China needs patience to achieve a peaceful rise
Mark Valencia says China needs to tone down its bellicose actions and statements to cool tensions in regional relations, and America must help by demonstrating its willingness to share power
Over the past several years, China has been demonstrating its growing power and ambitions. Salient signals include deliberately forcing a US Navy guided missile cruiser on the high seas to change course; locking fire-control radar on a neighbour's vessels and aircraft; unilaterally declaring a new air defence identification zone which overlaps those of its neighbours'; reiterating a fisheries law requiring other nationals to seek permission to fish in its claimed and disputed waters; aggressive naval and coast guard patrols and exercises in the territorial seas of disputed islands and in others' claimed exclusive economic zones; and increasing blue-water naval and air patrols.
It is understandable that China wants to be respected and to play a major if not dominant role in its own region, and eventually the world. But it also wants to avoid war - or a cold war, an intense across-the-board ideational struggle - that would retard, if not thwart, its rapid economic, military and political rise. And therein lies the strategic dilemma.
According to President Xi Jinping , "the argument that strong countries are bound to seek hegemony does not apply to China". "This is not in the DNA of this country, given our long historical and cultural background," he said. "China fully understands that we need a peaceful and stable internal and external environment to develop ourselves. We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides trap - destructive tensions between an emerging power and established powers … Our aim is to foster a new model of major country relations."
Yet China's actions and statements do not seem to support Xi's claims.
China knows it is not yet ready for an all-out military clash with the US and its allies - even if some sections of its society seem to think it is inevitable. But China's "overreach" - it appears to want too much power too soon - is in danger of producing the opposite of the friendly geopolitical environment it seeks.
Indeed, China's actions are generating fear - not ideational admiration and respect - and pushing ever more countries towards the US for protection, like Japan, Australia and the bulk of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Presumably, this is precisely what China does not want; to be encircled, constrained, even "contained" by unfriendly, even hostile, neighbours aligned against it. This could be disastrous for its continued "rise" in all dimensions.
