China’s new Foreign Relations Law
By Olivia Cheung | 05 July 2023
https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/china-institute/2023/07/05/chinas-new-foreign-relations-law/
China passed the country’s first ever Foreign
Relations Law on 28 June 2023. The purpose of the law is to regulate how
China—the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Government, the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA), Chinese companies, Chinese organisations, Chinese
citizens, and foreigners who live in China—interacts with the rest of the
world.
Analysts outside China are puzzled. They point out
that there is nothing truly new in the law, which does little more than
reiterate Xi Jinping’s foreign policy principles and initiatives.
But the lack of novelty of the law is only to be
expected.
Xi Jinping sees laws less as instruments to introduce
changes than to legitimise and consolidate changes that he has been pushing,
especially those that are controversial within the Party.
For example, the plethora of internal rules and
regulations of the Chinese Communist Party were revised to tighten political
discipline only after he first started the rectification-cum-anti-corruption
drive, in 2013, to redefine the chief criterion of discipline expected of party
members to be absolute loyalty to himself. This being a change that greatly
undermined over two decades of collective leadership under his predecessors,
Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Similarly, a slew of national security,
counterespionage, and data protection laws were passed after Xi has already, in
countless speeches and policy documents, set the tone that the government must
strengthen protection on state (implying regime) security, and embed security
considerations in all stages of policy making. This is so even if it may well
compromise on China’s economic development, which the Party pursued as its
number one priority since it opened up the country to the world in the early
1980s, after decades of Maoist isolation.
Once laws have been passed to codify the controversial
changes that Xi has been pushing, it sends a strong signal that they have now
become consensus in the political establishment. They are no longer Xi’s ideas,
but the Party’s collective decisions backed by the national will.
In view of Xi’s “change first, legislate second”
approach, one way to analyse the PRC Foreign Relations Law is to ask what were
the changes in/related to foreign relations that Xi tried to push at the
expense of vested interest?
Two things stand out. The first is bolstered party
authority in foreign policy making (Articles 5 and 9). The second concerns
Beijing’s approach towards western sanctions and criticisms (Article 33).
Article 9 of the Foreign Relations Law states that the
“decision-making”, “deliberation”, “coordination”, “top-level design”, and
“supervision of implementation” for foreign policy rest with the “central
leading organizations on foreign relations.” The word “central” implies party
organizations, not government organizations, which are referred to as
“national” organizations in the Chinese political lexicon.
A long-standing principle in China is that the Chinese
Communist Party has the final say on foreign policy. However, the reality was
that since the 1990s, the foreign-facing branches of the Chinese Government,
especially the foreign ministry, emerged as powerful foreign policy players in
their own right.
Chinese diplomats, who are staff of the foreign
ministry, have always been faithful to the Party but there was tension. The
most obvious one was that they saw themselves more as professional diplomats
than party apparatchiks. It was not a problem before Xi when Beijing pursued a
low-profile, conciliatory foreign policy to assuage the anxieties of other
countries about China’s rise, to create a maximally permissive external
environment to support China’s economic growth.
It became a problem under Xi, who made robust defence
of regime security the priority of Chinese foreign policy. He exhorts Chinese
diplomats to actively “struggle (or fight) against” any risks and challenges to
China’s rights and interests, especially the legitimacy of the Chinese
political system. This is an issue because the self-ingrained professional
identity of Chinese diplomats is averse to “struggle.”
There is no neat way to reconcile this tension than to
change the requirement for diplomats, such that being “red” becomes more
important than being “expert” – i.e., placing one’s loyalty to the Party above
professionalism. Article 9 of the Foreign Relations Law consolidates the
authority of the Party—the custodian of redness—over the foreign ministry—the
long-term torchbearer of foreign policy professionalism. This confirms that the
career prospects of Chinese diplomats lie in proving themselves as faithful
agents of the Party above all else.
The second thing that stands out in the Foreign
Relations Law is Article 33. It states that China has the “right” to carry out
“countermeasures” against actions that “violate international laws and
fundamental norms of international relations” or “undermine China’s
sovereignty, security, or development interests”.
Wang Yi, the second highest diplomat in China (after
Xi Jinping, the “Supreme Diplomat”), was implicitly referring to Article 33
when he suggested that the Foreign Relations Law can aid China in
its “external struggles” against “unilateralism, protectionism, hegemonism,
bullying and foreign interference, sanctions, and sabotage.”
These are terms used by Beijing to describe the “trade
war” initiated by Donald Trump against China, western restrictions on selling
advanced technologies to China, western sanctions of Chinese officials deemed
to have committed gross human rights violations, and criticisms of the Chinese
Government’s approach to the South China Sea, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and
human rights more generally.
Western countries see their sanctions or criticisms
against China as “countermeasures” to punish Beijing’s violations of
international agreements and norms. In contrast, Beijing interprets these as
unprovoked first strikes against China, which not only undermine China’s rights
and interests—and now, also Article 33 of the PRC Foreign Relations Law—but
international laws and norms too.
Time and again there are voices from within the
establishment in China calling for moderation in Beijing’s policy towards the
West, especially the US, given their critical importance to China’s security
and economy. Yet, Article 33 of the new law settles on Xi’s position: Beijing
will not budge. This implies that the rebuilding of trust with western
countries is not a priority for Chinese foreign policy.
没有评论:
发表评论