As anti-China sentiments build up around the world and global leaders call for holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the Coronavirus pandemic, China, initially sticking to its character, resorted to offense rather than defense.
But, after deploying an offensive approach or what is popularly known as the Wolf Warrior diplomacy for months, Chinese politicians are finding that it is not working in their favour and is in fact backfiring. In the last few months, the countries around the world are grouping up against China.
In the last few days, a coalition of democratic countries has been projected to build a new global order, and China, being an authoritarian non-democratic Communist country, is obviously not a party to the new grouping, be it the proposed ‘G10’ or the ‘D10’.
Countries around the world no longer want to give benefits of a developing country to China, as it flexes its muscle in smaller countries using its economic prowess. In April this year, Trump said, “China has unbelievably taken advantage of us and other countries. You know, for instance, they are considered a developing nation. I said well then make us a developing nation too.”
It is evident that Wolf Warrior diplomacy has failed and it has rather harmed Chinese interests. Many political commentators and old school Communist party veterans, who played a key role in the “peaceful rise of China”, are now questioning the new approach by the Xi Jinping government.
Therefore, the Communist government seems to have deployed Premier Li Keqiang- the second-most powerful official in China after Xi Jinping, to engage in some damage control and protect Chinese interests, through the old approach.
In a press conference last week, in a rare show, Li played the poverty card. He said, “The average per-capita annual income in China is 30,000 yuan (USD 4,193), but there are over 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 yuan (USD 140), not enough to rent a room in the Chinese cities.” This is around 40% of China’s entire population.
According to Li, five million Chinese people were living in poverty before Coronavirus struck the country and ravaged the Chinese economy which has now registered a contraction of 6.8 percent in the first quarter, sending millions more into poverty.
So, in a rare departure from China’s economic muscle-flexing against nations like Australia,
the Chinese Premier now seems to seek concessions of a developing country, by marketing the poorer side of China.
Li was deployed by the Communist government because if the statement would come from mighty Xi Jinping, the leader whom the Chinese try to project larger than life, would have looked weak. Therefore, after the failure of Xi Jinping’s bad cop strategy, Li is playing Good cop and trying to convince the world that China is still a poor country, and seeks a “peaceful rise” to lift millions of people out of poverty.
China is not a poor country per se, but given the very high-income inequality, millions of Chinese people do live in poverty. As per a paper published by the London School of Economics, the top 1 percent account for more than 40 percent of the total wealth in China, which is one of the highest in the world. And Income inequality has started rising since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012.
China, despite being the second-largest economy in the world with a GDP of 14 trillion dollars in 2019, is home to one of the largest number of poor people in the world. The share of the top 1 percent in the total wealth of the nation has consistently risen ever since the country implemented economic reforms in 1978. Meanwhile, the share of the bottom 50 percent has come down from 28 percent to 14 percent.
If China is isolated at the global stage, the country will lose out on the export of goods and services across the world.
China’s growth story has been centered around exports and hence, China fears isolation from the global community, as it would result in a collapse on its export-led economy. Therefore, Premier Li is now playing the poverty card to control the damage caused by China’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, and its Chinese aggression, be it in the South China Sea or at the border with India.
The offensive defense approach was a radical departure from the traditional Chinese foreign policy, which followed the principle of “Hide your strength, bide your time,” outlined by the father of modern ‘Capitalist’ China, Deng Xiaoping. For decades, China projected its “peaceful rise” and sought concessions of a developing nation from the world, while also maintaining a highly opaque, authoritarian regime.
As the country was experiencing a “peaceful rise”, western politicians and political theorists were fooled by the idea that the sleeping giant will never wake up.
Given the failure of Xi Jinping’s approach to reap any positive results at the global stage, it seems that China wants to go back to Deng Xiaoping’s “Hide Your Strength” philosophy.
