China Shows Off Its New Global Power

In Copenhagen, a new world order became apparent: China was the strongest player as America’s number one image faded. Barack Obama could not help but notice.

China is an ancient power and the Chinese are intimately familiar with the symbols of power, but this was an unusual show of force even for them. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao stayed in a hotel some distance from the conference center. President Barack Obama, who still likes being referred to as the most powerful man in the world, had to leave Copenhagen’s Bella Center where the conference was held in order to meet with Wen in an attempt to save the conference from collapse. According to reports from international negotiating circles, Wen even made Obama wait for half an hour on the occasion of his second visit, letting it be known that there were other negotiating partners with whom he had to meet.

Wen only appeared at the Bella Center once when he addressed the plenary session to present China’s views. Unlike Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Brazil’s President Jose Ignacio Lula da Silva, Wen did not take part in the deliberations of the Group of 25. Wen’s representative to those negotiations left on Friday around 4:00 PM and did not reappear until 8:30 PM, no explanations given.

“China appeared extremely self-confident,” Merkel said upon her departure for Berlin Friday night. But China had been self-confident for some time already. Chinese diplomats were always considered rather rude, but their often-abrasive manners had been limited to subjects like Tibet and the one-China issue.

As China’s economic power grew, the West increasingly called on China to take more global responsibility in other areas. During meetings with Wen and President Hu Jintao, Merkel pressured them to take an active role in world affairs beyond environmental issues.

China listened, but not as closely as the West imagined. For years, China has made allies of old contacts in 130-odd states of the G77, i.e., the developing nations.

China is Collecting Vassals

Many African nations are now dependent on Chinese development aid. European diplomats are convinced that Sudan’s stubborn intervention against Danish leadership of the climate conference was orchestrated by China. The Chinese are now doing exactly what the U.S.A. and Soviet Union did from the 1960s through the 1980s – surrounding themselves with vassals.

And China is no longer a developing country. While it will still take many years before China overtakes the United States as world’s largest economy, it is already the world’s largest CO2 polluter. Therefore, an environmental policy without China is unthinkable.

China has been on a par with Germany in the area of exports for years. The majority of less-developed nations have environmental concerns very different from China’s. Since Copenhagen, the bottom line is that China is not only a major power, but a superpower. The influence the rest of the world can exert on superpowers is limited, as the United States has been proving for years. And now, just at a time when the United States under Obama’s leadership appears ready to accept a multi-polar world, a new superpower shows up wanting to play by its own rules.