China’s Emerging Entanglements

I was reading an article today on China’s involvement in Afghanistan. It spoke of the economic commitment made in paying to open a profitable copper mine while bearing no security responsibilities in the country. This combined with some reading I have been doing on the history of US foreign relations has me thinking about some interesting parallels.

China has been making deals with regimes which are unsavory in the eyes of Western powers in order to receive resource concessions, which Beijing views as of paramount importance to its economic security. Britain and the United States both displayed similar drives for secure resources during their rise to global power. The difference this time, is that China does not seem willing to back up its stake with anything more than money. That’s great, but what happens when the unsavoury regime that China is currently backing is overthrown by a different one. Or what happens when the country ends up being destabilized by domestic violence. China can’t expect the international community to defend its resource interests wherever they lie. Will China be willing to commit troops to protect its assets? To build military bases and airfields in distant corners of the globe? Is it possible to manage this under the rubric of “peaceful rise”? What threat is there of these assets being nationalized if a more accountable government comes to power?

As with many things here, I think that China is treading a fine line, and perhaps sooner than many people expect, the government will have to make real decisions about their involvement in the world. Words and cash only go so far, especially in places where governments have very little to lose. Maybe China is willing to spend the money that will be necessary to prop up friendly regimes in most of the regions where it has resource interests, but that seems like an expensive proposition when there are so many pressing domestic demands.

I guess much like with industrial development, China is well within their right as a sovereign country to not learn from anyone else’s history and make all the same mistakes to the world’s detriment.