Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister of 32 years’ standing, has experienced the benevolent embrace of both the west and China. Since the “killing fields” pogroms of the Khmer Rouge ravaged his country in the 1970s, Phnom Penh has accepted tens of billions of US dollars from western donors and the Chinese state alike.
But there is no doubt over Mr Hun Sen’s preferred partner. China is officially hailed as the Southeast Asian nation’s “most trustworthy friend”, while the west is routinely chided for delivering haughty lectures on democracy and human rights to Cambodian officials while lavishing much of its aid on highly paid European and American consultants.
The main difference, says author Sebastian Strangio, is that China invests in big infrastructure projects whereas the west has focused on “soft development” issues such as enhancing good governance. “[The Chinese] build bridges and roads and there are no complicated conditions,” Mr Strangio quoted the Cambodian leader as saying in his book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia.
Cambodia is one of Asia’s smallest economies. Yet its experience suggests that as the US under President Donald Trump retreats from its globalist agenda, China may offer a potent alternative. Beijing has no intention of promoting liberal democracy, but it may still displace American influence through its ability to get things done, analysts said.
This week, Mr Trump showed that his anti-liberal tirades during last year’s election campaign were far from mere rhetoric. He cancelled US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact designed to shore up American economic influence in Asia. His officials also suggested placing a 20 per cent tax on imports from Mexico in order to raise funds to build a wall along the US-Mexican border. China has been threatened with punitive tariffs.
Hopes that China may step in to take up the cause of globalisation were aroused by President Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum in Davos this month. He exhorted countries not to pursue narrow interests, warning that ships should not scurry back to harbour at the first sign of a storm.
Yet his message was undercut by thumping contradictions: could the standard bearer for global liberalism really be an authoritarian Communist party boss who presides over a regime of media censorship, strict capital controls, a structural trade surplus and an economy that keeps key sectors closed to foreign investors?
Yongjin Zhang, professor of international politics at the University of Bristol, sees a chasm between the way China defines globalisation and the way the wishful high priesthood of global capitalism at Davos wanted to understand it.
“Chinese understanding of globalisation is very different from the prevailing liberal project that Trump is trying to dismantle,” Mr Zhang said. “China may attempt to defend that part of globalisation that China has benefited from, free trade for example. But it is not committed to globalisation as a liberal project for constructing the future world.”
Singapore’s former foreign minister, George Yeo, made a similar point. “The Chinese have no wish to play the US’s role in the world,” he said in a recent speech.
“Whether we’re talking about cyber space, cultural policy or capital markets,” Mr Yeo added, “China will never harmonise with the rest of the world.”
What, then, might an era of Chinese-style globalisation look like? This is where the example of Cambodia is instructive. China’s proposition is that it can change the developmental destiny of countries by financing and building the infrastructure that they need. This, Beijing hopes, will create markets for Chinese products.
Such is the thinking behind Mr Xi’s One Belt One Road initiative, under which some $900bn in infrastructure projects are either under way or planned in 65 countries in Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe.
Though the size of this ambition is unprecedented, China possesses unrivalled financial firepower. Its two largest policy banks, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, disburse more in loans each year than the world’s six largest multilateral lending institutions put together.
In some areas, China’s emerging supremacy is already evident. In the space of a decade, for instance, its port operators and shipping lines have transformed the country into a commercial maritime superpower with investments in nearly two-thirds of the top 50 container ports and a dominant share of cargo traffic.
But China’s investments and diplomatic alliances are overwhelmingly in the developing world. In this sense, its vision is not global but sub-global; it is aiming to influence those countries where it can make a difference, reap the rewards and remain insulated from western demands to liberalise its political system and inculcate democratic values.
Thus, said Mr Zhang, China’s vision is for globalisation without the liberalism. “It will pick and choose the bits and pieces of the liberal global order that work for it,” he said. The rest of it, it would be happy to see wither.
