In 1898, the United States — at the time an isolationist and anti-colonial power — entered upon the world stage after Spain allegedly sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. This event propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the historical firmament and was a driver behind America’s emergence as a great power.
The commercial adventures of the East India Company compelled the British state to intervene in China in the 1840s, sparking the Opium Wars. In 1850, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, ordered the British navy into the Aegean in order to protect Don Pacifico, a British subject born in Gibraltar, and to reclaim his lost property. After an eight-week blockade, the Greek government paid compensation to Pacifico. When challenged in Parliament, Palmerston justified his actions referring to the declaration ‘Civis Romanus sum’ (‘I am a Roman citizen’), a declaration that would protect a Roman from harm anywhere in the ancient Roman empire.
All were defining historical moments in the emergence of great powers. They demonstrate that the greater a rising power’s economic interests in a foreign land, and the more nationals it has involved there, the more likely it will feel compelled to act should events threaten either.
Has China’s defining ‘great power’ moment been thrust upon it by the Libyan crisis?
This week China joined the international community in voting for a unanimous UN Security Council resolution that includes a travel ban, an asset freeze on Muammar Gaddafi and his family, and referral of Gaddafi’s actions against his people to the International Criminal Court. This takes China’s exercise of its international responsibilities to an unusual and an entirely new level.
The crisis forced China to bend its principle of non-intervention, and to launch its biggest-ever rescue mission of some 32,000 Chinese nationals in Libya. A Chinese frigate participating in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden was deployed in the rescue efforts. Four Chinese military transport planes were also dispatched from Xinjiang. This marked a departure for China as a great power, as it sought to square principle with the practical reality of finding solutions to immediate problems that arise from its global reach.
All this is in stark contrast with China’s past stance against interference in the affairs of ‘imperfect regimes,’ such as those in North Korea and Zimbabwe. The need to get its nationals out of harm’s way in Libya — as well as its search for international respectability — have thrust China into its new role as a great power. Chinese citizens are starting to feel the same need for protection all over the globe, and they will expect protection, forcing Beijing to shoulder one of the many burdens of great-power status. In the Libyan crisis this is an entirely welcome development for the West. But it is a development that will have many consequences.
This is no trivial turning point. It is a significant change that will require a major re-assessment of China’s view of itself and the international community’s view of China’s stance in world affairs.
What is the major reassessment? Reassessed to what? What is the significance and consequences? These questions are unclear to me after reading the piece.
@ Jonas Parello-Plesner
Re: …The need to protect its economic interests and nationals abroad are thus giving China’s foreign policy a new twist….
…This time around, it is a burden that coincides perfectly with Western interests….
@ Peter Drysdale
Re: .. This week China joined the international community in voting for a unanimous UN Security Council resolution that includes a travel ban, an asset freeze on Muammar Gaddafi and his family, and referral of Gaddafi’s actions against his people to the International Criminal Court….
@ Mathew Robertson
Re: …What is the major reassessment? Reassessed to what? What is the significance and consequences? These questions are unclear to me after reading the piece….
Yes I agree that China was compelled to evacuate their imperiled citizens from Libya and their “Yes” vote in the UN Security Council was an exercise in “soft power” and realpolitik.
Mathew Robertson has asked the right question.
How does that mean that China will follow the western missionary template of direct intervention in the future.
The ancient Roman Empire was funded thru military conquest and its economy used slaves as an energy and labor resource.
China during the same historical time was an agrarian peasant economy which as the Middle Kingdom was essentially self contained and not expansionist in the Roman Empire a model.
The West has expanded thru colonial expansion then thru its re-incarnation in the most recent form of the US hegemony practiced economic domination underpinned by military might including a pattern of global military alliances and bases not unlike the Roman and British Empire.
China is a former victim of the Western colonial powers and remains a curious mix of third world peasant and first world industrial and technological economy.
The Middle East secular and popular uprising is a consequence of Western intervention in that region.
What benefit does China gain from being seen as following the west in Libya?
Particularly when the common man and woman in the Middle East fear western military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan will be repeated in Libya under the pretext of Humanitarian concerns whilst Italy still buys oil exported by the regime as we speak.
How does covert British SAS entry into Libya then detained by the rebels fit into the picture?
Note also that China and Russia has insisted a “No Fly Zone” policy should not be implemented and a “Non Interference” policy respected.
I suggest that assuming that China is compelled to follow the Western paradigm on how Great Powers behave is inappropriate because it is on the wrong side of history.
There is a paradigm shift and these two disparate links are examples of how “emergence arising from complex systems” contribute to why things will be different (in addition to China’s perception of how to best serve its interests):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dk60sYrU2RU#at=1023
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wgNuSEZ8CDw
CPC is a schizophrenic organization. For instance, it has successfully delinked different kinds of domestic reforms from each other. It could as well project Libya as an exceptional case requiring otherwise objectionable solutions. Only when it supports a similar line of action in a few other Libyas-sans-Chinese nationals can we say with some confidence that a turning point has been reached. In short, it is too early to celebrate the Westernization of Chinese foreign policy.