China’s uncertain future as a global security provider
China’s uncertain future as a global security provider
WRITTEN BY LUKAS FIALA
6 July 2023
China’s involvement in the recent diplomatic thaw between Saudi Arabia and Iran has reignited questions about Beijing’s potential role as a security provider across the Global South. Indeed, the fact that Beijing was presented as the mediator ending the seven-year hiatus of relations between Riyadh and Tehran caught many observers by surprise and seemingly underscored China’s growing clout in the Middle East and the international arena more broadly. Accompanied by assertions that Washington and its European partners could have never brokered said deal, the event highlighted China’s diplomatic comeback after three years of pandemic-induced isolation and revived perceptions of the United States’ relative decline vis-à-vis China in the Middle East.
However, this episode also highlights the pervasiveness of rather unrealistic assessments of China’s overseas security strategy, driven by exaggerations of China’s actual capabilities — and willingness — to provide security abroad. In fact, despite China’s more assertive foreign policy strategy under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, Beijing has largely avoided controversial mediation issues in favour of delegating such efforts to local actors while keeping regional counterparts at arm’s length. While China has become more willing to engage other countries, intrastate conflicts featuring non-state actors and disputed claims to power have long presented a challenge to China’s statist approach to peace and security. In the context of China’s proclaimed ambition to help broker peace in other conflicts, such as between Ukraine and Russia or Israel and Palestine, it is crucial to understand the underlying drivers and enduring challenges of China’s approach to insecurity abroad.
China’s ‘security turn’ under Xi Jinping
To begin with, it is important to acknowledge the changes that have occurred since Xi assumed office a decade ago. Xi has overseen a wide-ranging institutionalisation of security and defence cooperation within China’s existing regional and bilateral partnership frameworks that began under Hu Jintao. These efforts have included sending combat troops to United Nations peacekeeping (UNPK) missions in South Sudan and Mali, growing bilateral capacity-building programmes in security sectors in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, multilateral peace, security, and defence summits with officials from across the developing world, and the active use of diplomatic envoys to present China as a constructive actor in regional and intrastate conflicts. In some instances, such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, Xi has explicitly linked security cooperation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), his flagship foreign policy strategy announced in 2013. Xi has also transformed China into a more capable military actor overseas by doubling down on naval and logistics modernisation, which was crystallised by the inauguration of China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017.
The key question is whether Xi’s growing assertiveness and inadequacy of existing means to ensure the security of Chinese entities abroad will lead to a more pronounced security footprint over the coming decade, featuring new military base arrangements and, potentially, institutionalised security guarantees.
Xi’s latest policy slogan, the Global Security Initiative (GSI), should be interpreted within this trend of transforming China into a more proactive security actor to preserve Chinese interests abroad. Announced only a year ago and light on concrete material commitments and policy details, the GSI has thus far functioned as a catch-all phrase to critique the existing US-led global security order while advancing China’s understanding of global security governance.
The GSI is based on six central pillars, including a strong commitment to sovereignty, the UN Charter, and ‘indivisible security’. First set out in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, indivisible security means that the security of any particular country is inseparable from other countries’ security in the region. One country’s desire for security should consequently not compromise another’s. The fact that Indivisible security has ironically been invoked by Vladimir Putin to critique NATO expansion — a point frequently supported by Chinese framings of Russia’s war in Ukraine — attests to how the GSI codifies Xi’s ambition to shape norms surrounding global security cooperation while framing China’s already existing security and defence ties as part of a wider — and anti-NATO — diplomatic initiative.
The GSI also speaks to China’s complex relationship to sovereignty. Indeed, the initiative’s strong commitment to the UN Charter reflects China’s own historical experiences of Western imperialism. During China’s late imperial history, instability and state weakness contributed to China’s usurpation by Western colonial powers, a period dubbed ‘the century of national humiliation’. Amplified by the Soviet Union’s disintegration in recent memory, sovereignty has become one of China’s most paraded concepts in international politics. Beijing has accordingly viewed the rise of liberal interventions under the banner of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as an illegitimate extension of Western hegemony.
To emphasise how China is different from former colonial powers, Beijing has invoked the principle of non-interference. The latter emerged out of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War and is usually cited to underscore China’s formal adherence to non-intervention in other countries’ internal affairs. However, as China’s growing economic footprint abroad has made Chinese entities vulnerable to political risk and instability, some commentators point to the nuancing of ‘non-interference’, reflecting China’s growing willingness to shape the external environment in favour of important economic and/or diplomatic interests. Chinese publications, for instance, have begun to differentiate between ‘interference’ (干涉) and ‘intervention’ (干预) to reframe China’s more proactive diplomatic endeavours. Presenting China as a constructive external actor responsive to local governments’ concerns has at least in some cases enabled China to harmonise its newly found role as a security actor in the eyes of Beijing’s longstanding strategic partners across the developing world with a shared history of anti-imperial and -colonial struggle.
Enduring challenges of China’s approach
Despite Xi’s assertiveness, however, China’s future as a security provider is shrouded in uncertainty. First, while often obscured by the tendency to infer Xi’s assertive agency as the sole driver of China’s growing security activism, the protection of citizens and assets abroad actually reflects a complex policy problem for Chinese leaders and planners. The latter generally does not only follow the ‘opportunity’ to project power but also the ‘necessity’ to safeguard China’s image as a major power at home and abroad. In this regard, it is worth remembering the humble beginnings of a more proactive Chinese posture in overseas conflicts, beginning with Sudan and Libya during the Hu Jintao era (2003-2013).
With the launch of the ‘Go Out Strategy’ (走出去战略) in 1999, Beijing accelerated the internationalisation of Chinese state-owned enterprises in pursuit of natural resources and raw materials to fuel China’s rapid growth at home. Underwritten by the financial largesse of China’s state-owned policy banks, Chinese firms ventured into emerging and frontier markets, often disregarding local politics and instability. Governments in Africa and beyond welcomed Chinese investment as an alternative to the interventionist practices of multilateral lenders that tied development finance to political conditionalities such as human rights and good governance. However, China’s no-strings-attached economic engagement soon encountered reputational risk when a transnational advocacy movement called for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics due to China’s support for the al-Bashir regime in Sudan. China’s ensuing role in negotiating the deployment of a joint African Union-UN hybrid peacekeeping mission to Darfur represented a milestone in China’s involvement in foreign intrastate conflicts.
Yet, it was only the disruptions of the Libyan civil war in 2011 and the hasty evacuation of 36,000 Chinese citizens that demonstrated the need for a more proactive security posture overseas. The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to respond swiftly to the contingency reflected just how taken aback Beijing was to find itself in the position of having fellow citizens demand rescue from a faraway contingency. Nationalist rhetoric galvanised by ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’ has since popularised Xi’s more confident foreign policy posture and amplified the pressure for Beijing to intervene if Chinese interests — including citizens and investments — are threatened. All this has made the government more vulnerable to criticism should it fail to deliver on citizens’ expectations. In other words, insecurity abroad is not as much an opportunity for power projection in Beijing’s perspective as a very complex policy problem that demonstrates the risks of China’s economic internationalisation strategy. The evacuation of Chinese citizens during recent fighting in Sudan has been more coordinated and nimble this time around, demonstrating Beijing has learned from past experiences and developed a more coherent policy response to protect citizens overseas.
Second, the efficacy of China’s approach to overseas conflicts needs to be closely examined. Beijing generally understands crisis diplomacy through the security-development nexus, which assumes that peace and stability are predicated on economic development and vice-versa. Therefore, China’s approach nominally differs from Western notions of ‘liberal peace’ by emphasising economic development over institutional reform in bringing about peace. The desired result is a strengthening of central state capacity, echoing the strong emphasis on sovereignty put forth in the aforementioned GSI. In practice, however, there is little evidence that this ‘developmental peace’ represents a panacea for insecurity. Despite close economic cooperation with China, Ethiopia and the two Sudans both experienced sustained periods of instability or even civil war over the last decade. While China was, for instance, important in transforming Ethiopia’s economy through low-wage manufacturing, ensuing economic gains have not translated into a peaceful solution to the longstanding political tensions among the major ethnic groups in the country. In Pakistan, China’s closest diplomatic and economic partner in South Asia and host to the BRI’s flagship project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, China has been unable to resolve the risks Islamic extremism poses to Chinese diplomats, workers, and infrastructure projects despite its close relationship with Islamabad. China’s financial heft as a major sovereign lender might bring conflicting parties to the negotiating table by offering economic carrots, but infrastructure projects undertaken without adequate due diligence, feasibility studies, and demonstrated utility to local communities also have the potential to further polarisation by creating winners and losers.
Third, given China’s strong belief in state sovereignty and ensuing close relationships with incumbent governments, Beijing is rarely seen as a neutral arbiter in post-conflict negotiations. This has, for instance, been the case in Ethiopia, where Beijing has strongly supported the Abiy Ahmed government against the northern Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). While China’s economic heft in many developing economies has enabled Beijing to curry favour with ruling elites, this exposure has not always been conducive to framing it as a potential arbiter in the eyes of non-governmental actors. For example, since his appointment in 2021, China’s Horn of Africa Envoy Xue Bing has largely avoided tackling controversial issues — such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam or the conflict in northern Ethiopia — head-on. Similarly, in the ongoing conflict in Sudan, China’s historically close ties to former ruler al-Bashir will render Beijing an unlikely peace broker between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In line with keeping partners at arm’s length, China favours letting regional parties lead negotiations, reflecting a preference for setting the table rather than the agenda. The recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement should be interpreted in this vein, with Beijing only stepping in to consolidate Iraqi mediation efforts when a truce was within reach. China’s contribution to ending one of the most enduring stand-offs in the Middle East shows China can work constructively with sovereign counterparts when necessary but underlines the difficulties Beijing faces when non-governmental actors are involved in protracted intrastate conflicts.
An uncertain outlook
It remains to be seen how strategic competition between the US and China will shape China’s role as a security provider across the Global South. While China’s highest form of diplomatic cooperation — strategic partnerships — includes commitments to security and defence cooperation, Beijing has so far eschewed formal defence obligations through legally binding alliances or treaty frameworks. While it is in principle in the interest of both Washington and Beijing to cooperate on mitigating instability and insecurity — as seen in previous instances of shared objectives during the ‘global war on terror’ in Afghanistan and against piracy in the Gulf of Aden — increasingly hardened fronts on both sides will likely make meaningful cooperation difficult.
Finally, while far from an alliance framework, the GSI reflects a shift from seeing security as an area of cooperation towards framing China’s approach as antithetical to that of the US and its allies. The key question is whether Xi’s growing assertiveness and inadequacy of existing means to ensure the security of Chinese entities abroad will lead to a more pronounced security footprint over the coming decade, featuring new military base arrangements and, potentially, institutionalised security guarantees. Except for the GSI, Xi’s newly introduced national security concepts have so far mostly focused on China’s domestic party-state. Any change in this regard should be carefully observed.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Lukas Fiala is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and the Project Coordinator of China Foresight at LSE IDEAS. Previously, he was a Yenching Scholar at Peking University’s Yenching Academy. Image credit: Flickr/UNMISS.