No one would still accuse China of hiding its light. After years of obeying Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of restrained foreign policy as the best means of advancing its?peaceful rise,?an emboldened Beijing now appears more comfortable about brandishing its strengths and achievements. Whether it is greeting visiting dignitaries with stealth fighters, encouraging the adoption of its currency abroad, or allowing retired generals to designate the South China Sea an area of “core interest”, the days of China as a shrinking violet are behind us.
The question is, what kind of foreign power will China become as its confidence grows and as its economic interests from south-east Asia to Africa and Latin America pull it deeper into world affairs. Unlike Japan, the world’s second-largest economy until last year, China will not be America’s shadow. In the phrase of Paul Keating, former Australian prime minister, the international order is returning to a more normal state in which the world’s second most important power is no longer a “client state” of the first.
Even at this early stage of a process that may take 30 years or more to fully unfold, it is possible to make out the contours of China’s foreign policy. One stark difference between it and the US, where Hu Jintao, China’s president, finds himself this week, is that China is unlikely to be a proselytising power. America was founded on ideas and documents. That, coupled with its Christian roots, produces a strong evangelical streak. Whether in regard to its constitution or the merits of its liberal democracy and free-market ideology, much of the US discourse assumes it has fashioned a superior system. America has often led by example and through the attractiveness of its model. But it has not shied away from using force – through coups in Latin America or war in Vietnam and Iraq – in an effort to impose its vision on the world.