Going global: Beijing’s bid to rewrite the rules of international security

15 August 2022

While the Biden administration has opted for a largely regional strategy to constrain China’s rise, Beijing is now pursuing a global approach to evade the Indo-Pacific pinch in which Washington has placed it. Since taking office eighteen months ago, US President Joseph Biden has inaugurated the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, announced the AUKUS security agreement, strengthened the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and is planning a semiconductor alliance with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

By rallying Indo-Pacific allies and partners to cooperate across economics, security, and technology, the administration believes it can restrain China’s great-power ambitions. Biden’s team is also working with its European allies on the China issue, but the lion’s share of the administration’s international efforts surrounding Beijing remains focused on the Indo-Pacific. China, on the other hand, is trying to advance its interests by looking outside its neighbourhood. For years, Beijing has pursued a robust diplomatic programme, creating several China-centric regional mechanisms, such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the China-CELAC Forum, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), among others. It is also expanding economic linkages and driving investment through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as well as the Global Development Initiative.

If Beijing succeeds in impelling Global Security Initiative partners to revise existing security norms and arrangements (certainly a big ‘if’), the United States and its allies could find themselves increasingly constrained.

Despite its many diplomatic programmes, China’s more muscular foreign policy has led several Indo-Pacific countries to boost their ties with the United States, largely stymying Beijing’s regional revisionist ambitions in the security sphere. Beijing has realised that its regional economic and diplomatic arsenal, as well as its military cooperation initiatives, are insufficient to deal with the increasingly constrictive Indo-Pacific security environment in which it finds itself. Recently, China has become more ambitious in its drive to revise the international security order by which it now feels more and more restricted.

This past April, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and in June, Beijing stumped to expand the BRICS grouping. While the GSI remains amorphous and the degree to which BRICS will grow is unclear, these announcements reveal Beijing’s concerns that its diplomatic, economic, and security initiatives in the Indo-Pacific are failing to insulate it from American pressure. In order to relieve the US squeeze, Beijing hopes that the GSI, as well as the BRICS expansion, will allow it to popularise Chinese international security norms and mobilise much of the developing world to amend the global security order in its favour. Already, however, China is finding out that expanding influence through economic and development initiatives is far easier than upending the global, or Indo-Pacific, security architecture.

Regional roadblocks and international opportunities

Since President Xi assumed office in 2013, he has overseen a vast expansion of trade and investment ties with most Indo-Pacific countries. BRI projects dot South and Southeast Asia, and China is now almost every Asian nation’s largest trading partner. Beijing has had difficulty, however, marshalling its overwhelming economic influence to attract partners in its bid to amend the US-directed regional security order, which most regional countries tacitly support, if not openly embrace. Countries that distrust China are willing to benefit from its trade and investment, but they are reticent to embed themselves within a Chinese security architecture.

Over the past decade, Beijing endeavoured to redraw Indo-Pacific security arrangements through various means, including more frequent military-to-military dialogues, training, drills, and, to a lesser degree, arms sales to regional countries. It has also begun to play a larger diplomatic role, including through the China-ASEAN Dialogue mechanism. The New Asian Security Concept, perhaps China’s best-known effort to amend regional security norms, was rolled out in 2014. Tellingly, the Concept calls for “inclusive security based on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “non-interference” in other nations’ affairs are precisely the same as those promulgated by the GSI. The New Asian Security Concept, however, never caught on.

These efforts notwithstanding, Beijing’s regional security activities have spooked its neighbours. China has militarised the South China Sea, regularly engages in coercive grey-zone maritime tactics, recently held live-fire drills around Taiwan, and engaged in violent clashes in the Himalayas. Many countries, such as India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, have bolstered security ties with Washington because of their growing distrust of Beijing. While several analysts have argued that Beijing’s announcement of the GSI is a bid to assume greater global leadership, it is also borne out of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) growing frustration with its backyard security stalemate: China has been unable to enlist other countries to expel the United States from East Asia or degrade its regional security activities.

Despite improving defence ties with Cambodia, as well as Thailand and Indonesia, Beijing has effectively been forced to look outside its neighbourhood for support in amending the international security order. Both the GSI and China’s desire to expand BRICS, as well as its (so far unsuccessful) drive to set up naval facilities in Equatorial Guinea and the United Arab Emirates illustrate this. Therefore, China is trying to marshall support for its vision for global security from countries further afield that do not feel threatened by its activities in East Asia.

Future challenges

China’s drive to relieve American regional pressure by internationalising its preferred security norms is ambitious. In recent years, it has begun playing a larger global security role through its contributions to UN peacekeeping operations, wider deployment of private security contractors and law enforcement services abroad, and the founding of a naval facility in Djibouti. That said, Beijing faces significant challenges in mobilising the GSI to rewrite the rules of global security.

First, while the United States and its allies are largely united by a shared ideology and concentrated in Western Europe and the Indo-Pacific, the adherents of China’s GSI are a mixture of authoritarian, democratic, and hybrid regimes sprinkled across Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. The lack of a common set of beliefs will likely hamstring the initiative’s efforts to galvanise collective activity. Though several commentators have argued that GSI countries will unite around antipathy toward Washington, some of the signatories, such as Uruguay and Indonesia, enjoy robust ties with the United States, further muddying the GSI’s ideological waters. Moreover, Beijing will have difficulty mediating future disputes among its GSI partners, much as it has had with India-Pakistan discord in the SCO.

Second, despite its rhetoric about taking up a position of global leadership, China often struggles to act decisively on the world stage. As Ian Johnson writes, China’s obsession with “a narrow set of issues”, including Taiwan and human rights, renders it “a character actor” on most international issues. A survey of several recent international challenges reveals China’s current leadership deficit in the face of pressing international issues. Though it boasts strong economic ties to Kazakhstan, China was caught flatfooted when protests rocked the Central Asian country. Moscow, rather than Beijing, swooped in to help President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev restore order, revealing once again Russia’s ability to act decisively in sensitive situations. In South Asia, China decided against providing meaningful material support to bail out Sri Lanka, leading to a resurgence of Indian and US influence in the island nation. Finally, Beijing’s inability or unwillingness to mediate the Ukraine-Russia conflict, despite admitting the conflict is not in any country’s interest, is further evidence of its international leadership deficit.

Handwringing about China’s apparent bid for global leadership notwithstanding, it is important to understand that Beijing is not looking to replace the United States as the leader of the international system. Instead, China, through the GSI, is trying to degrade the current security order by popularising its preferred rules of engagement. By promoting the ideals of the inviolability of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the embrace of non-interference in the affairs of other countries, China believes it can attract GSI countries to support its stance on Taiwan and censure the United States (as well as its allies and partners) for complaining about Chinese human rights abuses. In essence, the GSI is an international plan to help China protect its ‘internal’ security interests, as well as safeguard the security of the CCP.

At present, Beijing lacks a positive vision for a global security architecture, as the GSI is based primarily on opposition to the current arrangement. Though some view the GSI as China’s bid for global leadership, Beijing’s vision for the global security order is one without an international community. As the GSI grows, it will likely be a collection of nations that wish to be free of international scrutiny and interference, but whose members would struggle to act collectively. That does not mean, however, that the GSI should be entirely written off. If Beijing succeeds in impelling GSI partners to revise existing security norms and arrangements (certainly a big ‘if’), the United States and its allies could find themselves increasingly constrained.

It is somewhat ironic that China is trying to undermine the international security arrangements whose cover allowed it to blossom into the greatest development story of the past forty years. Meanwhile, Beijing hopes that it can guarantee its security globally before doing so regionally — something that few, if any, countries have succeeded in doing.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Sam Bresnick is a senior research analyst and assistant editor at Carnegie China, where he conducts research on US-China relations and Chinese foreign policy. His articles have appeared in Wired, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, ChinaFile, and The American Prospect. Image credit: U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Mikki L. Sprenkle via Wikimedia.