroeconomic policy and trade relations to be anywhere but number one on that list. Nukes come next. China’s role in the North Korean nuclear crisis is pivotal to the success – or otherwise – of the negotiations. Couple that with Iran, where keeping China on board for the gradual squeeze of sanctions-tightening remains a fraught task. And the security side of the list is rounded off by Taiwan, where the modus vivendi reached between Washington and Beijing – alongside the election of the more China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou – has dramatically reduced the prospect of conflict in the straits, the real worst-case scenario in the relationship. Burma, Sudan, and Tibet sometimes make the upper end of a B-list but that is not where the real political capital is being spent. The two presidential candidates are not shaping up that differently either – neither one going close to the ‘strategic competitor’ language of the 2000 campaign, let alone the ‘butchers of Beijing’ from 1992.

Other countries face similar prioritizing dilemmas in their China policies. While everyone attempts to pretend, at least publicly, that they can continue to lobby China just as effectively on all fronts as they ever could, they can’t. We have a list of policy areas on which we want China to move that is twice as long as it used to be. The stakes for the most important issues are twice as high. And, in dealing with a far more powerful China than the second-tier economy it was ten years ago, we have half the leverage. Even the NGOs struggle with their focus – human rights at home? Darfur? Burmese monks? Tibetan monks? Climate change? The critical reaction from the Chinese public over the Tibet protests has made many of them additionally nervous about the consequences of their efforts to link each of these causes to the Olympics.

The net result is clear. On most of the ‘soft’ issues, while there is a fair volume of noise, the Chinese government now faces little targeted international pressure and can move pretty much to its own timetable. Indeed, it is China that has demonstrated the capacity to target and punish countries for stepping out of line politically – Japan over Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, Germany and France over Tibet. It is still possible that a single cause will flare up in the next two weeks and dominate the Games. But while Beijing 2008 is rarely going to be written about without the words ‘dogged by concerns about [fill in the blank]’, on the substance of the issues China is largely off the hook. The Olympics were a major test of whether a particular set of campaigning tactics would still work on China – and on Western governments in their relations with China. The answer appears to be that they don’t. Do Western governments still have the leverage? Yes. But they’re choosing to use it elsewhere. The pretence will continue, but China policy isn’t about human rights any more.

This entry was posted by Andrew Small on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 7:09 am and is filed under China, United States.

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