What China wants

Chinese sanctions on Pompeo, Bolton, Navarro and others on the eve of Joe Biden's inauguration may be more significant than they looked

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch. And China couldn’t have chosen a stranger day to impose them, being the final day in office for the Trump administration. Yet China’s decision to announce sanctions on 28 then-present and former US officials in the Trump administration for having "gravely interfered in China's internal affairs" could prove quite noteworthy. Not for its actual likely impact on any of the 28 — only 10 of whom have so far been officially named, including Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Peter Navarro and Robert O’Brien — but for what it indicates about China’s self-image and indeed strategic ambitions as a great power.

Much of the language in the announcement will be quite familiar to anyone who has butted heads with the Chinese government in the past. Many are the times when, as a weekly magazine editor, I was accused by the Chinese ambassador in London or by an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing of having “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. I can clearly recall a seemingly interminable and excruciating dinner in Beijing with such an official during which I was lectured about The Economist’s coverage of Taiwan, or Xinjiang, or Tibet or some other sensitive issue, and that the conversation only turned normal and even halfway friendly when I tried to change the subject by asking him about North Korea — which shows how desperate I was getting. And Chinese muscle-flexing in diplomacy has become more and more familiar over the past decade, with countries being punished for such sins as being too friendly with the Dalai Lama, for awarding Nobel Prizes to dissident writers (Liu Xiaobo in 2010) or, in Australia’s case last year, for calling publicly for an inquiry by the World Health Organisation into the origins of Covid-19. Chinese officials even have a phrase for it that many — though not all — consider a compliment: wolf-warrior diplomacy.

So the announcement of sanctions, innovative though it is, does not represent a change of Chinese behaviour. Among Chinese actions this one is not even very aggressive, since they waited until the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration to do it. The sanctions might thus be seen as a kind of vindictive revenge on the Trump team, or perhaps as a sort of warning shot across the bows of the Biden team: watch what you do or say, the message might be, for today’s China is willing to hit back at you personally in this way, just as America does towards senior Iranians, Russians or indeed Chinese.

It really isn’t much more than a slap in the face with a wet kipper, as we English sometimes say. Yet this is the first time China has acted in this way, and I think that whether or not there was a direct message attached to the move, there is an important underlying message or perhaps we should call it implication.

The implication is this. Forget all that stuff about “When China rules the world” or any notions that China is aiming for some sort of hegemony, for every Chinese leader knows that notions like that are about a far-distant future at best, or are simply science fiction. What China really has its sights on is equality, by which is meant equality with what has long been the world’s leading superpower, the United States. China’s sense of its own identity as a superpower that is now emerging from several centuries of decline and humiliation is that its destiny is and must be to be treated in the same way as the United States has been ever since 1945 and that it is also entitled to behave in the same sort of way as the US does. It plays a decisive role in setting rules, in shaping outcomes, in organising institutions, in establishing norms. So as a self-respecting superpower, that is what China expects to be able to do, too. That is what superpowers are like, especially those with such huge geographies, worldwide interests and, in China’s case, long histories as political systems and civilisations.

The US slaps sanctions on foreigners whose behaviour it disapproves of. (As by the way does the EU.) So why shouldn’t China? The US considers that its domestic laws can be applied extra-territorially, punishing people and companies that it considers to have broken them. Why shouldn’t China? The US has been instrumental in proposing, negotiating and establishing all sorts of multilateral treaties and institutions over the past 75 years, but very often chooses not to ratify or even abide by them itself. Why shouldn’t China also do that?

This kind of attitude can be seen most plainly in China’s claim to control of the entire South China Sea, in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which China signed (and which the US supported but has never signed) and in disregard of the claims of other littoral nations. They are small and China is big, and unlike them China has a strategic need, no, strategic right, to control all the seas around its borders. That is essentially the Chinese argument and attitude. One can argue with its rights and wrongs. One can intervene with the fact that although America has often acted outside the very rules it has helped to establish it has generally done so with some degree of support from other, smaller countries. But the fact is that this is what China’s behaviour has amounted to over at least the past decade. And although China currently has little support from others for the way in which it acts right now, things might change over the next decade or two.

The sanctions slapped on Mike Pompeo and others seemed like a fairly small detail in a week that felt momentous for other reasons. My argument is that they too are momentous, not for themselves but for the wider strategic development that they represent. China is seeking equality.