Soft Logic

China has been a tad ornery lately:

Is this the year that China's leadership lets us all know that it is determined not to abide by routine international norms but will use raw power to take whatever it wants?

That is too strong a conclusion just yet, but it has certainly been a year of rugged behaviour from Beijing, behaviour that we should study closely.

For fun, let's recall how China wanted to portray a good image. So said their ruler President Hu Jintao way back in January 2008:

Officials should "perform well the task of outward propaganda, further exhibit and raise up the nation's good image," Hu said.

Reports on his remarks Tuesday to party leaders and propaganda officials dominated the front page of the party's flagship People's Daily and other official newspapers Wednesday.

The reports did not indicate any direct mention of the Olympics by Hu. However, they said he called for boosting China's "cultural soft power," a reference to influence in culture, sports and other spheres outside traditional military might and hard-nosed diplomacy.

China has only lately embraced the concept of "soft power," although propaganda has been a central tenet of Communist rule even before the party seized control in a 1949 revolution.

And there was a time when people believed that about China. Yet even back then, China's best friends were rogue states. Yet when China occasionally smiled while dealing with rogues, our Chinaphiles ate it up:

There's another side to China's emerging might, however, what some pundits call "soft power" or "smiling diplomacy" or the "charm offensive." Most of that effort is the application of China's expanding economy to trade, aid, and investment to achieve political ends.

And now China seems to have decided that smiling while befriending thugs won't do them any good with the rest of the world. What the heck, the Olympics are over. Perhaps it was just intended to make sure that all those foreign journalists covering the Olympics would stay on message while in China without requiring the Chinese government to be heavy handed in shaping positive coverage. So China now feels free to insist that other countries recognize China as the Middle Kingdom that must be obeyed. Charming, eh?

Those nations that this smiling diplomacy was supposed to persuade seem to fear Chinese ambitions now and are eager for our help:

Most of China's neighbors are looking to the United States for help in resisting increasing Chinese aggressiveness. Even Japan, where residents of Okinawa want U.S. forces gone, and are becoming increasingly loud about it, is telling its citizens that the American troops are increasingly vital to Japanese defense, and must stay. Japan is seeking other allies against China, and this now includes India, which recently sent some senior officers to Japan, to seek ways to cooperate in blocking threatening Chinese military strategies.

Ah, but not all is lost. I'm sure that some of our pundits will swoon over Peking no matter what China does, and read deep brilliance into whatever they sneeze into a napkin.

UPDATE: The year Asian nations decided to resist China?

With Beijing becoming more assertive, this may be the year consensus finally tips from the belief that China will eventually take its place among the great powers as a responsible stakeholder to a less-rosy conviction: that China's military might will be used in ways that reveal its regional goals to be incompatible with international norms for diplomatic behavior.

For all the talk in left-wing circles about how awful America is, two decades of being the dominant power did not persuade nations of Asia to align against us to balance our power. China has managed in this year to push nations to arm up and adjust their attitudes to gain our cooperation to resist China.