Asia's challenge to China

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Daniel Twining
American economic weakness, Europe's uncertain political and demographic future, turmoil in the Middle East and challengers to western leadership from Moscow to Tehran may signal a new moment in world politics. It is characterised by the decline of free nations whose power and principles have shaped international society for centuries and the emergence of an autocratic Chinese superpower whose seemingly unstoppable economic ascent shatters the comfortable belief that capitalist development leads to democracy. Should the liberal west brace itself for a new global "Beijing consensus" of authoritarian modernity?
Not yet. Although US leadership and transatlantic unity remain essential, China's trajectory will also depend on how its neighbours manage the growing power. Today we see the emerging outlines of a democratic challenge to the projected Chinese century by Asian nations determined to hedge against China's authoritarian rise.
Leaders in Beijing believe China's growing economic and military might will enable it to dominate Asia. But shared political values are shaping the region's landscape as much as changing constellations of power. Japan and Australia recently inked a security pact, Tokyo's first outside its US alliance, and Australia has tied up with democratic Indonesia. India and Japan are constructing a pan-Asian alliance of values with extraordinary economic and military potential. Japan has led India, Australia and a reluctant US to create what Chinese strategists fear is an "Asian Nato" - a quadrilateral partnership of great democracies that will build, according to Shinzo Abe, Japan's former prime minister, a "new Asian order".
This flurry of alliance formation is striking because it is led by rising Asian powers rather than the US, which has policed the region for 60 years. It is also striking because this new Asian order seeks to replicate the democratic peace of the west - not the Sinocentric hierarchy of Asia's past.
Big Asian democracies are building value-based strategic partnerships because they understand that peace and democracy are "inseparable", as Indonesia's foreign minister puts it. India's prime minister says his country can only be secure in a region of democracies; Japan's leadership wants to build an "arc of freedom and prosperity" across Asia; and south-east Asian leaders have declared that regional stability requires democracy at home and abroad. These are the stirrings of a different Asian century from the one China's leaders envisage.
The character of a country's foreign policy cannot be separated from that of its domestic rule. China's closest associates are autocracies in North Korea, Burma, Pakistan, Russia and central Asia. China's favourite regional forum is the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, which unites it with Eurasian strongmen. Beijing chafed when Japan, Indonesia and Singapore created a democratic counterweight to Chinese influence at the East Asia Summit by inviting India and Australia.
Asian nations have been dependent for too long on US military power to maintain regional peace. But without a consensus on the sources of domestic legitimacy, Asian organisations cannot replicate the peace of Europe. In an Asia divided by history and culture, democracy provides a transnational identity that is creating a new basis for co-operation - one that could replace foreign powers' management of the region with truly Asian leadership, fulfilling the promise of a new Asian age.
Growing pressure for democratic change in China - and the leadership's intense debate over how to manage it - suggest that prosperous mainland Chinese will eventually demand the freedoms enjoyed by Chinese societies in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Until then, the key geopolitical dividing line in Asia will not be between China and America or east and west. It will be between an authoritarian leadership in Beijing, whose hegemonic ambitions are the foreign corollary of centralised domestic control, and a coalition of Asia-Pacific democracies that value pluralism at home and abroad.
The future of the world's newest centre of power is being shaped by this contest while Washington fights fires in the Middle East and Europeans debate the future of their union. It could lead to military conflict. But as a senior Japanese official says, it could also lay an enduring foundation for peace when a free China becomes the natural leader of an Asian community of democracies.
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Under syndication arrangement with FE