Diplomacy with salient features

Over the past 30 years, China has taken economic cooperation as a key part of its diplomacy, as conveyed by the famous slogan "diplomacy shall serve domestic development".

However, as the situations in Southeast Asia show, economic cooperation can meet a bottleneck without a solid political foundation and the wide support of local people. And China's worsening relations with Japan are testimony to the fact that economic interdependence does not necessarily result in political trust.

With 14 land neighbors and eight maritime neighbors, China has geographic surroundings that are perhaps the most complicated in the world. In order to maintain security the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence were formulated by former Chinese leaders.

The current leadership on its part has made innovative breakthroughs with concepts like the "community of shared destiny" with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiatives. These initiatives can improve the security situation in the neighborhood, but more needs to be done to propel real change.

To some extent, these challenges have external causes, for instance the US' "pivot to Asia" and the misunderstandings of China's neighbors, but much also needs to be improved in the nation's own diplomatic policies to deal with the external pressures and disperse mistrust from neighbors.

A series of moves, like forging "a new type of major-country relationship" with the United States and emphasizing a salient feature in diplomacy, have outlined the top leadership's sincerity for interaction and interconnectivity with others, that's a positive move that not only suits China's growing comprehensive capabilities, but also stresses the need to turn such capability into global influence.

In the current world with ripe international mechanisms, major countries generally realize their will through influences that are softer and more acceptable, instead of direct actions that involve confrontation. Influence is what China lacks in the global diplomacy and should be what it pursues in the coming years.

That requires China to not only act progressively, but also bear more global responsibility on the higher moral ground. Realism in international relations theory used to regard the moral high ground as childish, but in today's world, where information is widely transparent and communication convenient, it is indispensable for winning wide support from people both at home and abroad.

Successfully turning its comprehensive capability into equivalent global influence should be China's first step toward the diplomacy of a true major country. There is hope of China coping with the challenges and practicing diplomacy with Chinese features, which is also the prerequisite for its realization of the Chinese Dream.

The author is a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

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