Beijing’s Blind Spot: Hegemonic Empathy
One of the great challenges of becoming a great power is restraining the hubris that accompanies the momentum of rising to the international stage. I’ve written previously about how American hubris is the greatest threat to American victory in the Sino-American conflict. Given what we’ve seen from Beijing in the past month, even the past week, I’d like to talk about Beijing’s own blind spot: something that I’ll call hegemonic empathy. Hegemonic empathy is the great power’s ability to understand how one’s actions are perceived by other states and how one will respond to those perceptions. The state that can convince others that their interests are aligned is the state that can build a world welcome to its rise. Hegemonic empathy is a key element of soft power, showing other state’s that you understand their fears and interests and will act without harming them. Ruling through fear and intimidation alone will only get a rising hegemon so far, fear and intimidation will eventually lead to organized resistance. A rising hegemon that ignores the concerns of its neighbors is bound to create more problems than such belligerency solves. Demonstrating empathy is a trust-building exercise. Good diplomats should be the lead in this effort, but not when your diplomats are wolf-warriors. Beating dozens of Indian soldiers to death and tossing a battalion commander off a mountain in the Himalayas, launching a months-long cyber offensive against Australia, and repeatedly challenging the sovereignty of its other neighbors (all at the same time, might I add) makes it hard for Beijing to write these off as isolated incidents. To its neighbors and potential partners around the world, this looks if not a coordinated effort to spread its wings and breathe fire, then a rash of belligerency fueled by insecurity and carelessness. Coupled with its “mishandling” of COVID-19, its wolf warrior diplomacy that does not at all look like diplomacy, its debt trap investment tactics, and a plethora of other aggressive actions, the narrative becomes one of an Imperial China where respect only goes one way. A singular conflict with America is one thing, American politics are currently polarizing enough that China could play off DC’s chaos and bring others under its wings.
Instead, Beijing has consistently outbid the Trump administration for revisionist of the year.
If there was at one time a Long March strategy with a well-planned timeline and design, it has been thrown to the East Wind and replaced with reactionary and belligerent actions that suggest Beijing’s own accession clock has accelerated from decades to mere years. The economics of COVID-19 would certainly seem to be a factor here, as are Beijing’s perceptions of a world in disarray as a result of the pandemic. Whether it be paranoia, arrogance, or simply insecurity, Beijing has closed itself off to the voices of the world. Xi’s China has shown wanton disregard for any sort of tactful approach to the world in 2020. It is counting on disorganized resistance devoid of American leadership to make up for its own lack of allies in the Indo-Pacific.
In reference to the deadly Sino-Indian border clash, India’s policy of appeasement and Beijing’s paranoia about its weak underbelly both brought us to this moment. When dozens of Indian and Chinese soldiers died this past week in hand-to-hand fighting, China continued to step up its belligerent rhetoric. This rhetoric included some not-so-subtle nods to its nuclear strength that only painted itself as the runaway revisionist instead of the victim of Indian aggression that other mouthpieces tried to sell to the world. What this suggests is that Beijing does not have a handle on its own narrative. The radical hawks and wolf warriors who want to defiantly and drunkenly wave the PRC flag in the face of everyone are overtaking those who for decades relied on the approach of “bide your time”. In some cases they’re the same people, just as regular neocons in American politics became conspiracy-peddling radicals under the current administration. This is what concerns me the most: not that the hawks have overtaken the doves in Beijing, but that the most ideologically radical hawks have overtaken the wiser hawks that helped China rise in the first place. There are no doves left to appeal to, there are no dissenters waiting to seize power and influence from Xi’s cohort.
Now, one incident on the Sino-Indian border would not be enough to suggest that there is a change in Beijing’s calculus. Border flare ups happen all the time. However, in 2020 the border flare ups don’t stop. The wars of fishing boats in the South China Sea continue and rhetoric regarding Taiwan is at its worst since the last Taiwan Strait crisis. The buildup on China’s artificial islands has never slowed down as the PLA consolidates its positions along China’s maritime and land borders. We cannot ignore the complex cyber attacks being launched against Australia as Sino-Australian trade talks break down and Australia pushes back against Beijing’s belligerency. All of these events are happening at the same time and something is going to break. Perhaps that is Beijing’s intention, to find the weak spot to exploit and pick off its potential enemies one by one. Or perhaps there is no singular strategy and Xi simply refuses to give up ground anywhere, driven by paranoia and economic and political uncertainty. To try to attack everything all at once, to refuse to let any flashpoint go unexploited, deeply suggests the latter…and that Beijing feels it is hitting a point of no return if it wants to succeed on its Long March to global hegemony.
Where Beijing is bound to fail is not in its aggression against a single state but against all of them. It has not yet learned the value of friendship that is not bought and bullied. Beijing doubles down when the world pushes back, it refuses to acknowledge the concerns of other states and refuses to try to mend its image without crossing its fingers behind its back. The longer it goes uneducated, the longer it is bound to forge its own demise in the form of a Quad Defense pact or whatever defensive alliance is formed in the face of Beijing’s belligerency. Its inability to understand that the world will not simply bow down to Xi, that it needs to convince the world that it is worthy of hegemony and not simply entitled through artificial historical narrative, will be its downfall. Unfortunately, what I also fear is that this downfall will only happen after the deaths of many in a conflict driven by hubris and nationalism. An increasingly isolated and arrogant Beijing is something we as Americans should be capitalizing on, but before we can, we have to check our own hubris first. Xi is providing us all the evidence we need for a case against a world run by China, but before we can sell it, we must remove doubts about our own ability to empathize as a hegemon. Beijing may have a blind spot in its strategic goals, but that blind spot only matters if we can exploit it. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.
