| Ambassador-turned-scholar speaks on China’s role in East Asia BY SALLY ACHARYA China’s rise as an economic powerhouse is making a marked impact on its neighbors, said Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, director of the China Initiative at the Brookings Institution. The China Initiative was established in 2004 by the prestigious independent think tank as a home for scholarship, programs, and public policy discussions on China. Bader, its first director, is a 27-year foreign service officer who has served in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Nations, and several African nations. He spoke last week at the School of International Service’s Washington Asia Forum, “China’s Role in East Asia: Now and the Future.” East Asia is a region heavily influenced by China, from Confucian philosophy to the alphabet to the presence of large Chinese ethnic minorities in places as far flung as Malaysia, Bader noted. Under Mao, Chinese foreign policy consisted largely of exporting revolution through financial, psychological, and military support to Communist insurgencies. That changed under Deng Xiao Ping, who led China from 1977 to 1997 and guided it to re-engage economically with the West. While Deng’s reputation in the West is sullied by the Tiananmen Square crackdown against democracy activists, East Asians don’t take a “missionary approach, [but] are willing to wait and let China change on its own,” Bader said. Countries such as Taiwan saw an economic opportunity when Western businesses shunned China and are now major investors. Even much manufacturing farmed out to Taiwan may end up being assembled in mainland China, he said. China’s transformation after Deng’s ascension to power has made it among the largest magnets for direct foreign investment in the world, alternating with the United States, Bader said. “When I lived in China in the early ’80s there were no privately owned automobiles. Zero.” Now, he said, it’s one of the top car markets in the world. Its Asian neighbors have experienced spectacular growth in their trade relations with China, with South Korea’s trade with China increasing five fold in the past decade and India’s increasing twelve times. East Asian countries all look to China as a major partner for exports, in many cases rivaling the US. China’s relationship with Japan, though, has deteriorated, Bader noted. Events such as the annual release of Japanese textbooks remind China of past tensions when, for instance, the Japanese invasion of China before World War II is described as “advances” and massacres are ignored, he said. More profoundly, he said, there is a national psychology that separates the two countries—one of whom is on the rise and feels on the rise, while the other is stagnant and feeling insecure in a Sino century. At the end of his talk, Bader was given a gift of an AU coffee mug. That, too, gave him an opportunity to reflect on China’s growing role in the world. “I get these sometimes when I give speeches,” he noted. “Invariably I find ‘Made in China’ on the bottom.” |
