If this is an example of Chinese power, I'm unimpressed

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, December 10, 2010 - 4:26 PM Share

Sorry, students -- Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage took up my challenge earlier this week to explain "what were the key factors that determined a country's decision not to attend Lu's Nobel [Peace Prize] ceremony?"  Click here and then here -- there are cool graphs.  

[Then why not replicate them here?--ed.  Because more of my readers should be reading The Monkey Cage anyway.] 

What's interesting is that, in the end, a few countries that originally signaled their intention to abide by China's wishes reversed course in the end.  In particular, some of the anomalous countries -- Colombia and the Philippines, for example -- reversed course and sent representatives. 

In doing so, Voeten found a pretty straightforward correlation between domestic press freedoms and attendance.  That is to say, the countries that declined to send a representative were the countries that censored their domestic press the most.  Foreign policy alignment, as represented by UN votes, does not appear to play a role. 

Voeten cautions that this does not mean that China's political and implicit economic pressure played no role, however: 

All of this does not mean that international pressure is irrelevant to the story. China can probably credibly threaten small punishments to most countries for attending but not big ones. So, the cost of attending may be pretty similar across states. There is much greater variation in the domestic cost for giving in to Chinese pressure. So, press freedom does a pretty good job in accounting for the variation in who attends and who does not. Yet, without China's ability to credibly threaten repercussions, the whole thing would not have been an issue.

Voeten is correct that China's power was in some ways a necessary condition for them to even consider organizing a boycott.  Looking again at the list of attendees and non-attendees, however, I'd mildly disagree with Voeten on China's ability to pressure others.  Voeten assumes that Beijing's ability to apply "small punishments" was constant across countries.  Looking at the list of target countries, however, there were quite a few with significant export dependence on the Middle Kingdom.  China is either the largest or second-largest export market for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iran, Japan, and Kazakhstan.  One would expect both Thailand and the Philippines to also have a pretty strong desire not to ruffle China's feathers. 

In the end, however, the only countries that complied with China's request were the countries that already shared China's domestic policy preferences on this issue.  Strictly in terms of assessing Chinese power, it is to Beijing's credit that it was able to get these countries to comply.  The country's inability to use implicit and explicit threats to compel other countries well within its power orbit to change their minds, however, is... let's say interesting. 

EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, CHINA, DESPOTIC REGIMES, GREAT POWER POLITICS, SOFT POWER, STATECRAFT
 

HURRICANEWARNING

6:14 PM ET

December 10, 2010

jury's out on china. im not

jury's out on china. im not so sure they are as capable of being a true modern power as people think they are. If one thing is certain in history, its that what the majority thinks will happen, almost never happens. EVERYONE it seems thinks china is going to become this amazing power, and rival the U.S....it's a little early to buy into that IMO. Fundamentally, their closed off, ethnocentric culture does not mesh well with the rest of the world...furthermore, they have achieved their power using an American system, in a world kept in relative control through American naval power and American political/ economic influence. They are simply riding our coattails...and it is less than impressive in almost every way. It seems that with any Chinese gain, if you dig a little deeper, you find that their are gross inaccuracies, or lies in the book keeping or reporting. their power is truly just a shell so far...and if the world thinks that America is brash and unconcerned with their interests...wait till they get a load of China.

 

PUBLICUS

4:28 PM ET

December 15, 2010

The CCP's aircraft carrier killers

The PLA Grand Idea is to develop missiles that will sink aircraft carriers in motion. One needs to keep in mind that the carrier battle groups are equipped and armed with formidable defenses. For instance, aircraft carrier battle groups have the same defensive technology as does Air Force One, which long has had the active capability to penetrate simultaneously the guidance systems of hundreds of attacking missiles to reverse the course of the missiles, i.e, to turn them around to return the missiles to their point of launch origin. This is the case whether the missile is fired ground to air or air to air. Returning a ground to air missile obviously is easier, the air to air return to sender missile can trail the signature of its launch aircraft but can also travel in its exactly reversed course until it simply drops far away from its target and only in the course direction toward its launch craft. The PLA is on a fools mission, an extension of the fool's mission of the CCP Politboro itself.

Keep in mind the CCP Politboro are not Lao Tzu. They never heard of Lao Tzu. The CCP Politboro are arrogant peasant farmers who are in the big city raking in the big bucks and swinging from the chandeliers.

 

GRANT

1:23 PM ET

December 12, 2010

Another possibility that

Another possibility that springs to mind is that many states simply felt that China was being too unreasonable about the entire thing. Were it a U.N vote or WTO talks the outcome might have been different.

 

SCOOP

3:16 PM ET

December 15, 2010

Don't let China be a Middle Kingdom bully

By Richard Cohen, December 13, 2010; washingtonpost.com > Opinions

"One of the more frightening aspects of China's persecution of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, is that the government never even bothered to frame him. That's the standard method used by totalitarian regimes to justify the unjustifiable, but China feels no need to placate the West or even caricature its system of justice, so it swiftly put his wife under house arrest, vilified the Norwegian Nobel Committee and censored any criticism of its own actions - a display of ferocious petulance reminiscent of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany or, in fairy tales, the thwarted Rumpelstiltskin stomping his foot into the ground. China's stomping was sufficient to intimidate the 16 other countries that boycotted the Nobel awards ceremony last week, some of them because persecution of dissidents is a native craft (Venezuela, Russia, Cuba) and some merely because China is a valued trading partner (Sri Lanka)....China is recasting itself as a latter-day Middle Kingdom, not so much an epoch as a mind-set - the ethnocentric conviction that it occupies the middle of the earth and is surrounded by barbarians."

 

CYBERFOOL

4:30 PM ET

December 21, 2010

cyberfool

A better way to look at this is to look at how each boycotting country treats their own. Hard to imagine Russia supporting a Nobel Prize going to someone that demands basic civil rights. If they don't abide by the UNs Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then it would be surprising if the did send a representative. So if we go down that list I only see 2 democracies that may have succum to Bejing's pressures. They would be Philippines and Iraq. Due to the "late unpleasantness" Iraq needs all the help it can get from China, so they don't want to p-off them. So as I see it the Philippines as the only other country that China really swayed.

 

PUBLICUS

7:22 PM ET

December 22, 2010

By invitation only

The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony (for any of the Prizes) is of course by invitation only. This year, in respect to the Peace Prize to the imprisoned Dr Liu Xiaobo, only 66 countries were invited. Yes, as has been noted by CYBERFOOL, serial violators of human rights (save the CCP-PRC) are not invited. The CCP-PRC is invited to encourage the hope that someday China would become a responsible member of the international system (an increasingly vain hope indeed).

So as the CCP-PRC makes its ridiculous, silly and juvenile statement that the "majority of countries" of the world will not attend the Peace Prize Award Ceremony for Liu Xiaobo, we see how the dictators in Beijing speak stupidly to the world as if they were speaking to their own inner country peasants who are cynically excluded from the economic development occurring only in eastern seaboard China.

The fact remains that the CCP-PRC is the only country to have a Nobel Peace Prize recipient imprisoned. The point is not lost on the world at large: kow tow to Beijing and the CCP or you will suffer. All the while the great number of the younger generation in and of the CCP-PRC detest the CCP of Beijing. As always, Beijing needs to get its own house in order before it tries to dictate its dictator's terms to the world.

 

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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