China a "teenager" on the world stage? An analysis from Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy magazine is out with an essay called "The Right Way to Pressure Beijing" by William F. Schultz, who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

It's a sober analysis of China's current role in the world, and why the west needs to adopt new methods to deal with it:

The most successful human rights engagement with China--such as that of John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong who has intervened on behalf of hundreds of political prisoners--is characterized by what one might call respectful tenaciousness. Trying to crack Chinese Internet censorship or highlighting the cases of those mistreated for seeking to advance the rule of law or exercise free speech, for instance, is always appropriate. But so is applauding China's attempts to control corruption or experiment with local elections.

The essay also discards antiquated methods of containing countries the west doesn't like; methods usually championed by American trade isolationists and human rights advocates:

There are, after all, only a limited number of ways in which human rights groups or Western governments can influence China on civil and political rights. Formal diplomatic entreaties usually yield shallow results. Trying to isolate the world's most populous country is not an option. Economic sanctions that worked against apartheid South Africa and maintain at least nominal pressure on countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe would be fruitless against the world's second-largest economy. Military intervention to stop human rights violations is unthinkable.

One of my favorite passages concerns that most ubiquitous of sentences found in state-run media and Chinese government statements: "(insert name/country here) has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people." I'm sure, in Chinese, this doesn't have the same connotations as it does in the west. In English-speaking countries, that phrase usually draws more derision than concern:

When the U.S. Congress recently passed a resolution calling on Beijing to end its repression of dissent in Tibet and open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, a Chinese spokesperson declared that the resolution had "seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people." Nor was this the first time the Chinese had expressed emotional distress at some political gesture. Everyone from the Icelandic singer Björk, who shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at the end of a concert in Shanghai, to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who met with the Dalai Lama in Ottawa, has been accused of hurting the feelings of the Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese might be the only people who regard the rantings of CNN's Jack Cafferty, who referred to the Chinese government as "goons and thugs," as worth taking seriously. Nerves this sensitive bespeak either a severe case of adolescent angst or a revealing insight into national character, or both. It is hard to imagine Vladimir Putin or Robert Mugabe, or George W. Bush for that matter, confessing to having hurt feelings about anything, much less the kind of symbolic ephemera that seem to regularly rile the Chinese.

The whole article can be read here, and is a refreshing look at how western countries can deal with China in the future.