China seeks peaceful rise: MM Lee
Beijing complying with trading norms, focused on catching up with rest of worldBy Goh Sui Noi, Senior Correspondent
CHINA is learning how to operate within the international system because it sees that as the best way forward, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said yesterday.
Beijing has accepted and is plugged into the world trading system, working within the rules of the game, and buying and selling on the open market, he added.
Noting that the Chinese were determined to play catch-up with the rest of the world, he said: ‘Their definition of their rise is a peaceful rise.’
Mr Lee was answering a question on whether China would be content to comply with regional and international norms as it rose in power or seek to create a new status quo.
In a speech earlier, he said China recognised that, historically, the emergence of a new big power had caused displacement of existing international systems, leading to wars. The rise and fall of Germany and Japan in the 20th century were examples the Chinese cited.
‘They are determined not to travel this route,’ he said in his speech at the East Asian Institute (EAI) 10th anniversary lectures on the economic and social challenges to China’s growth.
The Chinese saw the success of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, which had access to the world - to technology, knowledge and markets. They saw that they needed the same access and therefore joined the World Trade Organisation.
And despite provocation from the Japanese over the Yasukuni Shrine, they pushed for a win-win relationship with their technologically superior and more advanced neighbour, Mr Lee noted.
Sino-Japanese ties deteriorated from 2001 as a result of then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the shrine, which commemorates, among the Japanese war dead, 14 war criminals involved in the invasion of China during World War II.
But the relationship warmed after Mr Shinzo Abe became prime minister last year.
Pointing to forecasts that China’s gross domestic product would be as large as Japan’s by 2030, Mr Lee said: ‘By the time they get there, we hope (they) will have a different generation in charge at all levels.’
This new generation would be different from the current leaders in that they would have studied or travelled abroad, and would have English as their first foreign language.
Mr Lee believed that this generation would ‘want to be admired and not just feared by the world’.
‘They will want to improve the nature of their society and make it as attractive and admirable as any Western society or Japanese society,’ he said.
He added that the world should encourage China to move in this direction.
In his speech, he also noted that China had since 1997 made a policy change from dealing with Asean countries bilaterally to engaging the region multilaterally through mechanisms such as the Asean Regional Forum.
‘China leaders may also have realised that multi-lateralism could increase credibility in China’s rise being peaceful and not a threat to the world,’ he suggested.
‘Asean is an opportunity for China to demonstrate that its rise is indeed peaceful and benign,’ he added.
Mr Lee was peppered with questions from Chinese participants, including one on how to tackle corruption.
He replied that this was a phase China had to go through in its transition from a planned to a free market economy.
However, he believed that the Chinese leaders could put it down because ‘at the core, they are not on the take’, so they could go down the line and clean up the government.
He stressed the importance of having a clean centre, noting that this was the case with Singapore, which, through its policy of benchmarking salaries of top government officials to those of the private sector, was able to keep a relatively corruption- free administration.
Asked for his view of the Chinese people’s demand for greater political rights, he said his observation was that young people in China wanted to succeed in life. To do so, China needed to grow and needed stability and policies that encourage growth.
Politics like those in Taiwan and South Korea were not conducive to growth, he noted.
Mr Lee yesterday noted that the EAI was the only research institute in South-east Asia studying contemporary China and lauded it for building a reputation through balancing policy-related research with academic study.
Source: The Straits Times, 20 June 2007
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