The geopolitics of China at the Beijing Winter Olympics
China used the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics to send a geopolitical message to India and beyond, but at what price?
The scar on Qi Fabao's forehead was barely noticeable in the Beijing sun as he began his run in the torch relay that kicked off the Winter Olympics last week. But the Chinese choice of Colonel Qi, a People's Liberation Army officer who was wounded in command of a regiment in a deadly confrontation on the border with India two years ago, ripped apart the atmosphere of peace and friendship that surrounds. games. The Financial Times writes.
Within a day, the Indian government announced that its diplomats would boycott the opening and closing ceremonies and accused Beijing of involving politics in the games it has often urged others not to politicize.
The incident has reignited the debate about why China often makes decisions that are reflected in its international relations and that its neighbors, partners and adversaries can only see as provocative or aggressive.
For years, China has intensified military and paramilitary pressure in disputes with neighbors, including Japan, Taiwan, rival suitors in the South China Sea and India. It faked attacks on US ships and unleashed punitive economic measures against countries like Canada and Australia, while its diplomats scolded, cursed and ridiculed those seen as disrespectful of Beijing.
"Many of their decisions and statements seem inherently counterproductive, as they would spur distrust of and opposition to China," said Helena Legarda, an analyst who focuses on Chinese foreign and security policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
The elevation of a certain figure to be seen as an affront in an event intended to show the nation's greatest pride highlights the breadth of the gap that has opened between China's values and those of many other nations since Beijing has hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 – an occasion many remember as a joyful celebration. Analysts believe that in the perception of China itself, having a model soldier among the 1,200 torchbearers was justified and necessary, and Qi was the obvious candidate.
"Beijing is getting stronger and does not need or want foreign countries to dictate its way of operating or its values," said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the think-tank of Washington. "Chinese Olympic planners likely knew that including Qi would upset India, but Beijing believes it is more than justified to honor those they consider war heroes for their sacrifices and to use the Olympics to communicate the types of leaders and citizens whom Beijing appreciates ".
"If Beijing had wanted to choose a soldier who actively and repeatedly defended Chinese territory, made significant sacrifices to do so and suffered severe injuries, it is likely that this soldier would have come from Chinese units operating on the China-India border," he added.
This is not a widely shared point of view. Many Chinese foreign policy scholars and diplomats, according to Chin-hao Huang, an assistant professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, focus on evaluating other countries.
"These people see Chinese power through the lens of how other countries perceive it, but they are definitely not in the driver's seat now," he said. "There are more assertive voices who want to interpret national power through the exercise of military power."
President Xi Jinping's nationalist rhetoric, which experts believe is behind the rise of this sectarianism, has begun to worry some well-known observers as well. Yan Xuetong, dean of the Beijing Tsinghua University Institute of International Relations and one of the deans of the discipline in China, noted in a speech last month that students were too confident in their country's ability to achieve their own goals of foreign policy and had a condescending view of other nations. They often thought China was the only virtuous nation, he added.
Foreign observers blame Xi's tightening of security. Under the concept of "global national security", the Chinese Communist Party has expanded the scope of its security focus from traditional areas such as the military and political sphere to a total of 15 categories, including "safety at sea" and " space security ".
"The 'securing' of everything reflects a party that is paranoid about risks and threats everywhere, but at the same time confident in its right and ability to suppress these risks," said Legarda. "Lower-level officials will try to meet these expectations, and this creates a willingness to bear costs – as with China's international reputation."
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/180353/ on Sat, 12 Feb 2022 06:14:38 +0000.