By Benjamin Herscovitch
Despite last year's sabre-rattling in the South and East China seas, China's foreign policy under President Xi Jinping shows no sign of a zero-sum Cold War mentality.
At an upbeat ASEAN meeting in Brunei eight days ago, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China and south-east Asian nations were ''like members of one big family''. This came after a joint press conference between the Chinese and South Korean presidents in which they exchanged smiles and expressed a shared commitment to a peaceful and denuclearised Korean peninsula.
China's Asian charm offensive should not be surprising: a stable and secure Asia is the Middle Kingdom's top priority, and it will not jeopardise relations with key regional powers or the US and Australia in the name of its contentious territorial claims in the South and East China seas.
Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the US, stressed in an interview last month that China had no intention of destabilising Asia's international order: ''China was ready to integrate … into the global system … [and] follow the international rules.''
To be sure, China periodically ratchets up territorial disputes with its maritime neighbours and castigates Canberra for being so closely aligned with Washington.
Nevertheless, as its sanguine diplomacy in Asia over the last week shows, Beijing knows it must foster goodwill in the region. And despite dire warnings from rogue People's Liberation Army colonels, Beijing also implicitly accepts Australia's growing partnership with the US.
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