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Elizabeth Economy is C. V. Starr senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and soon to be Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She has written numerous books including The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (2018), By All Means Necessary: How China’s Resource Quest is Changing the World (2014), which she co-authored with Michael Levi, and The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (2004). Economy is a leading expert on China’s foreign policy, including on environmental issues. In this interview, we asked her about how China’s role in the world has evolved in recent years, including the motivations behind its newfound assertiveness and the challenges that will pose for the global order. 

Q: How has China’s participation in global governance and international institutions changed in recent years?

A: Xi Jinping’s approach to China’s role on the world stage and his concept of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” both have as a central element reclaiming a degree of centrality for China. In practical terms, this has translated into reasserting mainland Chinese control over areas he considers to be Chinese sovereign territory, as well as realizing China’s security, economic and political ambitions through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the same time, China is reinforcing its interests, values and policy priorities at the level of global governance and international institutions. 

What is most interesting to me is how China manages to advance its norms and values through each of these efforts. For example, China’s efforts to develop support for its norms around human rights play out through capacity building in BRI countries, as well as negotiations within the United Nations. Its imposition of the National Security Law in Hong Kong will likely also reshape Hong Kong’s human rights situation in ways that align it more closely with that of the mainland. I don’t think it is a grand strategy. I’m sure much of it is done opportunistically. It is more of a multi-level game.

And what are the values that China is pushing through its participation in international institutions?

An obvious value that has been around for a long time, but has really intensified under Xi, is ensuring that the international community recognizes Chinese sovereignty claims as legitimate, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea. So, for example, in the UN, we saw with the Covid-19 pandemic that China refused to have Taiwan participate as an independent actor in the World Health Assembly, because it didn’t want to give Taiwan any international space distinct from that of the mainland. Or we saw that in the case of Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets General Manager who tweeted “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” China responded by cancelling all the licensing deals for the Houston Rockets and banning NBA games from being televised in China. What was so striking about the Chinese response to Morey’s tweet was not just the economic punishment — which was an order of magnitude greater than many things we’ve seen in the past — but that CCTV came out later and said, essentially, “Issues of sovereignty and social stability do not fall within the purview of free speech.” What that means is that the Chinese government believes that it has the right to control the speech of people who are citizens of other countries, who are actually not even within China’s borders, and who were operating on a platform [Twitter] that China has banned. It is fairly extraordinary. And we’ve seen China use its economic leverage in other instances, such as demanding hotel chains and the airlines not recognize Taiwan as a separate entity on their website or risk losing their right to operate in China. It is that kind of coercive behavior that China uses to enforce its normative preferences over international actors. 

Another value is clearly in the realm of human rights and internet governance. China doesn’t recognize rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and free media. Before Xi, China might have quietly tried to escape criticism for not adhering to these values. Now it asserts its own values, arguing that the state has the right to determine what rights people possess as opposed to people’s rights being inalienable. There are a number of new proposals coming out of the Chinese government, and their message is: “We’re no longer ashamed. We no longer feel as though the international community has any right to criticize the way that we choose to govern.” And beyond that, as Xi has said, “We believe that there is a China model that others can learn from.” That is a very significant shift from the China of before.

China also tends to use its leadership positions within the UN for its own political benefit. For example, the International Civil Aviation Organization [the UN’s aviation agency] has blocked Twitter followers from its feed if they support Taiwan’s independence or the right of Taiwan to participate in the organization independently. China has also advanced the BRI into scores of UN documents and programs. This may seem relatively benign, but if you look at what happened with the reauthorization bill for the UN mission to Afghanistan in 2019, a different picture emerges. When the United States and other countries refused to allow the BRI to be included in the bill, China threatened to veto the bill twice. In the end the reauthorization was approved without the BRI language, but I think that China’s behavior demonstrates the extent to which China is willing to sacrifice the broader good of the international community in service of its own narrow priorities. This is not a game of semantics. This is really important to them.

What do you think incentivizes this new assertiveness? Why not just make these changes quietly?

Actually, for the most part, China works quietly. Because the UN hasn’t traditionally been a focal point of major power activity, with the exception of the UN Security Council, the UN has been China’s playground. In the past, only groups such as Human Rights Watch or Human Rights in China might call China out and try to get the world to pay attention to how China was trying to transform norms and values through subtle shifts in language or procedural moves. They would point out that while the language that China was proposing might appear innocuous, it really wasn’t because it was eroding the fundamental values that underpin the international system. But these were calls in the dark; not many people were listening. But some people in the Trump administration took note, and here I think, you have to give some credit to this administration. They said, we see China trying to subvert norms of the international order in many different spaces, and the UN is one of them, and we need to stand up and push back. 

So in some respects, it is only because other governments have now acknowledged that China is undermining parts of the rules-based order that the profile of China’s behavior has been raised. China has been perhaps a little more persistent, but they have still been reasonably quiet. It is simply that the rest of the international community has taken note. 

But Xi, himself, is more bold in asserting Chinese interests in international institutions. He has said explicitly that China should lead in the reform of the global governance system. As early as 2014, he gave a speech to a number of leading scientific professionals and he said, in essence, “China should not only help to create the rules of the game, it should create the playgrounds on which the games are played.” When I read that statement, I thought to myself, this is something new. He is talking about some very fundamental reforms and a much more assertive Chinese foreign policy. Some China scholars agreed, and some didn’t. But to me, that was the first moment where I thought he signaled that China really wanted to play a much larger role on the global stage. And then at Davos, he said that China would be a champion of globalization and then he promised to protect the climate agreement, and on and on. China is not really a champion of globalization and it hasn’t protected the climate by exporting coal fired power plants and allowing its C0₂ emissions to increase each year for the past few years, but Xi is nonetheless quite bold when it comes to articulating China’s interests and ambitions.

Watch Xi Jinping’s full speech at the 2017 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos.

How significant has the change been in China’s contributions to international institutions in terms of their funding?

The funding of the UN is determined by several factors including the size of a country’s economy, its population and its debt burden. Then there is the additional voluntary support that countries or other actors can choose to provide. I don’t think China has been particularly generous in terms of its voluntary contributions, although it has made some significant-sounding pledges around the environment and, more recently, public health. Still, it is always important to look at what China actually delivers. In the Ebola crisis, for example, China’s contribution was generally seen as much less than what it could have been.

But the amount of money that China contributes to international organizations is, in some way, less important than the amount of energy it expends to support the organizations politically, even though it may be working primarily to advance its own interests. For example, when a Chinese official, Meng Hongwei, was the head of Interpol, from 2016 to 2018, China hosted the big Interpol annual conference. Xi Jinping headlined the conference, and China offered to train 5,000 police officers, and to provide the telecommunications infrastructure for Interpol. It had already managed to tie the BRI into Interpol. All of these efforts could be seen as relatively self-serving. For example, it is fair bet that Huawei technology would be used for the telecommunications infrastructure and that cooperation on policing might involve the deployment of Chinese safe-city surveillance technology. I think it is important to distinguish between what is clearly in China’s economic self-interest, and what could be seen as actually simply supportive of responding to a global challenge. Has China moved beyond narrow self-interest to respond to the broader needs of the world? Does it support telecommunications infrastructure in Interpol if it’s Ericsson and not Huawei? I think these are important questions to answer when we consider the larger implications of China’s role in global governance.

But do other countries support international initiatives that are not in their own interest? 

Of course one can always make the argument that in the end nothing is completely altruistic because undertaking good and generous acts also makes you feel good about yourself. However, I do think that when the United States sends the U.S. Navy to help with disaster relief throughout the rest of the world, it stems more from a desire to do the right thing and to help others than simply to reinforce relations with that country. I think that international initiatives that can track directly to economic self-interest belong in a different category.

One of the things that interests me now, for example, is China’s Health Silk Road, which is part of the BRI. Beijing has quietly been pushing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as part of its health diplomacy through the BRI. It has established TCM centers in more than twenty cities globally, and it pushed to get TCM included in the UN registry that classifies diseases and diagnoses. Doctors around the world use it, but according to some reports, TCM didn’t have to go through the same rigorous testing as western medicine did to be included in the compendium. To be fair, it wasn’t only China that pushed, Japan and South Korea did as well. The global market for TCM is worth tens of billions of dollars. China also has advanced TCM as a treatment for Covid-19. Interestingly, Xi Jinping, himself, is a huge supporter of TCM. He has called it a national treasure and thinks that it could be an important element of Chinese soft power. Looking ahead, I am interested to see whether all of Xi’s promises to fund Covid-19 responses globally and build public health capacity in Africa will come with TCM strings attached.

How else has China taken advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to take more of an active role on the global stage?

What was striking to me, over the course of the pandemic, was that China did not stop its pursuit of its other interests. Even as the pandemic was raging, within China and globally, you saw China sink a Vietnamese vessel and you have the passage of this new national security law in Hong Kong. So, what struck me, frankly, was that Xi never hit the pause button. He just kept pressing forward with all of his broader foreign policy ambitions. 

But in terms of how they’ve used the Covid-19 pandemic, mask diplomacy [China’s efforts to ship medical equipment such as masks to other countries] was an obvious effort to change the narrative away from the fact that the virus originated in China and that their management of the virus in the first few days and weeks allowed it to spread within China and beyond its borders. The mask diplomacy helped to shift that narrative and was a boon to China’s soft power. But then the coercive tactics, which were tied up with Beijing’s wolf warrior diplomacy, undermined much of the goodwill that the mask diplomacy should have generated. The media, of course, played this very much as a competition between the United States and China. The United States was in chaos, and clearly not able to respond domestically much less internationally. So in the context of a bilateral competition, it was China’s to lose. And while it didn’t lose to the United States, it didn’t win. The wolf warrior diplomacy and the demand for gratitude and the threats about being grateful really took the wind out of their sails. Both China and the United States capsized.

Which brings us back to something you mentioned earlier. Why is it important to make the distinction that Xi does not have a grand strategy in terms of global governance, but rather is working opportunistically?

It is important because many people ascribe a long term grand strategy to Chinese leaders. If we think there is a grand strategy out there with a defined end and that everything is already pre-ordained, that sends out a certain message to the rest of the world. But if we think that things aren’t cast into concrete, that means there is more of an opportunity for the international community to shape Chinese behavior. The BRI started off as one thing, which was trying to export over-capacity and link less developed parts of China to external markets and contribute to the global gap in infrastructure. But it has morphed into something much more significant. For example, now it includes cyber training for BRI countries. That wasn’t part of the initial conception of the BRI in the fall of 2013 when Xi first articulated it. I see Chinese behavior as more evolutionary.

How did the BRI evolve into something so different from its original intention?

There are many different parts of the Chinese government that feed into decision making. When you have a major program that’s announced, like the BRI, it sets many parts of the political and economic system into action. Actors at every level of the government became engaged, especially as they realize the potential of a new initiative like the BRI and see opportunities to use it to advance their own priorities. There are inputs from scholars, SOE heads, members of local governments, etc. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. There are also opportunities to incorporate programs and policies that might not have originally been part of the BRI into the initiative at a later date. This is what happened with the Health Silk Road. Now there is also a move to connect the Digital Silk Road and the Health Silk Road to realize opportunities around telemedicine or using technology to track people during pandemics. I don’t think Xi originally envisioned this type of expansion, but the BRI is his flagship foreign policy initiative, so the bigger the better.

What is the future of the BRI? Has the Covid-19 pandemic changed China’s overseas ambitions? 

I don’t think that the pandemic will lead Beijing to rethink the BRI in a fundamental way. If anything, the Chinese leadership will likely redouble its efforts to use the BRI to entrench its political, economic, and military interests globally. Nonetheless, it is also possible that in many countries, the BRI will assume a somewhat different character as a result of the economic constraints imposed by the pandemic. First, both China and the host countries may be more prudent in the projects they adopt. No country can afford the type of excess and waste that many of the early projects produced. Second, there will be a greater reliance on the Digital Silk Road and Health Silk Road. These are both areas in which private Chinese businesses, such as Alibaba, can play a significant and positive economic and soft power role. Finally, and this is more a hope than an expectation, at a time when China’s reputation has taken a significant hit as a result of its Covid-19 wolf warrior diplomacy, China might take a step back and actually recalibrate the BRI to ensure higher labor, environmental, and lending standards. There is a lot of talk about a green BRI, for example, but very little evidence of such a thing. China has had more than two decades of experience in large scale, overseas infrastructure projects and ample time to improve its practices. Perhaps this will be the moment it actually decides to practice what it preaches with regard to good governance standards.

How has the U.S.’s decision to take a less active role on the international stage under Trump impacted China’s actions?

President Trump really has no interest in the United States being a leader on the global stage. He has no interest in being the country that seeks to forge consensus and find common ground to address global challenges. He pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and he has threatened to pull out of the World Trade Organization. He routinely criticizes our alliances as burdensome and devalues them. All of these things have certainly afforded China the opportunity to step into the breach. I think many analysts have given credit to China on this score before it was due. The reality is that over the past three years, since the Trump administration has come into power, is that China has actually not been able to fill that global role. It has not been a climate leader. It has not forged new global agreements in areas like refugees or climate. There’s nothing new coming out of China. It was eager to claim the mantle, but I don’t think that it is capable of wearing it. 

In addition, if you look at the Trump administration response, while it is not interested in leading, it’s also not interested in having China lead. It has been very active in trying to prevent China from assuming the U.S.’s position on the global stage. Hence, we’ve assigned a senior State Department official to the UN whose primary job is ensuring that China doesn’t make many advances within the UN. We lobbied very hard — successfully in the end — to keep a Chinese nominee from becoming the next head of the World Intellectual Property Organization. There’s a very significant effort by the Trump administration to limit China’s advances and to constrain China. So, we may not be interested in leading, in terms of responding to global needs and demands, but we’re also not interested in having China play that role on the global stage, given that China is also bent on undermining much of what the rules-based order has been based on. That’s how I would see that dynamic playing out. Other countries, middle and smaller powers, have stepped up to the plate to lead. When the United States stopped funding family planning globally that included the right to abortion, a number of northern European countries stepped up to lead. Canada and Germany stepped up to lead on refugee issues. Other countries have stepped up to do the right thing. It really hasn’t been China.

How has China failed to lead on climate issues?

China’s C0₂ emissions have increased for the past few years. In 2015, people were predicting that China’s emissions had peaked and that they were going to begin to decline 15 years ahead of schedule. But instead, we’ve seen over the past few years that C0₂ emissions in China have continued to increase. Of course, that increase is permitted under the terms of China’s pledge in the Paris Climate Accord. But Beijing is certainly moving in the wrong direction. 

In addition, the fact that they’re exporting more than 100 coal fired power plants through the BRI speaks volumes about their commitment to addressing global climate change. China would have been responsible for Kenya’s very first coal fired power plant through the BRI, if the Kenyans, themselves, hadn’t protested. People have been touting China’s carbon market since probably 2013, but it has yet to come to fruition in a significant way. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which analysts and officials will assume that when China announces something, it’s going to happen. You really have to look much more carefully at what actually is transpiring to understand the gap between rhetoric and reality. If China truly wanted to lead on climate change, it could step up and say, “We have a first round agreement on C0₂; let’s work with Europeans, India, Russia and other major emitters to figure out what a round two agreement would look like” and bring some pressure to bear on the United States. Or China could say, “Maybe we should be considering new agreements around other greenhouse gases like methane.” But none of that has happened. That, to me, is what constitutes leadership, not signing a pledge in 2015 with President Obama and then, when the U.S. does the wrong thing and announces that it is going to pull out, you do the wrong thing too and let things slide. That’s not global leadership.

Do you think China’s inability to follow through on climate goals is partly because of economic concerns? 

The fact that the Chinese economy has been slowing is certainly a factor. The minister of ecology and the environment said a year and a half ago that China was going to have to take a step back from some of its more ambitious environmental targets because of the slowing economy. We’ve seen another announcement that the environment is going to have to take second place to economic growth as a result of the pandemic. So, there is no doubt that the pressure from a slowing economy is influencing China’s environmental behavior.

But I also think that once the pressure from the United States was off, China relaxed. And again, the fact that China is pushing coal fired power plants through the BRI tells you much more about its real commitment to global climate change. That’s one of the absolute clearest demonstrations of the reality of China’s commitment to addressing climate change — its economic interest is trumping the environment. All their steps domestically to close down coal fired power plants and to put a stop on most new coal plant construction at least for a period of time benefits the Chinese people directly. That deals with domestic air pollution issues. But the export of the coal fired power plants, that deals with global climate change. This goes back to my earlier point about whether China, as a global leader, is willing to sacrifice its own economic interests for the broader global good.

What parts of the world can China exert the strongest influence over?

China’s greatest source of leverage comes from its trade and investment. So, where countries are most interested or most needy when it comes to investment, the potential for influence is certainly greatest. There are also authoritarian states or authoritarian-leaning states that see an advantage to partnering with China because Beijing doesn’t observe best governance practices around transparency, labor and the environment. So it’s easier for deals to get done behind closed doors. But the biggest leverage China has is the lure of its market. Even powerful economies like Germany struggle with issues around Chinese human rights in Xinjiang, for example. What’s the proper balance to strike between standing up to China and ensuring that economic ties are not damaged? Every country, to some extent, makes that calculation. It just depends on the leadership of the country and the pressures that the leaders face from various domestic groups. Increasingly, you see in Europe and maybe even Southeast Asia, for example, that leaders no longer are willing to permit the economic element of the relationship to trump every other consideration, including human rights or security. There’s a growing sense globally that the way that China plays the game is both unattractive, and also ultimately, very detrimental to other countries’ values and security. 

Companies have different levels of exposure to China and companies have different abilities to shift supply chains quickly. But everybody would like to have access to the China market. The question is what is the price that you’re willing to pay? The price that China extorts just gets higher and higher. Look at the application of the social credit system to multinationals. We don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, but there are dozens of ministries that are involved in determining the different metrics by which multinationals are going to be evaluated for their social credit score. Some of the things are going to be simple, like: Are you adhering to China’s environmental laws? But others engage more value laden decisions such as are you featuring Taiwan on your packaging material? Or even: Are you buying Chinese goods in your supply chain? I think that the political price will just get higher over time. It is not going to be easy for companies.

A lot of people talk about how China does not have enough soft power globally, and that it has too much hard power. Do you agree with that argument?

China is sadly lacking in soft power. I’ve always thought of soft power as something that emanates from the values and the culture of a society and how those are expressed. It’s not something that can be mandated by a government. I think this is very challenging for China. TikTok is a good example of [the limits of] Chinese soft power. It is creative and incredibly popular globally. But to the extent that China attempts to control it or to use it to access information about uses, TikTok will lose and China will not gain any soft power. I think the challenge with Xi Jinping is that it’s very difficult for him to take his fingers off the levers of control. Everything he does is to enhance the CCP’s control and influence within the Chinese economy, society, and culture. If that is your orientation, it will be very difficult to have soft power, because soft power is organic. China’s mask diplomacy could have been a big win for China and a good example of soft power, particularly since Chinese companies, like Alibaba, were contributing PPE as well. Instead, China demanded thanks and threatened to withhold PPE from countries that challenged its narrative. So, then mask diplomacy turned into a loss on China’s soft power ledger. China created its own problem on that front. 

What are the major misconceptions that people have about China’s role in global governance?

There are two misconceptions. First, that all of China’s economic influence necessarily translates into permanent political influence in other countries. There is a belief that simply because a country is in debt to China it means that the country is going to politically align itself with China. Or because China has control over a set of ports, that those countries are not going to be able to deviate from advancing Chinese interests in different areas. So, one misconception is that every Chinese economic gain necessarily translates into a level of political influence. I think the opposite can be true.

More research needs to be done on whether BRI-related debt leads countries to support China politically in ways they otherwise would not. Some countries likely pick and choose their battles. For example, as countries have lined up to support or criticize Beijing’s imposition of the new National Security Law in Hong Kong, Greece has remained quiet. At the same time, Greece’s largest mobile communications service provider just announced a few months ago that it would work with Ericsson to create Greece’s first 5G network, despite the fact that Greece had earlier supported pilot projects with Huawei. Also few things are forever in international politics. We have seen in a number of countries, such as Malaysia and Sri Lanka, that when new leaders are elected they are unhappy with the terms of the BRI deals that were struck by their predecessors and attempt to unwind them. 

The second misconception or debate within the China analytical community is that we don’t need to worry so much about China, because all of its actions are simply defensive. These people argue that China actually has no interest in exporting its values or shaping international institutions and regimes in a proactive way. It’s not looking to undermine the international order, they say; it’s just looking to make that order safe for China and safe for autocracy. To my mind, this is perhaps the most insidious argument, because it attempts to distinguish between a defensive strategy and an offensive strategy. It really is not a defensive strategy — it’s a defensive strategy that’s basically saying the best defense is a good offense. Is the argument then that if norms around human rights or internet governance are transformed within the UN or elsewhere and countries begin to adopt Chinese views, it doesn’t matter because it’s just defensive? To me, the fact that Xi says China should lead in the reform of global governance speaks directly to the idea that there is an ambition to transform these institutions in a way that is fundamental. So it doesn’t matter if you call it defensive, the impact of it is no less significant. Saying that it’s just defensive diminishes China’s ambition and in some ways protects it from international censure. I think this is a significant misconception around China’s role in global governance.

Why do you think people are eager to label China’s actions on the international stage as defensive?

Because I think that, with the Trump administration in particular, there is a concern that the United States has gone too far toward a containment narrative and that the relationship is in a freefall. There is no floor. I think that many scholars are concerned, and rightly concerned, that we could end up in some form of a Cold War. But to my mind, being analytically dishonest or trying to shape the narrative a certain way, even if your ultimate objective is a good one, isn’t going to lead you to the right set of policy prescriptions. So it is much better to be analytically honest about what’s taking place in the fullest sense, and then work to try to ensure that you have policy recommendations that address these concerns about what China is doing in the narrowest and smartest way. So, using a scalpel instead of a sledge hammer — I always subscribe to that, but I don’t subscribe to trying to diminish either China’s ambition or its impact in the pursuit of trying to prevent the U.S. or other countries from overreaching or making bad policy.

Do you think Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong, with the National Security Law, are making people question the assumption of China as a defensive power?

For me, analyzing China is akin to doing a very large jigsaw puzzle that I will never finish. I am constantly alert to new pieces of information that cause me to develop new ways of thinking about the country and then to develop a new picture of what is going on. It is entirely possible that for some China scholars, the events in Hong Kong are new pieces for their jigsaw puzzles that will cause them to understand China differently. 

I think it is more likely, however, that people committed to the idea that China acts overwhelmingly to defend its interests will understand the Hong Kong situation as a perfectly rational and reasonable effort by Beijing to ensure its stability and sovereignty. Of course, Beijing’s definition of what constitutes a threat to its stability and sovereignty is always evolving and expanding. There is almost nothing that it might do that cannot be justified by the “fear of instability” argument. 

In terms of Chinese influence in international institutions, are there any issues that you are following that others may be missing? 

One of the most interesting aspects of Beijing’s behavior with regard to global governance and international institutions — beyond the sheer amount of human and financial capital that it throws at these issues — is its incredible persistence. I am always fascinated to see how Beijing approaches a challenge from one direction and, if it doesn’t succeed, will come at it again and again from multiple directions. It never gives up. It is like watching a horror film, in which the protagonist believes she has killed the monster, but it just keeps reappearing. 

In the recent past, China has lost a battle to have the BRI incorporated into a UN program as well as the election for head of the World Intellectual Property Organization. I am interested in whether it will push for the BRI to be included in that UN program next time around and whether it will continue to put its candidates forward for leadership positions in such an aggressive manner. In terms of a specific issue area to watch, one of the most critical emerging arenas in which we see China assuming a leading role is in the sphere of information and communications technology standards. 

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