The relations with other Great Power is often presented as being at the ‘core’ of Chinese diplomacy and China has been quiet proactive in this field in the recent. In fact, Beijing has been busy establishing a wide range of different relationships with other states. The type of relationship is based on the partner’s levels of development and / or his alignment with China on major policy issues areas. In this article, we will first assert if China qualify as a great power. We will then assert the genesis of the G2 concept before finally defining what is really under the “Great power relations” concept.
Even before jumping into the presentation of the concept of ‘great power relationship’ as such, it’s crucial to assert whether China is presenting itself as a great power or still as a rising one. If we look at the Chinese scholars, while some consider that China has already achieved the status of the world’s ‘No. 2’ or even a superpower, the mainstream discourse still depicts China as both a Great Power and a rising one. This has established a sort of double identity, which is making it hard to pin down what exactly is at the heart of the concept of ‘Great Power relationship’ (be it a new one or not). Moreover this double identity result in a difficulty to predict China’s strategic intentions.
A second element making hard to pinpoint the concept of great power relationship is the definition of the actors that qualify for such relation. In fact, there are some discord on whom this status applied. Whether it only concerns the United States, or whether it applies to other countries as well. Nevertheless, this dissent point is far more limited in its expression as most Chinese scholars build their analysis solely around Sino-US relations.
This concept has emerged for the first time in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. However, it was met at the time with considerable suspicion and even occasional outright opposition by sceptical Chinese analysts and officials. It was argued that even though China had at the time the world’s second-largest economy; ‘large’ was not the same thing as ‘rich’, let alone powerful. While China has reached the place of the 2nd world economy, It was still a relatively poor country in per capita terms, China. There was still around 150 million people living in poverty. Therefore it was seen that China should be expected to behave on the global stage still accordingly as a developing and / or emerging power.
Aside from this contradictory position, the concept of such relation sat uneasily with Chinese analyses. The concept of a special alliance forged with the pre-existing super power was not in line with their hopes for a transformation of the nature of the global order. For the Chinese analyses three factors mean that the world has entered a new era: 1° the decline of US power, 2° rise even though not to be exaggerated, of new powers and 3° the spread of a type of globalisation that undermined the authority of states to control economic activity.
Therefore the G2 concept was first rejected by the then Premier Wen Jiabao :
Three years later, however, the understanding of China’s global power status and its relationship with the USA changed quite a bit. This shift is illustrated in the proposition of Xi Jinping to establish a ‘new type of Great Power relations’ between the two countries during his trip to Washington in 2012.
Under this concept, both sides should join their efforts to build up a cooperative partnership. The goal was to try to find a completely new way for the new type of great power relations, unprecedented in history and open up to the future. The underlying goal nevertheless was for China to establish a relationship that was to be constructed under a greater symmetrical position. It was conceptualised as a relation between two Great Powers rather than between one Great Power and a developing economy. This aspiration for a symmetrical relation illustrates the renunciation under the leadership of the previous strategy of ‘keeping a low profile’. Rather than that, the current Chinese leadership is proactively striving to establish, ‘a favourable international environment for China’s national rejuvenation’. This is based on three crucial Chinese consensus:
As a result of those three consensus there is now a greater appetite in China both to assert its interests and objectives, and to take action to redress perceived inequities and governance gaps by increasing its ‘institutional voice’. And thus even though China may have what Vice-Premier Wang Yang calls neither ‘the ability nor the intent to challenge the United States’ and overthrow the existing global order.
In a nutshell, this model of relation is the materialisation of a push toward a reform agenda by China rather than a desire to establish a Sinocentric order. This also comes in the context of the publicly advocated willingness to avoid the ‘Thucydides trap’. If we take into consideration the own words of Xi Jinping : ‘we all need to work together to avoid the so-called Thucydides trap—destructive tensions between emerging power and an established powers’.