Is China an enigma? If it is difficult to decipher the country on some fronts, there are other elements which are more accessible. While it might be easy to look at its impressive growth in recent decades as diverging from other global players in key areas, there are other areas which are mutually convergent. From the multidimensional panorama of a complex world -- the "multiplex" world, a preferred approach is not to generalise too much but to analyse the specifics of our times for possible confluence.
China's current policy and related vision towards the world community can be seen from the communique issued by the national authorities at its Third Plenum gathering in July 2024. It harks back to the earlier Five-Sphere Integrated Plan and Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy which project socialism with Chinese characteristics in the economic, political, civil, social and cultural development, based on harmony between societies.
In the background for over a decade, its Belt and Road Initiative has been a key player linking up with some 150 countries worldwide through massive infrastructure projects, such as construction of railways, and extractive industries, such as mining in various parts of the world, with Chinese finance and loans undergirding this strategic outreach.
Recently, due to critiques about environmental impacts and debt traps which await various countries borrowing too easily from their counterpart, there is now more consciousness of the need for environmental impact assessment and more rigid financial planning to address the debt issue.
For instance, China has now issued green finance guidelines for a more accountable process based on ESG (environmental, social, governance), as well as the opening for grievance mechanisms to accept complaints from affected communities in regard to ecological harm. There have been tens of thousands of cases in the country where communities have lodged complaints against the authorities for environmental damage, such as a key case in Gansu province where a conservation organisation took the local state enterprise to court for failing to use renewable energy -- and won.
More recently, three initiatives emerged to complement that vision: the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and, most recently, the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI).
The GDI promotes shared values premised on people, with a stronger commitment to address climate change, green development, the digital economy, and connectivity. The GSI calls for sustained security based on respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, with peaceful dispute settlement through dialogue. It tackles both traditional security (such as armed conflicts) and non-traditional security (such as the drug issue and cybercrime).
Perhaps the most intriguing initiative is the GCI, which counters the perspective of the "clash of civilisations" by projecting inclusiveness among civilisations, unity in diversity, and people-to-people exchanges. It is linked with another phrase that appears in the political discourse: "the community of common destiny", anchored on respect for the diversity of civilisations, dialogue, common values, and innovation.
In a way, it envisions human rights interaction based on cooperation rather than fragmentation. Of course, all this has to be tested in reality in a multilateral setting to assess the country's substantive respect for human rights, democracy, peace and sustainable development. There is a persistent need to ensure compliance with civil and political rights in concert with economic, social and cultural rights, as well as to broaden the spaces for a variety of stakeholders, including minorities and those who have viewpoints differing from the majority or the administration.
On the development of trade and commerce, while it is easy to focus on trade-related conflicts based on inter-state competition and rivalry as China began to grow as a magnum force in these relations, partly as a result of its membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the country has been supportive of key developments in building a rules-based trading system.
In 2022, it supported the finalisation of the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies. Basically, this multilateral agreement seeks to regulate harmful fisheries and the subsidies behind them, especially where they are detrimental to the environment and are exploitative of the system; this is best exemplified by action needed against illegal, unreported and unlicensed fishing. It targets action against overfished stocks and has a notification system aiming for transparency, as well as a dispute settlement mechanism.
This year's more recent WTO-related Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement is a plurilateral agreement with some but not all members of the WTO joining, and China has been supportive of the development. It aims to reduce paperwork to facilitate investment, thus minimising transaction costs, and promotes cross-border cooperation, even though it does not deal with market access. Its facilitative approach does not delve into the sensitive area of investor-state dispute settlement (between states and foreign investors), and this has to be dealt with by other channels. Yet, the agreement enables countries to act in concert to simplify some of the barriers facing the globalisation of investment and opens the door for more assistance to developing countries.
The country has also been supportive of the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism as a whole, even though the appellate process of the latter has been blocked by divergences between international stakeholders. While the country has tried to maximise its access to outside markets as it moves rapidly to a green economy, with an impressive surge of electric vehicles for exports, some importing countries claiming oversupply are imposing tariffs to counter the influx. In that relationship, China still uses the WTO as a means of dispute resolution. Most recently, in the middle of 2024, there was a complaint against the European Union regarding the latter's action against subsidies concerning imported cars. A pervasive issue is thus transparency and fair play, closely linked with the role of state enterprises and related subsidies.
In sum, while there are difficulties along the development path, areas of confluence are welcome, particularly with the greater call for a green transition and the economy through peaceful processes with intergenerational implications.