Foreign Policy of the People's Republic of China
The Foreign Policy of the People's Republic of China refers to any political relationship between the People's Republic of China as a state and other political organizations outside of China. This can be bilateral relations with another state or multilateral relations with several states at the same time, for example at the level of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Historical background of China's foreign policy
External relations of the Empire of China up to the 19th century
China's relationship with other states is based on its self- image , whose ethnocentric worldview is already clear in the name of the former Chinese Empire: the Kingdom of the Middle ( zhong guo ). This empire is ruled centrally by the Chinese Emperor - the Son of Heaven - whose claim to power is derived from his divine nature. This view of the world is integrated into Chinese culture through the philosophy of Confucianism , which positively evaluates loyalty and obedience to the authorities. With regard to the external relations of the empire, Confucianism, with its urban emphasis on the importance of social harmony, was also viewed by the Chinese as an element of Chinese civilizational superiority. While this Chinese complex of superiority found its expression in all relations between China and the peoples in its vicinity, it was particularly pronounced with regard to the nomadic peoples living north of China - barbarians from the Chinese point of view . The importance of this complex of Chinese superiority becomes clear in the words of the British historian John Fairbank : "The political theory of the superiority of the Son of Heaven over foreigners was an integral part of the power structure of the Chinese state. Undisputed in his empire, he never asserted outside [the empire] Having had peers and that helped him to remain unchallenged inside. "
A correction of this view of the world would have been possible, if at all, by the fact that Chinese society would have been increasingly exposed to foreign influences. The social class of traders, who traditionally interacted most with strangers, enjoyed little respect in the strongly agrarian society of ancient China. Although merchants in ancient China had considerable power through the wealth they often acquired, they were often placed on a par with the pirates, who for centuries made Chinese waters unsafe, due to their maritime activities, particularly in southern and eastern China.
Apparently paradoxically, the Chinese superiority complex contrasts with the fact that China was repeatedly conquered by foreign powers from the north during the time of the empire. However, these powers have always been integrated and "sinized" into Chinese society. Both the Yuan Dynasty in the 14th century and the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century took their place in the millennia-old cycle of the rise and fall of Chinese imperial dynasties and created their own Chinese identity.
From a societal perspective, Chinese society in general has tended to be conservative, traditional, and even isolationist. New, especially foreign, influences were either very difficult to find their way into Chinese society or, as in the case of Buddhism, were sinized. H. made into something culturally independent Chinese. The fact that the relations between the Chinese imperial court and other states came from the other states towards China also plays a role in this constellation. A key factor here is that, with the exception of a period of splendor in the 14th and 15th centuries, China was never a sea power. Until late in the 19th century, China's attention was always primarily directed to the north, as the northern equestrian peoples posed a constant threat to the stability of the empire, but never from the south, from the east or from the sea.
Finally, the way in which Imperial China designed external relations must be pointed out. Almost all relations (with the exception of Sino-Russian treaties in the 18th century) between China and other states were strictly based on the principle of Chinese superiority up to the 1st Opium War in 1839 and therefore took the form of tribute payments. Here, the emissaries of the peoples from China's neighborhood brought gifts to the Chinese emperor, kneeling down in front of him ( kowtowing ) and thus recognized the superior power of the Chinese ruler. In return, the Chinese emperor also gave gifts to the emissaries, which mostly exceeded the value of the gifts that had been brought to the Chinese side, and the meeting was recorded in minutes. If foreign delegations refused to kneel before the Chinese emperor - as in the case of a British delegation in the late 18th century - this dissonance with the Chinese worldview was resolved in minutes at the latest.
The decline of the traditional order and the rise of modern China
Rapid population growth in the 18th century under the Qing dynasty led to social unrest in the early 19th century when crop failures caused famine in southern China for several consecutive years. Decentralization of imperial power, which took place gradually over decades, away from the imperial court in Beijing to the governors of the provinces, as well as the widespread corruption at the imperial court, led to a decisive weakening of the imperial central power and the slow decline of the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. The increasingly aggressive appearance of Western powers in the Chinese sphere of interest also emerged as a decisive, but probably not decisive, factor. This aggressiveness must be seen in contrast to the relations between Imperial China and Western powers in the 17th and 18th centuries. At that time, the pre-industrial western trading powers came to China to buy goods such as tea, china and silk . However, these economic interactions then happened under strict guidelines of the imperial administration and embassies of the West were forced to pay their respects to the emperor. Another level of interaction between China and the Christian West emerged when Christian monks, especially Jesuits , began continuous missionary attempts in China from the 16th century. This balance changed, however, when Great Britain in particular, whose economic and military power grew rapidly due to its advancing industrialization , tried to reduce its trade deficit with China by selling opium . The proliferation of opium in south-east China has created serious socio-economic problems related to the addictions associated with opium use in general. The tensions resulting from this problematic economic relationship, the Chinese superiority complex and the increasing self-confidence of the West finally erupted in 1839 in the First Opium War, which China lost and which ended with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. This treaty opened a period of forcible opening of China by Western powers and progressive humiliation in the early 20th century, which has gone down in modern Chinese historiography as the 100 years of national humiliation .
After the 1st Opium War, several major European powers in addition to Great Britain - including the Russian Empire , France , the German Empire and Japan - forced China to open itself up to them economically by means of gunboat diplomacy and to lift the trade restrictions that previously applied to foreigners in China. Characteristic of this policy were the so-called unequal treaties , which the Chinese emperor was forced to conclude with the foreign powers. As part of these unequal treaties, China lost Hong Kong to Great Britain in 1842 and Macau to Portugal in 1887 , two areas which would only be returned to China over a century later. Further content of these unequal treaties was the opening of an increasing number of Chinese ports in south, east and later even north China, in which foreign traders could trade unmolested. The Chinese authorities were particularly ashamed of the fact that they had to admit extraterritoriality to the foreigners in these ports, so that foreigners in the heart of China were legally treated as if they were not on Chinese soil, but in their home countries, and exclusively more foreign Subject to jurisdiction. The result of these developments was that at the end of the 19th century large parts of China's coastal region came under semi-colonial foreign rule. With regard to China's surroundings, another humiliation of China was that it had to acknowledge that countries formerly owed tribute to China such as B. Vietnam or Assam became western protectorates and colonies.
China's response to the ambitions of the colonial powers
In the second half of the 19th century, more and more Chinese people realized that the only way for China to get out of oppression by the great Western powers would be in-depth reforms. Based on this knowledge, a reform movement arose, which was supported by parts of the Chinese bureaucracy and pushed for the introduction of western engineering, technology and science. These reforms would have been implemented almost in 1898 as part of the Hundred Day Reform , which enjoyed the support of both the reformist section of the bureaucracy and that of the Guangxu Emperor . After a few months, however, this brief period of reform was ended by the intervention of the Dowager Empress Cixi , who carried out a coup d'état. Shortly thereafter, China sank into the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion and the suppression of the anti-Western uprising in 1901. Nonetheless, there remained increasingly widespread support for Chinese self-empowerment based on Chinese values and traditions, enriched by Western teachings on science, technology and technology . Recognizing too late the far-reaching demands for reforms, the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China, fell in the context of the Chinese Revolution , led by Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang (KMT), in October 1911 and was inherited by the Republic of China .
However, the Republic of China has been very weak despite efforts by the national conservative Kuomintang to reform China. The main reason for this weakness was the influence that a number of warlords had usurped in China during the turmoil of the 1910s. This resulted in the Republic of China being ignored under Sun by most major powers, with the exception of the Soviet Union. With the help of the Communist International (Comintern) under Moscow's leadership, Sun finally managed to reorganize the KMT in the early 1920s and to conclude an alliance brought about by Moscow with the Communist Party of China (CCP) founded in 1921.
The rise of communism
The alliance with the KMT gave the CCP sufficient time and room to maneuver to organize and expand its influence. The death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, however, led to an internal turning point within the KMT in which Chiang Kai-shek came to power. Chiang declared the KMT's alliance with the CCP ended in 1927 and drove the communists out of the cities. Even after the CCP withdrew west to the countryside, Chiang's KMT carried out a series of extermination campaigns against the CCP. In order to avoid being encircled by the KMT armies in 1934, Mao Zedong and the People's Liberation Army went on a march north to the remaining communist forces, which, as the Long March, became a basic component of the Maoist hero myth. After the end of the Long March in 1935, Mao was the undisputed leader of the CCP, and the CCP established a permanent headquarters in Yan'an . In Yan'an, Mao built the CCP into the party that conquered China in 1949. With regard to the period from 1921 to 1935, two things are important in terms of foreign policy:
- Mao never had a particularly good personal relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. In fact, until the Zunyi Conference in 1935, he was constantly involved in internal disputes with the so-called Chinese Bolsheviks under Bo Gu and Otto Braun , who were loyal to the Moscow-controlled Comintern .
- Mao and the CCP were constantly on the run until the establishment of a permanent headquarters in Yan'an in 1935, with the result that the CCP had no external relations with any country other than the Soviet Union until 1935, and the CCP staff had no diplomatic experience with abroad.
According to Chalmers Johnson, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) contributed significantly to the CCP's later success under Mao. In contrast to the national-conservative KMT, which was surrounded by Japanese armies in its capital Chongqing in southwest China in 1944 and survived mainly thanks to military aid from the United States of America, large sections of the rural Chinese population in particular saw the CCP and the People's Liberation Army as nationalists fought against the Japanese occupiers for the liberation of China. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the KMT and the CCP were allied with each other from 1936 onwards. However, this was only a nominal alliance and there have been reports of skirmishes between the two armies during the war.
After the end of World War II and the failure of the negotiations initiated by the USA at the Chongqing Conference in 1945, the KMT declared the ceasefire with the CCP over and the Chinese Civil War began. When faced with the question of which side to support, it quickly emerged that neither the US nor the Soviet Union had a particularly high opinion of Mao. The US openly supported the KMT in the Chinese Civil War with equipment and military advisers. The Soviet Union, which was ideologically closer to the CCP than the KMT, had seen the KMT as a means of stopping an invasion of China by militaristic Japan and thus tying up resources that Japan, allied with Germany , would otherwise have used to attack the Soviet Union can. Because of this bond with the KMT, even after the end of the Second World War, it only gave Mao nominal support and instead of intervening on the side of the CCP in the war, it withdrew the Soviet troops back to Moscow. However, this did not happen until the Red Army removed most of the equipment from Japanese factories in northeast China. For this reason, overall, it is fair to say that the CCP under Mao obtained control of China largely on its own after the KMT drove it from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949 .
Mao's strategy
Although heavily influenced by Marxism and Leninism , Mao developed his own ideology and strategy in the course of his struggle against the KMT, which went down in history as Maoism . The core of the Maoist strategy was the land, based on the historical experience that the CCP had been able to rely on the support of the peasants in the countryside, while the cities were mostly under the control of the KMT. This can be seen in contrast to classical Marxism, whose socialist theories are heavily based on the activism of the industrial workers' proletariat, which inevitably occurs primarily in an urban environment. Other key points of the Maoist strategy relevant to foreign policy include:
- the central role of the People's Liberation Army and the CCP's control of the People's Liberation Army;
- the importance of political mass movements;
- the importance of economic self-sufficiency ;
- the importance of border areas as military buffer zones;
- the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside.
Influence of history on the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China
After this brief historical overview, it is important to note the strong historical awareness in the conduct of Chinese foreign policy, a historical awareness that influences many other political areas in China. Well aware of its 5000-year history and the glory days and global and regional influences of the Han , Tang , Song , Yuan , Ming and early Qing dynasties , these times are a constant for Chinese foreign politicians Reference. This reference to China's past also gives rise to the desire to restore China's former status and to rise again to become a great power. On the other hand, there is a deep victim complex, which has its origin in the humiliation of China by the West and Japan in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a time which is not for nothing called "100 years of national humiliation". This period of national humiliation finally came to an end with the founding of the People's Republic of China by Mao in 1949. The importance of the feeling of national humiliation in relation to Chinese foreign policy can hardly be underestimated, as it drives Chinese policy to any perceived humiliation of China Funds to quit. This can also be seen as the reason for China's uncompromising stance with regard to any topic that is relevant to the reunification of China. These conflicts have included and include Hong Kong , Macau , Taiwan , Paracel Islands , Spratly Islands , Senkaku Islands and Diaoyu Islands, etc.
Another fundamental problem of Chinese foreign policy, as already indicated, is the paradox that although the majority of Chinese are firmly convinced of the superiority of Chinese civilization, they still depend on cooperation with the West, its resources and technology if China is to be found to rise again to a great power. This belief in one's own strength is obviously paradoxically in contrast to China's objective weakness. To a large extent, the political discourse on China's economic modernization and development in China itself revolves around the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches that have been or are used by the West and the Communist East. The fact that something is of foreign origin does not necessarily lead to its rejection in China; on the contrary, China has a long tradition of incorporating various foreign achievements such as Buddhism , Marxism or Leninism into Chinese culture.
Finally, the importance of nationalism for today's Chinese foreign policy must be emphasized. Chinese nationalism was used, especially under Deng Xiaoping , to fill the ideological vacuum left by the aberrations of the Cultural Revolution . But before that, nationalism had been used to a large extent by Chinese leaders like Sun Yat-sen - nationalism as one of the three principles of the people - or Mao Zedong - nationalism in the war against Japan. The current desire of China to regain its former power and its international status should also be seen in the context of this nationalism.
Economic foreign policy
In the 21st century, China began to invest heavily in Europe as well as financing development for Africa . From 2008 to mid-2020, China bought around 360 companies from Europe. It bought all or part of six seaports, four airports, wind farms in nine countries and more than a dozen professional football teams from Europe. This happened at a time when the One Belt, One Road project , which connects China with Europe, among other things, was also beginning.
See also
- Sino-German relations
- Sino-Indian relations
- Sino-Japanese relations
- Sino-Russian relations
- Sino-American Relations
literature
- On the historical background of China's external relations:
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Peter Müller, DER SPIEGEL: Companies in the Corona Crisis: This is how the EU wants to fend off Chinese takeovers - DER SPIEGEL - Economy. Retrieved June 15, 2020 .