China's major-country diplomacy progresses on all fronts
- By He Yafei
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E-mail China Today, March 23, 2016
Replete with its own unique features, China's major-country diplomacy has made comprehensive progress in recent years. Upholding a new model of international relations centered on win-win cooperation, China has actively built up a global partnership network. It has expanded its relations with other major countries, forged closer ties and deepened its collaboration with other developing countries, and become ever more involved in global governance even as it broadens its scope. It has also promoted reforms to governance mechanisms and systems by contributing China's views and plans thereto. Chinese-style major-country diplomacy has thus delivered remarkable results over past years.
Extended Global Partnership
China's foreign policy of establishing open and inclusive global partnerships based on win-win cooperation is welcomed by other countries. China's partners are now to be found everywhere in the world. An innovation of China's independent foreign policy of peace, the global partnership network transcends the simplistic "non-aligned" or the U.S.-led "military alliance" models of inter-country relations. With the core concepts of "respect for justice," "adherence to principles," and "striving for win-win results," this partnership embodies China's millennia-old philosophical ideals and core values. They include searching for common ground while reserving differences, harmony in diversity, and the vision of harmony and peaceful co-existence. It is therefore both viable and appealing.
China deplores the mindset and rules of the zero-sum game, and deprecates any exclusive alliance. Rather, it upholds an open and inclusive world order that supports diversity and reciprocal learning and an international relationship that allows for peaceful coexistence, equality and win-win cooperation. A manifestation of China's global partnership concept is its diplomacy toward its neighbors. It features amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness: thus far, China has established various forms of strategic partnership with 67 countries and five international organizations, signifying that its view of global partnership finds endorsement and support worldwide.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has elevated the ideal of global partnership to new levels with his proposal to jointly build a community of shared future with international society. The global partnership network China advocates is inherently different from the U.S.-led military alliance spawned in the Cold War period, which is closed, exclusive, and whose primary aim is confrontation, even military confrontation. The relationship between the U.S. and its allies rests not on an equal footing, but is rather U.S.-centric. Its allies depend on the U.S. to varying degrees for their security.
In contrast, the network of global partnership China anticipates, with or without the "strategic" prefix, is open and inclusive, and targets win-win cooperation. Not intended to counter a third country, it comports with the "Bandung spirit" and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and serves the goal of world peace and stability and common economic development.
The partnership China proposes is not discriminatory or divisive. It sets up no "us" and "them" camps, as it aims to achieve cosmopolitism and build a community of shared future, which both demands and facilitates collaboration.
This global partnership network is moreover not China-dominated. It is a set of multi-centric, multi-layered and multi-pivotal sub-networks of regional and international cooperation that are interconnected and interwoven. It covers interstate cooperation in the southern hemisphere, and that between the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as those defying such geographical pigeonholes. Given the rich diversity of the world and the disparity in the development levels and models of different nations, this global partnership network pioneers a new relationship paradigm in which countries learn from, unite and cooperate with one other in the Internet Plus era, yielding a "one plus one equals more than two" effect.
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