China gambles on the Third World

BEIJING - China’s venture into the Third World that began with the first Asia Africa summit in Bandung, Indonesia, 50 years ago is finally paying dividends for the lumbering economic giant.

As China goes where few others will venture — fostering diplomatic and economic ties with nation's viewed with various degrees of disdain by Washington such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela – its economic star is rising while undercutting the United States as well as its main Asian rival, Japan.

China’s President Hu Jintao, is in Indonesia this weekend to confer with other top leaders from Asia and Africa and commemorate the landmark conference that provided then fledgling Communist China with its first platform for breaking out of its international isolation.

The fact that Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi used the international event Friday as a platform to issue an apology for his country’s aggression in Asia during World War II, in an effort to defuse rising tensions between Japan and China, demonstrates the importance of the gathering.

Adroit diplomacy
At the height of the Cold War in 1955 and faced with diplomatic and economic sanctions, China nearly did not make it to the historic first world summit of former colonized Asian and African nations, as organizers wrangled over the issue of whether to invite the U.S.-backed Taiwan, which then occupied China’s seat in the United Nations.

With adroit diplomacy, China eventually joined and actively influenced the assembly of some 300 delegates representing 29 Asian and African nations — a meeting of the “underdogs of the human race,” as one American observer Richard Wright put it. That provided a crucial support for the beleaguered Communist-led regime in Beijing that was still recuperating from the Korean War.

The Bandung conference, which brought together the leading lights of the then Third World —India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno, China’s Chou Enlai, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and many others — created the core base for the Non-Aligned Movement, which China supported in its long struggle against the United States and the former Soviet Union.

China’s efforts in cultivating Third World allies eventually paid off when it assembled enough votes to topple Taiwan and regain its seat — and the veto power — in the United Nations in 1971. 

Central actor with new thrust
As the leader of the fastest-growing economy, which has recently overtaken Japan as the world’s third largest trader, China’s President Hu may well be a central actor in the Indonesian summit, which will map a new Asian-African partnership. 

His trip was preceded by a state visit to the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, and will be followed by a trip to traditional U.S. ally, the Philippines, now a major recipient of Chinese aid and investments, in moves that very much bear the hallmark of China’s current diplomatic thrust.

“China’s Third World diplomacy today is more sophisticated than in the time of Mao,” observed Professor Shi Yinhong, a noted foreign policy expert at Beijing’s Renmin University.

“While before it was nearly 100 percent strategic, uniting with any forces against the United States, it’s now more moderate and comprehensive, with a prominent economic component, driven by trade, investments, and our need for energy and other resources,” said Shi.

“Of course, political influence develops with more trade, but our principal consideration now is economic advantage, mutual advantage,” Shi added.

Engine of Asian growth
True enough, China’s role as the main engine of Asia’s economic growth is reshaping the region’s economic alignments, as witnessed by last year’s pact with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to establish a free-trade community of almost 2 billion people by 2010, potentially bigger than the U.S.-led NAFTA and the European Union. 

With a recent diplomatic breakthrough with India, China is pushing for an even bigger economic bloc that combines the world’s two most populous countries.

Other important U.S. allies are increasingly being drawn to China’s expansive economy, with export-dependent South Korea pouring nearly half of its overseas investments to China, and resource-rich Australia signaling its desire to initiate free trade agreement talks with Beijing.

“The real challenge for the U.S. is how to deal with East Asia that is increasingly going under China’s political sway,” said Philippine political scientist JCM Romero.  China’s pact with the Southeast Asian countries is “part of a Chinese strategic plan to project its influence in Asia to outflank Japan and match the presence of the U.S.  But who minds?” echoed Singapore’s Strait Times.

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