Is China a Super Power?

In 1972, President Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit the People’s Republic of China. His meeting with Chairman Mao provided the initial foundation for China’s decision to develop trade with the rest of the world. The consequences of this for China’s seismic economic growth have been profound. In 1994, the year he died, Nixon presciently warned that: 'Today, China’s economic power makes US lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.'

With the world’s largest population (1.45 billion in 2021), China has massive reserves of cheap labour, making it the manufacturing and export heart of the world.

Although still considered to be a developing nation (due to the levels of poverty and the lack of development in significant parts of the country, especially in rural areas), China has also become the most successful neocolonial power in the world. It is Africa’s biggest trading partner and the value of China–Africa trade in 2019 was $192 billion, up from $185 billion in 2018. In defiance of the Monroe Doctrine, which regards South America as firmly within the US’s sphere of influence, China has dramatically increased investment in the region. From 2000 to 2013, trade between China and South America increased 22 times. China is now the second-largest trading partner of Latin America (the US is the largest). President Xi Jinping has made numerous visits to the continent in order to further develop economic and diplomatic ties. Chinese investments are also global. Chinese investors own Birmingham City Football Club, House of Fraser, Pizza Express, Volvo and Weetabix. A Chinese investment of £6 billion is financing the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset. Chinese investors are also financing the Nicaragua Canal, which will cost US $50 billion and is designed to challenge the Panama Canal. China’s structural economic power is dramatically increasing, further extending its global outreach. Since 2001, China has been a member of the WTO and, in 2015, Beijing established the AIIB, which provides loans to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. China also heavily invests in the US in the form of foreign direct investment. This demonstrates how China has grown, given that it used to rely on foreign direct investment from the West.

In 2019, the Chinese government reported an official defence budget of just under $178 billion, however other estimates are higher. This is second only to the US. China has purchased an aircraft carrier from Ukraine and completed construction of its own in 2017, with another completed in 2021. It is also attempting to militarise reefs in the South China Sea and is building up its submarine and missile capability in the region. In 2014, for example, China deployed the Jin-class ballistic missile submarine in the South China Sea. Each submarine is armed with 12 JL-2 nuclear missiles.

Limitations

However, these developments do not confirm that China is close to becoming a superpower. Some critics have likened China at the beginning of the twenty-first century to Prussia at the end of the nineteenth century. In short, China is great and powerful in its ‘near abroad’. However, its military and diplomatic outreach does not match its economic outreach. The US, for example, has almost 800 military bases in 70 countries as well as alliances across the globe. Only in 2016 did China open its first overseas military base, at Djibouti in the Indian Ocean.

China’s global influence is also arguably limited by its communist ideology. American democratic values have, especially since the Second World War, had a global appeal, which China’s more authoritarian approach lacks. In its immediate zone of influence, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan all look to the US for both ideology and protection, therefore affecting its soft power on a local and a global scale. ASEAN also provides an alternative model of development. India, as the world’s largest democracy, represents a potential barrier to China’s global influence. Even Russia, which is increasingly authoritarian and understands the value of courting China, shares a 4,000 km disputed border with China, making its friendship unreliable.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under President Xi Jinping’s administration appears to have abandoned former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s policies of rule by consensus and a large degree of economic freedom crucial to creating a modern and advanced society.

In addition, China still has issues with its human rights record, which has come under heavy criticism from the international community, once more affecting its soft power. A recent example of this has been the claim that China has been committing a crime against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uighur Muslim population in the Xinjiang region. China denies these allegations and claims it is trying to combat separatism and extremism in the region.

There is also the question of whether China actually wants to be a superpower. In order to be a superpower a nation-state needs to have a clear world mission and be willing to take on a global leadership role. Rome in the ancient world had this sense of mission, as did Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and in recent years so has the US. However, China has generally viewed world affairs according to Westphalian principles, by not seeking to impose its values on other states and jealously protecting its sovereignty from outside influence. In 2015, President Xi Jinping announced at a military parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War that, ‘China will remain committed to peaceful development. We Chinese love peace. No matter how much stronger it may become, China will never seek hegemony or expansion.’ However, China’s more recent geopolitical actions have suggested a shift in this behaviour, and it could now be argued that China is at least vying for regional hegemony. After all, there has seemingly been a global move towards regional hegemony as opposed to global hegemony, and we have seen similar in the middle east with Saudi Arabia and Iran’s battle for dominance in the Arab world. Other signs point to China’s ambitions being even greater: the Belt and Road Initiative and the String of Pearls concept suggest an increasingly global range of influence. In 2017, in the wake of President Trump’s abandonment of the Paris treaty, China quickly positioned itself as the global leader on climate change.