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China at the UN
- This week marks the 40th anniversary of China’s admission into the United Nations as a permanent member of the Security Council.
- In the 1970s and 1980s, China used its return to the UN to feel its way around the world’s foremost multilateral forum, stayed out of controversies as much as possible, and focused on rebuilding its diplomatic and political relations after the damage done by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
- China was reluctant to use its veto power in the UNSC against Western interventions. It exercised the veto only in defence of its own sovereignty. On Western interventions, China chose the prudent path of expressing reservations but avoiding a confrontation.
- Over the last decade, China has tended to be a little more proactive, use its veto power to limit the scale and scope of Western initiatives it did not like
- Veto on Syria
Beijing justified its veto by citing the principle of non-intervention, the question of regional stability and the pattern of Western misuse of UNSC resolutions. - The Syrian case involves a more complex power play and the veto is likely to make the West and the regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran pay more attention to Chinese interests in the region.
- Beijing is unlikely to accept the Western demands to take more “responsibility” on international affairs.
- Pragmatism, rather than a grandiose vision, is the driving factor behind China’s strategy in the United Nations and other multilateral forums.
- While China remains somewhat cautious on the global front, it has taken a more active role in promoting regional multilateralism.
- It places a special emphasis on the “ASEAN Plus Three” that brings the ten-nation Southeast Asian forum together with China, Japan and South Korea.
- But when it comes to its own territorial sovereignty, China (much like India) is quite clear that it will not submit to multilateral mechanisms.
- On the question of the contested waters of the South China Sea, Beijing has agreed to negotiate a code of conduct with the ASEAN as a whole. Beijing, however, insists on resolving the territorial disputes within a bilateral framework with each specific party directly involved rather than collectively with the ASEAN.
India and 1911
- Barring a small celebration in Kolkata’s Chinese community, the centenary of China’s 1911 republican uprising, also called the Xinhai revolution, has gone without much notice in India.
- As China looms large in the world, the current politics of Chinese history should be of great interest to India.
- On October 10, 1911, also called “the double ten day”, a rebellion in the port city of Wuchang led to the ouster of the 267-year-old Qing dynasty and two millennia of continuous imperial rule in China. Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the Republic of China in January 1912. China’s struggle to overthrow imperial rule and embark on political and economic modernisation at the turn of the 20th century produced some of the first contacts between the Chinese and Indian national movements.
- Sun Yat-sen, one of the guiding spirits of the 1911 revolution, helped Indian nationalist leaders like M.N. Roy, Rashbehari Bose, and Lala Lajpat Rai to establish contacts in Japan, where he had considerable goodwill and influence, to mobilise support against British colonial rule in the subcontinent.
- unless China and India embrace each other and support each other, Asia will not become secure
- The Chinese communist leaders do acknowledge the significance of the republican revolution, but are careful not to overstate it.
- For the CCP, the Communist revolution of 1949 that followed the “bourgeois democratic” one in 1911 is far more important.
- The memory of the bloody civil war between nationalists and the communists in between the two great events is underlined by the continued existence of the Republic of China or Taiwan, where the nationalists led by the Kuomintang had fled in 1949.
- Speaking on the occasion, President Hu Jintao stressed the contemporary relevance of the main theme of 1911, the “revival and rejuvenation” of China. He also pointed to the unfinished task of uniting the Chinese nation by integrating Taiwan into the mainland.
- Beyond Beijing’s formalism on 1911, the CCP is quite circumspect in defining the current relevance of 1911, whose three principles were nationalism, people’s welfare, and democracy.
- The CCP rightly takes credit for having advanced the first two — for it has successfully created a rich and powerful nation. But the CCP would clearly want to avoid any emphasis on the question of democracy in China, a major legacy of 1911.
- In Taiwan, where the ruling Kuomintang party is celebrating the centenary with much vigour, President Ma Ying-jeou has called on China to embrace democracy. As a functioning democracy, Taiwan represents the ideals of the 1911 revolution
