By Kerry Brown
Earlier this month, Tsinghua University in Beijing held a major peace summit. Retired leaders from across the world descended on Beijing. One of the scheduled speakers was “former” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. However, just as the conference was beginning, Mr. Rudd was reassuming his old position and therefore unable to attend.
Lurking behind conferences like these in contemporary China is some sense of an act of affirmation or validation going on. There is a concept, of a peaceful, constructive emerging power which wishes to be everyone’s friend. But every now and then something sharp comes through all the rhetorical fluff. For his first major speech to an international audience on foreign policy issues, Foreign Minister Wang Yi simply responded to a question about the maritime disputes with the iteration that “China cannot, and will not, change its stance on these issues.” This begged the question therefore of if it is really possible to resolve the current problems in the South and East China Sea.
As ever with these summits of affirmation, which perform more a semi-religious than any kind of intellectual function, the real value was in discussions away from the sound and fury of the central stage. An African delegate was sitting next to me at dinner on the first night. What did he make of this effort and messaging about China’s peaceful emergence? It was easy, he said. For the first time in centuries, a new power was rising with values and a political system that were different from most others. It wasn’t taking any hard, military route for dominance. It wasn’t even aiming for dominance. It was staking out its key interests in a subtle, gradual way. Furthermore, despite the fact that it was regarded with suspicion, it had many internal challenges, and its international strategic space was highly circumscribed. Surely, the African delegate concluded, this was something we should support. We couldn’t expect the American imperium to last forever, and better it slowly resolve itself this way than implode, or end in conflict.
Read the full story at The Diplomat