These days, people expect a lot from China. Beijing is expected to help Washington persuade (or force) North Korea and Iran to ditch their nuclear ambitions. It is expected to set the developing world's agenda on reducing carbon emissions. It is expected to keep buying US Treasuries, but not to create the requisite surpluses by selling Americans consumer goodies they can no longer afford. While it's at it, it is expected to bail out Greece. Oh, and it is expected to keep its own economy barrelling along at 10 per cent a year. In short, it is expected to save the world.
The problem is China just does not see things that way. As Chinese officials may make clear in Davos, where such expectations are riding high, Beijing is not ready, or willing, to take up the leadership role being foisted upon it. Typical of what one hears in Beijing is the comment from Zhou Hong, director of the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “There will for a long time be a big gap between outside expectations and China's ability,” she says. “China is big. But it is poor. Its preoccupation will still be internal.”
That difference in perception has become a source of tetchiness, if not outright friction. David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington university, says Barack Obama's administration put huge store in a joint document signed in November. That laid out the framework for a new era of shared responsibility in which the two will combine to tackle the world's biggest problems. But Prof Shambaugh, who detects a “hunkering down in Chinese diplomacy”, says the plan was stillborn. “They've become very truculent, sometimes strident, sometimes arrogant, always difficult,” he says of recent Chinese diplomacy.
Examples of China's truculence – as viewed from Washington – abound. Beijing played what many consider to have been a destructive role at the Copenhagen talks on climate change. It has shown no interest in supporting sanctions against Iran. Nor has it done as much as Washington would like to bring North Korea to heel. It has annoyed Japan by pressing ahead with exploitation of a disputed gas field in the East China Sea. Relations with India have also taken a turn for the worse over disputed territory. The list goes on.
Even the business community, which normally sticks up for Beijing, complains of a more hostile atmosphere. Google's threat to quit China has brought into the open previously muted complaints about non-tariff barriers and allegedly arbitrary regulation. Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian miner, is still smarting after last year's arrest of four of its employees, including Stern Hu, an Australian. “The world was collapsing and China did great. Who cares about foreigners?” is how one senior foreign business leader with 20 years of China experience characterises Beijing's new attitude.
Such talk of a hardening stance may be true on the margins. China could have concluded – and who can blame it? – that it has less to learn from the free-market model peddled at Davos than it once thought. It may also be more jumpy about internal stability because of recent outbreaks of violence in Tibet and Xinjiang and because it is beginning a tense period of transition to a new generation of political leaders in 2012.
Yet the basic problem is more fundamental. China has a different perception about how an emerging superpower should act. Beijing has no desire whatsoever to be the world's deputy sheriff.
