BOOK REVIEW: Is China a Menacing Empire?
By Toh Han Shih. World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore. Hard cover, 476 pp. Also available on Kindle and soft cover
By: Debasish Roy Chowdhury
“Empire” is a contested term in the time in which we live. America’s hegemony and unipolarity once triggered debate over whether it should be termed an “empire.” The matter is far from settled because it’s difficult to characterize a modern global power as an empire in the way we generally understand the term, even though we accept it as shorthand for the asymmetrical geopolitical relationships that the US has come to enjoy. China’s rise has once again stirred intellectual arguments over the subject, with political thinkers beginning to wonder if China is a new empire.
Toh Han Shih’s new book is untroubled by the conceptual particularities of framing China as an empire. The previous book by the Hong Kong-based Singaporean risk analyst and regular contributor to Asia Sentinel, Is China an Empire?, has already explored that subject in detail; the sequel Is China a Menacing Empire? interrogates the second-order question of what kind of an empire China is.
Not a particularly nice kind, going by conventional wisdom. Sinophobia has been baked into western policymaking and normalized in mass media messaging, with China framed as presenting a systemic challenge to the rules-based liberal international order. The fear of China thus feels completely rational. Is it really? Is China a Menacing Empire? gathers up a sizable chunk of material on historical and contemporary geo-economics to address the question.
Among the most potent sources of the fear of China is the supposedly neocolonial relationship China is forging across the globe with its infrastructure projects and its trading patterns in a growing web of economic influence. Since 2014, Chinese outbound investments have surpassed investments coming in. Net overseas direct investment skyrocketed nearly 40 times between 2004 and 2016. This torrent of cash coming out of China has got a bad rap. It allegedly goes into funding bribe-filled projects at exorbitant costs, creating debt traps that are then used by Beijing as strategic levers over the recipient countries.
Sri Lanka was one of the earliest cases where this narrative took root, and it has only strengthened as China has expanded its global infrastructure development spree through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The gargantuan global program has surpassed $1 trillion in the decade it has been around, through 200 cooperation agreements inked with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations.
The collapse of the discredited Rajapaksa regime after Colombo defaulted on its debt for the first time in its history appeared to validate the warnings about the dangers of growing Chinese debt. Yet, the fact is, Sri Lanka finally defaulted on US dollar-denominated bonds, and China or Chinese banks were not involved in the default. The countries to which the Sri Lankan government was in arrears in servicing its foreign currency debt included the US, South Korea, Germany, and France, but not China. The foreign banks with which the government was in arrears in servicing its foreign currency debt were from several countries, such as Rabobank of the Netherlands and Credit Agricole of France, but no Chinese banks.
The Sri Lankan debt story has been repeated in various degrees from Malaysia and Zambia to Vanuatu and Kyrgyzstan. As Han Shi shows, China is only among the many creditors in all these cases, has not charged predatory rates to engineer defaults, and has not shown any particular tendency towards grabbing the defaulted assets, as would be expected of the new-age colonialist that China supposedly is. Debt renegotiations of Belt and Road Initiatives, as a Rhodium Group study shows, include repayment extensions, refinancing, and partial or total debt forgiveness, rather than outright asset seizure. For all the scare stories we have heard about Africa’s ruinous Chinese debt, the fact remains that African governments owe three times more debt to Western banks, asset managers, and oil traders than to China, and are charged twice the interest rate of Chinese lenders.
The dark geopolitical intrigues that are said to dictate Chinese loans are an exaggeration for most part, mischaracterizing commercial motives as sinister goals of state capture. This fear-mongering about China also infantilizes debt-recipient countries as devoid of any agency in the loans they obtain from China, when in reality, it’s they who pursue China for these projects to develop their economies. For a reason. As multiple case studies in the book show, access to Chinese credit opens up new avenues of growth and prosperity, and the terms offered by Chinese lenders are often the most attractive, making them the preferred development partners for recipient nations.
Many commonly held reasons for hating China are similarly misplaced. Resentments about job losses as a result of cheap Chinese imports has animated right-wing politics in the US, but study after study show that jobs lost due to trade with China are a minority of US job losses in past decades and occurred in a particular subset of US manufacturing firms. By comparison, significant sections of the economy and labor force have gained from Chinese imports and US service exports to China, not to mention wage increases for the majority of US workers and lower inflation as a result of China trade.
Such nuances are lost in the reflexive Sinophobic framing in global media. But the aspects of corruption and opacity, sometimes associated with Chinese businesses, that strengthen such framing are indeed a problem, even if they are an inevitable spillover from China’s domestic realities rather than deliberate, geopolitical tools. One of the strong points of the book is Han Shi’s diligent chronicling of Chinese businesses and their intersection with its politics. The detailed studies of high-profile corruption cases such as the chairman of China’s biggest state-owned manager of assets who had over 100 mistresses and was executed for seeking bribes. Or the powerful chairman of the China Development Bank who was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and sentenced to life for corruption.
When characters like these used to the impunity of unchecked power afforded by a one-party state at home intersect with rent-seeking elites abroad in countries with poor regulations and transact millions of dollars in highly graft-prone sectors like infrastructure and mining, risks of corruption rise manifold, casting Chinese-funded projects in an unfavorable light. Political opposition tapping on the popular anger at this loot – such as in Sri Lanka or Zambia – and class resentments against Chinese capital harden Sinophobic sentiments. No wonder then that in many countries, growing Chinese investments are correlated with worsening public attitudes towards China.
A relatively recent addition to the repertoire of China scare tools is its conflation with the global challenges to democracy. Joe Biden managed to supercharge America’s flagging leadership status by twinning the goal of rescuing democracy with that of containing China, as if the rise of autocrats in countries like India, Turkey, or Hungary were brought about by China rather than the democratic dysfunction in their respective countries.
As a demagogue now takes over from Biden, without much assistance from China, the world is on the edge in anticipation of a looming escalation of tensions between the two empires, old and new. Trump had threatened to wage a tariff war with China if he won, is suggesting military action to break supposed – and discredited -- Chinese control over the Panama Canal, and has raked up the old controversy linking Covid’s origin to China. It’s fitting that the book ends with an elaborate chapter on the prospects of war between China and the US. It’s inconclusive, as no one knows how this will play out. But one thing is already clear: for all the demonizing of China, it is the other empire that has the world freaked out right now.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a Hong Kong-based journalist and co-author of ‘To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism” (OUP/Pan Macmillan)