China’s Strategy for a Post Western World

A number of different visions of China’s future as a leading world power are competing for public attention and influence. Among them are populist ideas that challenge Beijing’s official rhetoric about “building a harmonious world”.

There is growing debate inside the People’s Republic of China about the country’s proper strategic goals. Many intellectuals and policy-makers are asking how China can convert its new economic power into enduring political and cultural influence around the globe. The key question they are seeking to answer is: “How would China order the (post-western) world?”

Beijing’s official view - first outlined by Hu Jintao, China’s president, at the United Nations in September 2005 - is that China is guided by the notion of “building a harmonious world” (????). But two other visions of China’s purpose in the global arena are growing in influence alongside this one: an unofficial view of a Chinese-style utopian world society, and a quasi-official description of how China can compete to become the world’s “number-one power”.

This article examines these different visions of China’s grand strategy in a post-western world, and suggests briefly what kind of response western powers might be best advised to take to them.

Official policy: "building a harmonious world”

The concept of world order embodied in the idea of “harmonious world” (hexie shijie) is an extension into the arena of foreign relations of Hu Jintao’s domestic-policy equivalent, the “harmonious society". Indeed, Chinese officials and scholars regularly proclaim “harmonious society” - whose formal aim is to use state power to “close the wealth divide and ease growing social tensions” - to be “the model for the world”. By this logic, writers in China explain “building a harmonious world” as a new and better route to “lasting peace and common prosperity” that will allow different civilisations to coexist in the global community.

In practice, the official view of hexie shijie lacks detail. The Beijing government tends to describe the policy in terms of vague platitudes, making it hard (for example) to establish whether the strong state thought essential to building a “harmonious society” is also needed to build a “harmonious world”. Other channels are more outspoken; the Hong Kong Wen Wei Po has called on Beijing to be the “‘formulator, participant and defender of world order,’ in order to push the entire world toward harmony.”
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