Win-win is the Chinese way

During the past decade, Chinese leaders with Hu Jintao as the CPC general secretary have adhered to the Deng Xiaoping win-win doctrine through peaceful means. The next generation of leaders, too, will tread the same peaceful and prosperous path.

In the past decade, Chinese entities have challenged the dominance of powerful groups in the world markets. Gauging the complexity of the situation, Chinese leaders have taken important steps to strengthen domestic research and development and upgrade industry in order to ensure a steady rise in the quality of Chinese products.

Unable to compete with such offerings in price or quality terms, certain countries are mobilizing different channels to spread scare stories of "security threats" from China, thereby seeking to stop Chinese manufactures from accessing the world markets. What is worrying these business rivals is that the expanded diplomatic reach of China during the past decade and the immensely improved quality of its products are developments that will continue.

At present, the only sectors where the NATO bloc has an advantage are aircraft manufacturing and defense. Very skillfully, some Western media outlets created the "China threat" theory to boost Western weapon and defense equipment exports. The "Iran threat" perception floated by the West has helped the US to export more than $50 billion worth of weapons to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries in the past 18 months, and the "China threat" theory has boosted the sale of expensive weaponry to many Asian countries.

There are a few people in China who speak and write carelessly about a potential military conflict with India or Japan, but the reality is that China remains firmly anchored to the peaceful approach reiterated by the leadership. The current and the next generation leaders both know that a vast country like China needs to prove to its smaller neighbors that it believes in conciliatory policy.

Although some think tanks present scenarios of conflict, the reality is that Asian people understand that peace alone can ensure stability and progress. The only people who stand to gain from talk of war are weapon manufacturers - there is usually a weapons' sales angle to every wave of hawkish commentaries on Sino-Indian or Sino-Japanese relations.

Deng Xiaoping and his successors understood that for Asia's peace and prosperity, the wars and tensions that characterized and weakened Europe for centuries have to be avoided.

China has not fought a war in the past three decades, and it is not expected to do so into the next decades as well. China's leaders have been schooled in the Deng Xiaoping Theory of ensuring prosperity through peace.

Over the next decade, with the consolidation of the politics and policy of peace as practiced since the Deng era, China is expected to present the world with an example of peaceful rise that eschews use of force and focuses on win-win solutions. Such a policy has marked the past decades, and will be taken forward by the next generation of leaders as well.

The author is vice-chair of Manipal Advanced Research Group, and UNESCO peace chair and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University, India.

(China Daily 11/01/2012 page9)

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