The Myth of China's ‘Values-free’ Diplomacy: Afghanistan and Beyond

A myth has been propagated in the policy world and beyond that China operates internationally from a platform of "values-free" diplomacy. This view is supported by China's reliance on "The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” which it originally used as the basis for a joint agreement with India and later Burma in 1954. The Five Principles, which include "mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty," and, most importantly, "mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs," are typically seen as a strategic move on China’s part to deflect foreign intervention into the behavior of the Communist Party toward its own people.

With the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and the United States and its allies virtually out of the picture, the issue of what China’s relationship with the new leadership will be is key to the region, and beyond. Will China recognize the legitimacy of a Taliban-led government, using as its basis the “values-free” concept of “mutual non-interference” and mutual acknowledgement of one another’s sovereignty?

China's primary interests in Afghanistan are twofold. First, Beijing needs to quell any support that an Islamic fundamentalist government in Afghanistan might give to Muslim Uyghurs in China to intensify separatist activities against Beijing, keeping in mind that Uyghurs also live in Afghanistan.

Second, China will look to use Afghanistan as yet another base for investments advancing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi Jinping’s trillion-dollar network of infrastructure projects linking more than 100 nations across the Eurasian continent, Africa, and Latin America. Projects to date in Afghanistan have not gone well. However, if China decides to take a further chance in the country, the judgment-free tenets of the Five Principles pave the way for China to accept the Taliban on their own terms and move forward with further engagement.

But are the values of mutual tolerance and respect expressed by those Principles actually valid in Chinese diplomatic thought and practice anymore? As China has transformed, has the fundamental premise of the way it diplomatically deals with other nations evolved as well? Do current practices expose a departure from the principle of non-interference, which ostensibly underpins all of China's international relations?

Before we answer these questions, it is informative to look at the foundation upon which the Five Principles were built in the first place. Certainly, the Principles give China protection from intervention and interference from those nations who choose to agree to and accept them. But there are additional, perhaps even alternative, reasons that the Principles were adopted. None had anything to do with values, but had everything to do with inexperience, poverty, and reclaiming Tibet.

In the 1950s, the new Chinese Communist government had virtually no experience in international diplomacy. And the experience that China as a nation had had in connection with foreign nations over the 150 years prior to the Communist takeover in 1949 had been hugely negative: from the Opium Wars with the British, to unequal treaties favoring foreign interests in Chinese sovereign territory, to foreign navies patrolling Chinese waters. Small wonder, then, that China’s view of the rest of the world, particularly but not only the Western world, was dim at best.

Wading into unknown waters was therefore precarious. The Five Principles offered a message of security, stability, and sovereignty as a first step in building new diplomatic relationships with neighbors and the wider world alike, without the benefit of knowing much about those new partners in the first place. By agreeing to little except to leave one another alone, risk and misunderstandings were minimized from the beginning.

Second, in 1954, China was gripped by poverty, and that state would not begin to be truly ameliorated until the 1990s. Not only did the Principles of Coexistence offer non-interference to countries – many of which were at similar levels of economic distress – it also offered a way for China to safely build relationships with nations that could later become economic and potentially, political partners. To some degree, that has happened.

Third, it is essential to look at the specific countries involved in the origins of the Five Principles, and relate that to the politics of the time. As the Chinese Foreign Ministry relates it, “During the period of the British colonial rule, India was used as a base by the British to extend its influence into China’s Tibet… After China and India established diplomatic relations in 1950, India still hoped to maintain the privileges Britain once enjoyed in Tibet...The Chinese Government insisted that all the privileges inherited by India in Tibet should be revoked.”

In other words, the policy of Peaceful Coexistence, in its first-ever instance of use, was a tool designed to cement China’s exclusive control over Tibet, wresting from India any lingering rights that New Delhi believed it may have had. That very specific premise calls into question the universal applications of the Five Principles, especially as the international context has changed so dramatically in the interim.

Today, China is a vastly richer and more powerful nation than it was more than 60 years ago. It is also a country criticized internationally for adventurism and militarism in the South China Sea, and for its forced re-education of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The desire to avoid interference in China’s internal affairs remains strong.

On the other hand, China is also openly challenging and changing the landscape in countries in which it has financed BRI projects. Empirical evidence shows that in numerous instances of BRI collaboration around the world China has abandoned the values on which the Five Principles of Coexistence stand. BRI project interfere in the affairs of other nations by helping to institutionalize and internationalize corruption of public officials, adhering to opaque business practices, and providing insufficient or non-existent feasibility studies for the projects that China is financing and delivering. Two detailed case studies on Malaysia and on Kenya – and an excellent overview of the impact of BRI in general – can be found in “Below the Belt and Road,” a study done by Elaine K. Dezenski.

Indeed, where countries are corruptible, non-democratic, illiberal, and especially poor, China reinforces those tendencies and characteristics in order to cement deals favorable to itself. In countries that are underpinned by some degree of democratic values, China tries to avoid the discussion of values, as they are an impediment to its interests. The result is a de facto attempt to change the target country's values by minimizing and trivializing the importance of what still should be called universal human rights.

Today, the extent to which the Chinese government has depended on its Five Principles to navigate and negotiate its relations with the international community is inversely proportional to China’s growth, confidence, and projection of power throughout the world.

China’s remaining problem is that the values held by most Western and other democracies prevent them from being either quiet or quiescent in the face of corruption and human rights abuses. Democracies don't believe that the rights of human beings are determined or limited by the sovereign borders within which they live. Democracies (at least in theory) act on the principle that rights transcend political maps.

Therefore, at this point in the life of BRI, the world can push back against the idea that China's BRI diplomacy is a mutually-beneficial and benign care package, with “no strings attached,” as Beijing often boasts. Aside from the financial risks, the risk of promoting projects in countries that can ill afford to have more corruption and less transparency is indeed an imposition of destructive and interventionist values on the world.

Even China appears to have heard the message, as in 2019 it attempted to reboot BRI, as “open, green, and clean.” Afghanistan will be a good test case.