At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet, the new Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key element.
India has already faced such a values-based geopolitical divide in its region, but singly. The Sino-Pakistan nexus against India is unique: never before in history has one country armed another with nuclear weapons and missiles so as to contain a third nation with which the two share common frontiers. Authoritarian bonds have also been employed in more recent years to try and open a new Chinese flank against India via Burma.
Indeed, the stated aim of the 1962 Chinese invasion — ‘to teach India a lesson’ — was rooted in a geopolitical divide centred on incompatible political values. For Mao Zedong, that war was a means to humiliate and demolish India as an alternative democratic model to totalitarian China. The 32-day aggression, which Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed “Mao’s India War”, helped boost China’s image at India’s expense.
More than 45 years later, the speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise is bringing new players, including India, into the world’s geopolitical marketplace. The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, has been accompanied by a high-stakes competition for new strategic tie-ups and greater access to resources, making strategic stability a key concern in Asia.
In the absence of a common identity or institutional structures, one challenge Asia faces is to develop shared norms and values, without which no community can be built. Yet, with only 16 of the 39 Asian countries free, according to Freedom House, creating common norms is a daunting task, especially when some States still flout near-universal values.
A bigger Asian challenge is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe has done) so that greater political understanding and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing visions. On one side is the mythical ‘Middle Kingdom’ whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives its official history — China’s centrality in the world. Its autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China a “world power second to none”, gaining pre-eminence in Asia is vital. On the other side is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order founded on power equilibrium.
Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules difficult. As a new book, China’s Great Leap, edited by Minky Worden, reveals, China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help improve its human rights record. Instead, it has let loose new repression. But just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Games could help trigger radical change in China.
Today, Beijing’s best friends are fellow autocracies while those seeking to forestall power disequilibrium happen to be on the other side of the value divide. Political values thus could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide. What may seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is conceivable in the Asia-Pacific theatre as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would not matter so much.
It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to help unite it with the Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is shaping up as a potential ‘Nato of the East’. Yet, when Australia, India, Japan and the US last year started the exploratory ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the apparition of an ‘Asian Nato’. A Chinese demarche to each Quad member followed.