Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a grand welcome ceremony hosted by Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, ahead of their talks in Hanoi, Vietnam on Nov. 12, 2017. (LI TAO/ XINHUA)

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In the past five years since President Xi Jinping took the helm, China has raised a series of important strategic diplomatic ideas and guiding foreign policies while the concept of “neighboring diplomacy” has become a keystone in official discourse.

To put these concepts into practice, Xi has proposed a kind, sincere, reciprocal and tolerant foreign policy toward neighboring countries, an Asian security outlook, the “Belt and Road” initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and a number of sub-regional initiatives, such as the Bangladesh-China-India-Burma economic corridor and a mechanism of dialogue and cooperation between countries of the Lancang-Mekong River Basin.

Over time, China’s neighboring diplomacy has begun to take on scope, scale and a multi-vectored nature.

In Xi’s report at the 19th CPC National Congress, he elaborated on the importance of the “Belt and Road” initiative and the strategic concept of a “Community with a Shared Future.” Xi’s trip to Vietnam and Laos, his first overseas trip after the 19th congress, underlines the priority of relations with neighbors.

In this light, China needs to tackle two major issues—diplomacy toward great powers and regional security—to create a sound surrounding environment for China’s development, and enable neighboring countries to benefit more from China’ development for the purpose of common development.

 

Top priority
In Xi’s report to the 19th National Party Congress, he outlined China’s two-stage development plan for the period from 2020 to the middle of this century.

In the first stage from 2020 to 2035, China aims to build on the foundation created by the moderately prosperous society. It is expected to take another 15 years of hard work to basically realize socialist modernization, at which point China’s economic and technological strength will have increased significantly.

In the second stage from 2035 to the middle of the 21st century, China will develop into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful.

In this blueprint, we can see China’s vision for transforming from a manufacturing giant to a high-quality product producer, from a regional power to a world leader. In the process, China’s strategic focus will shift from peripheral areas to a larger scope.

However, prior to 2035, building relations with neighboring countries will be a priority to achieve China’s pursuit of peaceful development, given the development of China’s national strength and the overall conditions of the surrounding environment.

There are four arguments to support such an assertion. First, China will hardly qualify as a world power in terms of national strength until at least 2035. Before that, it will be difficult for China to have a relatively comprehensive geopolitical, economic and security impact on the world. China’s influence is likely to be confined to its surrounding areas.

Second, the Asia-Pacific region will continue to be the global strategic pivot until 2035. The power struggle in the region will not abate and the dominant players in the Asia-Pacific region will determine the structure of global power. China, as a major power in the Asia-Pacific region, should no doubt pay more attention to the peripheral areas.  

Third, some of the structural contradictions and historical problems plaguing China’s regional security are unlikely to be resolved in the short run. Structural contradictions in China’s bilateral relations with the United States, Japan and India coupled with the tension on the Korean peninsula and the Indo-Pakistani conflicts, cast a shadow on the development of China’s national strength and its international influence.

Finally, events and initiatives proposed by Beijing are expected to come to fruition by the year 2035.

Hence, China will continue to place neighboring diplomacy at the forefront of the overall diplomatic layout, and going forward, lifting strategic capabilities in the surrounding region remains a key task for China.

 

Differentiated appeals, strategies
With China’s growing national strength, the gap between China and its neighboring countries will become more disturbing, which requires China to think about how to build better ties with neighboring countries.

At present, China’s neighbors adopt a mixed attitude of welcome and wariness toward China. On the one hand, they want to ride on China’s fast economic growth. On the other hand, they are worried that the rise of China could pose a threat to their national security.

Therefore, it is a central task for China to figure out a solution to the “geographically near but not close” relations with its neighbors. To make things worse, some countries constantly challenge China on issues of national interest, adopting a strategy of “making friends afar while attacking neighbors nearby.”

For example, in recent years, on the issue of the South China Sea disputes, the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries often do not hesitate to make a scene and invite outside parties to complicate the situation. At the root, they are betting that China will not risk its international image and other factors to take tough action against them.

For a long time, China has upheld the basic principle of equal treatment of large and small countries, putting aside disputes to maintain regional stability, so that many countries believe that China’s adherence to the path of peaceful development means it has renounced the use of force.
China mainly resorts to economic means to build ties with its neighbors and caution toward the use of force is apparent. Even when China carries out economic diplomacy, there is little use of punitive measures, such as sanctions, which leads to a more complex attitude among neighboring countries toward China. Though most of them have concerns about China’s potential threat to their security, few are truly worried about punitive military action.

It can be said that relations with neighboring countries have become a major problem in China’s diplomacy. Discrepancies in national strength and status of the peripheral countries translate into different strategic appeals and interests. China must better handle this asymmetry in its relations with neighboring countries in order to promote a more harmonious neighboring environment.

 

Mutual respect, trust
For a long time in history, China and neighboring countries have been living together under a tributary system, which was in fact a form of regional hierarchy. However, one thing to point out is that China has never relied blindly on force to subjugate its neighbors and establish regional leadership, and it was more reliant on the rule of rites. With ethics and morality as the basic norms of conduct, the Chinese showed authority rather than power in history.

In modern times, the tributary system in the surrounding areas of China has broken down, and the norms of modern sovereign countries have begun to spread around the region.

At present, Asian countries face a series of pressing problems, such as territorial disputes, national identity and so on, in particular the issue of coexistence of large and small countries.

As China rises, its influence on the neighboring countries continues to grow. However, the influence does not bring about the desired harmony in China’s relations with the countries concerned, and does not lead to the provision of a favorable neighboring environment.

In this light, China’s neighboring diplomacy should stress strategic policies. China was formerly inclined to solve its peripheral problems through economic means, and now it is facing more and more inadaptability. In recent years, some Chinese scholars have begun to rethink the necessity of mutual respect and trust. 

To be specific, China needs to lay out its code of conduct more clearly and stress reward and punishment as it is, to let the neighboring countries have better pre-judgment on China’s action.

Second is to apply a set of political, economic and diplomatic tools in a more flexible manner when handling foreign relation affairs to avoid the dilemma of dislocated strategic goals and means.

Third, China needs to constantly cultivate soft power in the surrounding areas, especially its prestige, earning more respect for China and reducing reliance on hard power.

Lastly, China should participate more in the provision of public goods in the region, so that neighboring countries can share the benefits of China’s development more fairly and strengthen their trust in China.

In short, China needs better strategic planning in its neighboring diplomacy, which will not only help to reduce the unnecessary loss of hard power but also be conducive to the coordinated use of soft and hard power, thus eventually leading to the enhancement of China’s influence in the surrounding areas.

 

Ling Shengli is from the International Security Research Center at China Foreign Affairs University.