Middle kingdom makes moves in middle Europe

Liberals across the world are wont to give China’s attempt to forge an alternative world order quite remarkable leeway, trusting that it cannot but be better than the current world sumo-champ state, the US, which has over the decades sold itself and its putative goodness down the river.

But is this borne out by China’s geoeconomic actions—which are inseparable from its geostrategy—or is this trust a matter of mostly subliminal faith? Can China bring a level of prosperity to the world that is not cheapened by self-doubt and servitude to Sinocentrism? Unlike the US, can China do this without buffing and propping autocrats? These questions and their various answers will inform political debate through the first half of the 21st century even as the US is forced to loosen its hold on the keys to the planet’s capitals.

To get some clue about China’s intent and execution, let me examine Xi Jinping’s newfound affection for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a man not of Xi’s mould. On May 14, Xi met with right-wing strongman Orbán to announce the formation of an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership”. The last Chinese premier to visit Hungary was Hu Jintao exactly 20 years ago, when the world was still substantially unipolar and China merely a growing  power, not the behemoth it is today.

Hungary’s ‘Eastern Opening’ strategy was announced in 2010, which, according to the Central European Institute of Asian Studies, “has since served as the referential point for emphasising cooperation with Eurasian countries outside the EU”. It is not the EU alone that China wants to rope into its sphere of influence; it is all of Europe and Eurasia. (It already has Russia eating out of its palm—with enough mastery that it has got Putin thinking of Russia as being North Asian, no longer a part of the hostile European realm.)

In his five-day Europe visit, Xi also met Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and signed a document to “build a new era of a community with a shared future”. China has bankrolled Serbia with billions of dollars in investment and loans, and the two countries signed a free-trade agreement last year; but this month it became the first European country to sign a comprehensive “shared future” bilateral document with China. Although Serbia has formally applied to join the 27-member EU, it seems okay with the fact that its agreements with China are substantially unaligned with the EU’s rules of membership.

China’s agenda in Hungary is its agenda in Europe and the rest of the world—influence. Following Xi’s tour, the US envoy to the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar, cautioned “all of our partners and all of our interlocutors to be very aware of China’s agenda in Europe”.

But it’s a meaningless warning. China and Hungary are accelerating key projects such as the Budapest-Belgrade railway, deadlined 2025 and costing $2.5 billion, 85 percent of it financed by Chinese loans, and “the whole spectrum” of the nuclear industry. This is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Hungary signed onto in 2015, the first European country to do so.

The Budapest-Belgrade will let China transport chemicals to Hungary, from where trade hubs will distribute it to European plants making batteries and industrial goods, especially in two of the most Sinophobic states in the EU—Germany’s coastal Northvolt factory and France’s giga-factories in the so-called ‘battery valley’.

To add to this economic insinuation, a gaggle of Hungary-based think tanks is pushing the idea of a ‘Eurasian Era’, outflanking and outdistancing the ‘Atlantic Era’ of US and Western European dominance. This might sound ambitious for now, but the idea gathered ground in 2012—a year before the BRI took off—with the establishment of the ‘16+1’, a forum for politico-economic coordination between Beijing and 16 Central and Eastern European nations and a test-bed for the BRI. The field of cooperation is future-proof: infrastructure, high tech and green technologies.

None of the major democracies in the EU is shaking China’s hand. But Eastern Europe’s illiberal, authoritarian states and statelets vigorously are. Chinese economism is the glue between these often mutually hostile states.

China is also following through with a Cold War strategy so beloved of the US and the erstwhile USSR—advancing soft power using print and television. Although both the US and Russia have pretty much stopped this with the emergent, aspirational, newly-politicised middle class in less developed nations, China has stepped into the breach in Europe. Earlier this month, the CEO of the Hungarian public broadcaster MTVA met with the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department and chairman of the Chinese state media company, and agreed to show Chinese documentaries on Hungarian television.

China’s massive clout is consolidating, US-style, around Xi’s willingness to chum around with what Freedom House calls “consolidated authoritarian regimes”—dictatorial leaders who have, just like Xi, “closed off the remaining space for dissent”. However, the road isn’t smooth for an amoral China, notwithstanding the historical reproachableness of the waning global regime. In ‘The Coming Entropy of Our World Order’ (Noema, May 7), Parag Khanna wrote “countries don’t want to unshackle themselves from the dollar only to become subservient to another self-interested superpower”. Maybe we liberals need to stop buying from the geopolitical souk.

(Views are personal)

(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)

Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist