Beijing’s dictatorship diplomacy

International Herald Tribune

China is often accused of supporting a string of despots, nuclear proliferators and genocidal regimes, shielding them from international pressure and thus reversing progress on human rights and humanitarian principles. But over the last two years, Beijing has been quietly overhauling its policies toward pariah states.

It strongly denounced North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006 and took the lead, with the United States, in drafting a sweeping UN sanctions resolution against Pyongyang. Over the past year, it has voted to impose and then tighten sanctions on Iran and, before the publication of the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, had provisionally agreed to support another UN resolution. It pushed the Sudanese government into accepting the deployment of a UN/African Union force in Darfur. And it condemned a brutal government crackdown in Burma.

The shift has been driven in part by China's changing calculation of its economic and political interests. With its increased investments in pariah countries over the past decade, China has had to devise a more sophisticated approach to protecting its assets and its citizens abroad. It no longer sees providing uncritical and unconditional support to unpopular, and in some cases fragile, regimes as the most effective strategy.

But an even more important motivator has been the West's heightened expectations for China's global role. Faced with the 17th Party Congress last October, the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and presidential elections in Taiwan also later this year, Chinese officials would have preferred to think about avoiding trouble at home rather than about developing a new foreign policy. But the nuclear crises in North Korea and Iran and international outcry over developments in Darfur and Burma have forced their hand. China's fears of a backlash and the potential damage to its strategic and economic relationships with the United States and Europe have prompted Beijing to put great effort into demonstrating that it is a responsible power.

Burma, for example, is a strategically important client. Nonetheless, Beijing's patience with the Burmese junta has been wearing thin recently. For several years, Beijing encouraged it to undertake economic and political reforms in order to help the regime consolidate its rule, ensure stability and regain international acceptability. It supported former Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, whom it considered a Deng-style reformist – only to see him ousted in 2004.

As the Burmese regime hardened further, China's confidence in its willingness to reform faded. Its support was put to the test by a UN Security Council resolution condemning the regime, which China vetoed along with Russia. But after the veto, Beijing let the junta know that its protection depended on a greater willingness to move forward with political reforms. China also deepened its ties with Burmese democratic and ethnic opposition groups.

When massive protests broke out in Burma this fall, Beijing supported a Security Council statement strongly deploring the junta's use of violence, acquiesced to the passing of a condemnatory resolution in the UN Human Rights Council, and pushed the Burmese government to receive the UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari and grant him access to senior generals and the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, throughout the demonstrations, while the Chinese government urged restraint on the junta, Beijing stressed that its first priority was to prevent another "color revolution." Despite China's concerns about its international reputation, Beijing neither wants nor really can ask the Burmese regime to "commit suicide," in the words of one Chinese analyst. China fears the establishment of a democratic government with a pro-American tilt.

As the Burma example suggests, there are inherent limits to the shifts in Beijing's approach to pariah states. For one thing, China's diplomacy reflects not a fundamental change in its values but a new perception of its interests. Its main motivations remain energy security and economic growth. Beijing is not subordinating its economic aims to other goals; it is simply devising more sophisticated means to secure them.

Another important limit is set by the military and commercial sectors, which see to it that whatever the changes in China's diplomatic stance, there is no commensurate effort to rein in arms sales or economic ties. Even when China presses pariah states toward (limited) political and economic reform, it holds up its own experience to show that reform and economic opening need not lead to democracy. And respect for state sovereignty remains the bedrock of many of China's key alliances.

The challenge for the United States will be to make the most of China's shifting sense of its interests while realizing that China's broader policies toward authoritarian regimes do not align with their own. Beijing is not likely to become a consistent partner of the West in dealing with dictatorships, but it is becoming an increasingly important part of the solution in many problematic cases.

Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt was an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2006-2007. Andrew Small is a program associate at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. A longer version of this article appears in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs.