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The East Is Red
With more than $1 billion in debt to China, last year Sri Lanka handed over a port along with 15,000 acres of land to companies owned by the Chinese government. China is stepping up its public diplomacy efforts to win friends and influence people in the Asia-Pacific region. According to a new study released recently by AidData from the College of William and Mary, from 2000 to 2016, China spent more than $48 billion in the region, 95 percent of which went to infrastructure investments.
The study found that China has tailored its strategy for different receiving countries based on local factors such as internet penetration, the size of the Chinese diaspora, and popular discontent. The target audience for China’s public diplomacy efforts in a receiving country includes public officials, civil society and private sector leaders, journalists, academics, students, and other relevant socioeconomic or political sub-groups.
The study divides China’s public diplomacy into five categories: Informational Diplomacy (the Chinese media in the receiving countries), Cultural Diplomacy (Confucius Institutes/culture exchange), Exchange Diplomacy (study abroad programs), Financial Diplomacy (loans/grants), and Elite-to-Elite Diplomacy (activities to cultivate personal relationships between the countries’ officials).
The study found that Japan, South Korea, and Australia attract the highest volume and most diverse set of inbound Chinese public diplomacy activities. While these developed countries do not receive any financial diplomacy from China, they receive a disproportionate share of Chinese sister cities, Confucius Institutes and culture exchanges, and official visits compared to other countries.
Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand receive the second highest public diplomacy activities from China in the Asia-Pacific region. China uses financial diplomacy — or rather, debt-trap diplomacy — as its preferred instrument for cultivating relationships in the first three countries. Thailand does not get similar investments but receives a higher share of Confucius Institutes and culture exchanges.
Indonesia and Malaysia are valuable to Beijing as a strategic gateway to the Indian Ocean, which is part of its strategy to secure passage to Middle Eastern oil. Cambodia and Thailand are especially welcoming to China, as both countries retreat more and more from western democracies due to military dictatorship in Thailand and Hun Sen’s authoritarian grip on Cambodia.
The remaining ASEAN countries (Philippines, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam), along with Mongolia, Fiji, and New Zealand receive a diverse mix of Chinese public diplomacy activities.
So, how is China’s public diplomacy viewed by the receiving countries? The study focuses on three counties: the Philippines, Fiji, and Malaysia. Using interviews with government officials, private sector leaders, civil society representatives, academics, and foreign diplomats to understand how Beijing wields public diplomacy to achieve its objectives, it found that Chinese investment weighs heavily on the minds of the interviewees. Whether that’s to China’s benefit or not, only time will tell.
Are there possible drawbacks to China’s influences in the Asia-Pacific Region? Well, as Sri Lanka found out, possibly the loss of its sovereignty.
You can read the study in its entirety here.
Published in General
Informative and infuriating…Thanks, @lidenscheng!
This is the kind of thoughtful post that all by itself makes Ricochet much more valuable. I can’t overstate how informed recommendations for reading like LC’s enhance the site.
I guess maybe the Commies have decided that imperialism isn’t so bad after all.
The Chinese Monroe Doctrine?
And China now has a military outpost in the Indian Ocean, right across from India.
China has been lending a lot of money to poor countries for infrastructure projects built by Chinese companies. Very good for Chinese GDP. These poor countries are starting to realize that they can’t afford the projects and that the projects are not really that useful. The whole belt-and-road initiative is starting to look like a Ponzi scheme. Bad news for a country in a trade war. (Did you see the story where Walmart asked suppliers to move production from China to Vietnam?) All those loans may turn sour. As Confucius said, “If a man owes you a dollar and cannot pay, that man has a problem. If a country owes you a billion dollars and cannot pay, then you have a problem.”
The same thing is happening globally. Chinese money and workers are developing resources and resource handling infrastructue in Latin America and Africa. It’s a way to spend all those dollars they were accumulating and if we don’t manage our economy intelligently, we’re not going to like the outcome which at some point will probalby be war. While the communists and indigenous leftists promoted the idea that emperialism was exploitative, host country problems were self inflicted. Now they’ll get to see real emperialism and there will be no outcry from the Chinese people to cause pull back or to flounder around trying to promote the development fad of the day as occured in the US. The Chinese won’t worry about promoting democracy or economic development except in their own investments and influence. Implicit in what I’m sayng here is that in addition to having a real presence in Asia we must begin to manage our economy in the only way we know how, by not trying to manage it from above, but cutting regulations and reducing the impact of the federal government. Every dollar of government deficit is a dollar of current account defcit and a dollar of imports, or alternatively it is a dollar spent by the Chinese and Germans on expanding their influence around the world which may or may not lead to a US export.
We can’t deal with these realities by trying to reduce imports from China or Germany, or anybody else, but we must make our economy more competitive so that result happens. We must reduce wasteful government spending, stop paying people not to work, fix our school system by allowing parents and business to influence what and how we teach, i.e. get the educational bureaucracy out of the way and let market forces sort it all out, and we must reduce regulations and taxes that cause wasteful private sector spending. In other words do what we say we’re doing, but do it better and faster.
Thanks LC.
I’ve shared these videos before, but I think they are useful:
and here’s another one that came out in 2016 and I hadn’t seen but I think may be also informative for those interested:
Australia has lots of worries, no?
There is also several Chinese Communist Party efforts to influence American policy via Chinese funding of think tanks like the Brookings Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They also fund the Johns Hopkins School of Advance International Studies. Their goal is to use the funding to give voice to positions favored by the Chinese government, but in an American accent.
They also fund Confucius Institutes on many US college campuses. The membership there seeks to steer campus discussion and activities into pro-Chinese veins and to stifle dissenting opinion.
China has also been attempting–with considerable success–to influence the content of US-made movies, and has gotten employees of US corporations fired when they felt that those employees had not been sufficiently deferential to Chinese foreign policy goals.
So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?
They must be having a good laugh about the US media’s obsessive focus on *Russia*.
Nothing to see here, folks. Free trade is always good and America will always be number one.
And it is building one in Pakistan. Chinese ports are dual use and the specifications they use are with military vessels in mind.
Listen to the Ricochet Podcast by Ben Weingarten on the main feed Titled “Former CIA Op Unloads on Brennan etc. etc. Then read this story:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5320392,00.html
Combine all that with the land grabs and artificial islands created by the Chinese, their war games this week with Russia, their major crackdowns on Christians and freedom in general – it’s going in a very bad direction – and fast … my neighbor’s kid was there this summer and said the older people are very scared and the young very angry. We have much to be concerned about.
LC,
This isn’t a China problem this is a Communist problem. A Communist government cares only about maintaining its power. The health-wealth of its people are secondary. Its foreign policy is deceptive. It makes great efforts to mask its intentions but in the end the naked hegemonistic aggression surfaces. Small countries will be absorbed, not only their sovereignty but their very identity completely obliterated.
We had hoped that the experience of a little capitalist prosperity and the model of the Russian withdrawal from Marxism would be enough to change China. It hasn’t worked. After Tiananmen Square, the Marxist ruling class made sure to take more complete tyrannical control. The recent internment of over a million Uyghurs makes the nature of the regime crystal clear. It should have been obvious anyway as there has been a gulag system operating in China the whole time that Marxist useful idiots like Thomas L. Friedman of the NYTimes were touting the glorious Chinese regime.
Regards,
Jim
So in other words, a Communist problem is a China problem?
Don’t forget that Chinese companies with deep ties to the State and Party control the ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. For a country whose navy does not project global reach, they are still well positioned to control major sea lanes.
As a long time resident in Bangkok, Thailand (15 years now) I can say that while Chinese public diplomacy is an issue, the Chinese themselves are as big of one. Chinese tourists are everywhere in Bangkok, a recent development, and the Thai reaction to them is largely negative. Chinese tourists are mostly seen as loud, rude, and cheap. I think this is a general SE Asian reaction, but am not sure.