Do you speak Chinese???

I have just finished reading Mark Leonard's most recent book, What Does China Think?, and can only say this: it's excellent! Excellent, and useful. The book is short and written with a quality necessary to any policy-oriented author: clarity.

Leonard attempts to correct two Western preconceived ideas, namely that China's leaders are blind to anything other than their country's economic growth, and that they refuse to allow any novel ideas to challenge their party's creed. He succeeds at demonstrating both.

Let's take a look at China's prospects on the world scene.

According to the book, which is based on numerous interview with Chinese academics and policy-makers, the country's strategy is to steal the international "moral high ground" from the United States – which has been pretty good at losing it anyway these last years. The way China will try to do this is by brushing up worn concepts such as soft power, sovereignty, and multilateralism to make them shine again.

In fact, it has started already: look at what's happening in Africa, where China is seen as a friend by nearly all of the continent's dictators for its support in putting an end to a history of foreign diktats. Look at the way China masterminded the build-up of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and has managed to penetrate the ASEAN. Finally, look at how many Chinese students are earning master's degrees in engineering from America's best universities only to come home a couple years later.

So it seems China has become the cool kid on the block: making new friends and adding them to old ones. But there are at least two sources of uncertainty that may undermine this apparently brilliant strategy.

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The first thing that boggles my mind is that African nations would want China as a new colonial power. Sure, it isn't yet quite clear if China's investments on the continent might actually serve as an inflow of development-stimulating cash. But after just a few years of presence on the in Africa, it has already become apparent that China is essentially grabbing the resources it needs and dumping the products it can't sell elsewhere – something quite similar to what the Europeans did in their days. So why go down that road (again)?

In recent years, African countries have been faced with a strategic choice: make the best of their long-time relationships with their former colonisers or open up to China's high-fixed sights. I am well aware of the luxurious gifts that come with adopting China as a big brother. Nevertheless, these presents – that come in the form of free highways, ports, schools, and hospitals – are likely to be poisoned.

Indeed, there is no such thing as a free lunch!

So, you tell me, had Africa not better stick with the devils it knows rather than go for the devil it doesn't? For all their proven hypocrisy as colonial and post-colonial powers, France, the UK et al. have been proven so wrong (and indeed have done so much wrong) in Africa that they couldn't possibly do it again. At worst, when and if they try, African leaders will know how to see through their manipulations. Something far from certain if the person across the table is from a culture they know little about.

I believe the West feels – and should feel – so bad for its mistakes of the past that it's only likely to be smarter (and more respectful) in the future. Who knows if that will be China’s case? Like all rising powers, China on the contrary is likely to feel its turn has come, and with it the right to dominate. Is a young driver not more likely to run over someone in his brand new Ferrari than any of his elders who know the dangers of the road and might feel guilty of their past recklessness? [I am well aware that China has dominated its region and been a great power many times before, but for most of its current population, a situation of leadership would be a true novelty.]

If you're not sure I have the grounds to be warning against China's rising colonial intents, here's something to consider: according to Leonard, already a leading Chinese political theorist has detailed how China’s final aim is to divide the world in two distinct spheres of influence with equally distinct rights for their people. The first, which will loosely be drawn according to regional boundaries, will gather all of China's friends – and they will be treated as such. The second group of states, on the other hand, will be treated as a backyard from which China will pick and choose what it needs, as well as dump what it doesn't.

Rightly, Leonard reminds us that this is precisely the kind of "double standard" the United States has used for over fifty years. Maybe. He also reminds us that the Greeks had done it before them. Sure. So? Why would anyone want to give China its own chance to do so?

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The second thing I'm not sure how China will get around of (and, this, Leonard emphasises) is the fact that China's own citizens are growing increasingly furious with the current state of affairs on the Mainland. Indeed, though it is possible that Westerners might have overemphasised the Chinese people’s claims for human rights over more mundane things like land property and healthcare, they nevertheless remain clearly unhappy.

So – Leonard asks – how can China's ambitions serve as a model for the future if it isn’t even sure what its own domestic state of affairs will be ten years from now? It is a well proven fact that human beings far too often allow servitude to grow over on them. Yet there will always be some people ready to fight for their freedom, and that is why I am not sure China's strategy of making friends with so many dictators will show as efficient in the long term as it might seem in the short one.

What happens when the Burmese, the Sudanese, and the Zimbabweans wake up, demand their own rights, and realise that China is the one that paid for their oppressor's Jaguar for so many years?

Whether it be to quell the riots it is experiencing at home (running at close to 100 000 a year these days) or to be able to show off internationally as a true moral big brother, China will have to improve its domestic system of governance.

Here again, Leonard's book is insightful. Indeed, it shows how – unsurprisingly – China is well aware of this urgent need for reform. In fact, the country has promoted truly unexpected initiatives to test-drive its future efforts at democratisation. For instance, the city of Chongqing – Leonard reports – has opened the great majority of its political decisions to expert advice and public consultations. You might think this modest novelty is nothing but symbolical. In reality, it's all but that.

Throughout the country, China is trying everything it can, from funding think tanks to picking its local leaders through lotteries (yes, that is how the Greeks did it: and it's also more democratic than our elections ever will be). And, as a matter of fact, some of these initiatives have proven successful too.

So, it seems, China is on the road to democracy. And once it has achieved political reform domestically, it will be ready to march on and take down the United States by hitting it not militarily (no chance at that – for now) but where it will hurt most: by tearing to shreds the American poster picture of morality and wealth.

Rewind! That might happen, but it also might not be as likely as it first seems. Indeed, there is a profound paradox in the logic of China’s political leaders. As Leonard points out, for all their efforts at finding new ways to reform their country's political system, Chinese statesmen can't seem to think of these innovations as anything but Party-controlled tryouts.

So what happens when the Chinese Communist Party's time finally comes? Will it go smoothly, or will the country burst? On page 61 of his brilliant essay, Mark Leonard points us to the fact that among China's worst fears is to end up like the Soviet Union. And the country just might be right about that. As Leonard notes: "until the very moment that it collapsed, the Soviet Union embodied an alternative model that challenged Western democracy".

Just like the USSR learned during the Cold War, China's struggle for global leadership against the United States will probably be fought and won (or lost) at home. How China democratises will almost certainly determine the amplitude of its power in the 21st century. Here, something is telling: for all he discovered about China's brightest minds, at no point does Leonard seem to regret having announced in a previous book that it is the European Union that will "run [the next] century".

Photo credits: Cover of Mark Leonard's book What Does China Think? (Fourth Estate, 2008). Nota: only the views identified as such are Mr. Leonard's. All other comments are mine.