By Peter Lee
The National People's Congress (NPC), now in session, is the People's Republic of China's designated venue for happy talk. It's a time for reaching out beyond the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and making nice with Chinese citizens and the world at large.
It's also an indication of where the CCP wishes things might go, if not necessarily how it expects things to turn out.
As China inches toward a major leadership transition, the outgoing team would like to bequeath a more favorable environment to Xi Jinping and the "fifth generation" than the current "bash the rising China threat" rhetoric that underpins the global discourse today.
Therefore, China is positioning itself as the global apostle of win-win, deliberately counter-programming against a world
increasingly obsessed with red lines, existential threats, trade wars, currency wars, and zero-sum outcomes in economics, diplomacy and security.
Overseas, the PRC has made a high-profile venture into the Middle East, trying to make the case for negotiation, reconciliation and stability in Syria even as the West and the Gulf Cooperation Council howl for President Bashir al-Assad's head.
Domestically, at the NPC the Chinese leadership made a determined effort to employ and endorse the intellectual tools of the West, coordinating its economic and social message with a massive document released by the World Bank on the eve of the Congress: China 2030. [1]
China 2030 is the swan song of Robert Zoellick, the retiring head of the World Bank. Zoellick originally earned his bones in the US State Department as the father of the "responsible stakeholder" meme, then took over the World Bank in 2007 after the disastrous tenure of Paul Wolfowitz. Zoellick pursued a line of engagement with China, most notably in his suggestion that the World Bank and the PRC could coordinate their infrastructure initiatives in Africa.
China 2030 can be seen as an effort to put some intellectual meat on the rhetorical bones of "responsible stakeholder"-ism, which was primarily employed as a propaganda tool with which to club Beijing when its policies in places like Sudan were not to America's liking.
The Chinese government participated in the report - the World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council are listed as co-authors - and Premier Wen Jiabao echoed its findings in his work report to the NPC.
A dead giveaway to the depth of collaboration between the PRC and the World Bank on the report is in its full title: China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High Income Society. READ MORE
