Playing it cool at G-8

Like India, this is the third time that China has been invited to interact with the G-8 leaders. But unlike India, China is part of the P-5, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gives Beijing enough and more leverage on global issues. “Obviously, no room for manoeuvre is reserved for China inside the G8, the club of the rich,” the People’s Daily went on.

Beijing is aware of the widespread calls to make G-8 relevant by including China. China, however, sees major hurdles—especially the potential criterion of being a democracy. As the paper said, “there exist some physical obstacles to China joining the group. The G-8 sets certain political and economic criteria, which are hard for China to meet at present.”

But China is in no rush to join the G-8. It is aware of the huge internal squabbling that is going on within the G-8 on a number of issues. The People’s Daily also summed up the weaknesses of the various western leaders. It underlined Bush’s unpopularity at home, highlighted that the European leaders are “licking their wounds” after the rejection of the European Constitution in key countries like France, and that the G-8 summit might be the Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi’s “swan song” on the global stage.

Bonhomie with Russia

At the St. Petersburg summit, Hu Jintao would be more than happy to boost Vladimir Putin’s spirit of self-congratulation at organising the summit. Hu will look good to Russians when some Western leaders want to ruin the Russian President’s party. China’s own relations with Russia are probably at their best ever since the late 1950s.

Like everyone else in the world, China is watching with great interest Putin’s new assertiveness and his growing problems with the West.

The People’s Daily summed up Russia’s problems with the G-8: “Russia joined the group out of political needs eight years ago, only to find that it has second-class membership of the G-8 and still does not have much say on economic matters…Russia has long resented its humble position within the group and hopes that its host-country status will help it become a truly equal partner. But Russia, having been a G-8 member for just eight years, is yet to be fully accepted by Western powers.”

While Beijing today takes full advantage of its warm relationship with Moscow, few there will shed a tear if Russia’s relations with the West continue to sour. For Chinese analysts, trained in the tradition of realism, renewed tensions between Russia and the West will only help take attention away from China as the rising power in the international system.

For all their impressive achievements in recent years, the Beijing believes it could do with at least another decade or more to stabilise China’s internal condition and consolidate its pre-eminence in Asia.

Elevating the Strategic Triangle

Chinese analysts are as surprised as Indian observers at the Russian initiative to hold trilateral meeting between Presidents Putin, Hu and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in St. Petersburg.

The Russian initiative on forging a strategic triangle between Russia, China and India goes back to mid-1990s. It fructified a few years ago, when the foreign ministers of the three countries began to meet regularly at the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly.

In June 2005, foreign ministers from the three countries met for the first time in an independent setting at Vladivostok. The meeting at the heads of state/government level, Russia hopes, will give a new weight to the proposed strategic triangle.

When Russia began to push the idea of trilateral initiative, both China and India were lukewarm. But thanks to Russian persistence, it has acquired a momentum that might now be unstoppable.

Tensions with Japan

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is bored with the proceedings of the G-8 interaction with the five developing countries, he could take a couple of minutes off to watch the body language between President Hu and the Japanese premier, Junichiro Koizumi. It is unlikely that the two leaders will even exchange a nod of the head.

Although they are each other’s largest trading partners, China and Japan have seen a rapid deterioration of their bilateral relations in the last few months. Sino-Japanese tension has acquired a new edge in the last few days at the UN Security Council deliberations on the recent North Korean missile tests. While Japan has demanded tough and mandatory sanctions against Pyongyang, China has been trying to dilute the resolution both in terms of the nature of the sanctions as well as their binding effect on the rest of the world. Before Hu left for Russia, Beijing made it clear that Koizumi will not be among the leaders the Chinese President will meet bilaterally in St Petersburg. The Chinese leaders hope that the exit of Koizumi from the Japanese political scene after September will help resume high-level engagement with Tokyo. The North Korean crisis, however, is already strengthening the hardliners in Tokyo. And if one of them succeeds Koizumi, the current chill in Sino-Japanese relations might not end any time soon.