By Kerry Brown
Faced with growing expectations, China’s foreign policy is actually becoming more insecure.
We speak of China now as more assertive, confident and sure of its position in the world. And yet wealth and the hard power that has come with it seem in fact to have made China’s behavior more insecure, not less so. Insecurity above all is the more accurate description of China’s diplomatic character at the moment, rather than a newfound confidence.
One can see this most easily not in grand geopolitics but on the granular level of China’s relations with regional powers around its borders. Cambodia stands as a kind of bellwether state. During the late Maoist period, it is now increasingly clear, Cambodia did little without leaders in Beijing knowing. In particular, China’s links with the Khmer Rouge leadership from 1975 on were profound and varied. Pol Pot, according to a superb account in veteran journalist Francis Deron’s Le Procès Des Khmers Rouges, visited Beijing secretly three times: in 1966, in 1970 and then, only two months after seizing power, in June 1975. He had his only ever state visit abroad to Beijing in 1977. Mao Zedong would grant Khieu Samphan, the regime’s Head of State, an audience in 1974 before they had even come to power, and Ieng Sary, who was to become Kampuchea’s Foreign Minister, ran what was in effect a liaison office from Beijing from 1971. Andrew Mertha of Cornell University has just written a further account of the immense amounts of Chinese aid that went to the Khmer Rouge regime. In light of this evidence, it is hard to not see Cambodia during this era as almost akin to a client state. No principles of “non-interference in the affairs of others” stopped China from having a huge say in the way the country was run and how it acted diplomatically.
Read the full story at The Diplomat