Global Governance, China’s Role, and Beijing as a Global Political City

Abstract

Global governance in its ideal form seems unlikely anytime soon given the turbulence pervading contemporary international affairs, but one bright spot is the rise of the “global political city”—an urban community that serves as a major node of governance, agenda setting, and/or resources for the world. Traditionally a “city of walls and gates”, Beijing is transitioning into one of the world’s most important global political cities with an increasingly vibrant idea industry. Beijing’s idea institutions and their understanding of global trends will ultimately be crucial in determining and clarifying China’s global role and its potential contributions to global governance.

I would like to express my sincere appreciation for Hong Liu and Dylan Harris, who are the key people helping me with the article. Hong Liu is my former student at SAIS and currently a Research Fellow at CCG, and Dylan Harris is one of our best Reischauer Fellows who just accepted a position with NHK.

International affairs in the post-post-Cold War world are clearly growing more volatile. In the security dimension, the Ukraine war, Middle East tensions, strategic rivalries, and the ever-present prospect of global terrorism are just a few of the continuing challenges. Volatility is rising in international finance, intensified by rising inflation and interest rates, while trade protectionism is proliferating as well.

Within many major nations, the danger of domestic political turbulence is rising also, spurred by the persistent volatility of international affairs. Globalization has, over the past four decades, stimulated global growth and taken hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Yet it has also aggravated major domestic inequalities and frustrations on every continent.

Global governance in the idealistic form contemplated by philosophers like Immanuel Kant seems unlikely anytime soon, given the turbulence pervading contemporary international affairs.¹ The operational difficulties which the United Nations has confronted since its inception in 1945 are a case in point. Even less geographically ambitious forms of multilateral governance with promising early trajectories, such as the European Union, have faced recent difficulty.

Nation states have consistently been the dominant actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. No doubt their standing will continue to be central for the foreseeable future, especially in areas such as national security. Yet the persistent volatility of state-centric international relations, coupled with the difficulty of creating sustainable, over-arching governance structures among nations, and even keeping abreast of fast-moving international events, suggests that nation states need support from elsewhere in human society. One promising source of such support in the twenty-first century could well be the “global political city”.²

The Rise of Global Political Cities

A global political city, I argue, is an urban community that serves as a major node of governance, agenda setting, and/or resources—the classic political functions—in the international political economy as a whole.³ Such a community typically includes a sophisticated information complex, or “idea industry”, capable of intelligently monitoring international events.⁴ Global political cities, of course, are frequently major national capitals, such as Washington and Beijing. They are not, however, necessarily so. Cities such as New York or Shanghai in the financial realm, or Geneva in the humanitarian realm, are major nodes influencing global affairs in their own specialized areas, even in the political realm, without being national capitals.

Deepening the distinction between the capabilities and influence of “nation states” and those of “global political cities”, there are highly significant global political cities that are in fact capitals, but not of major nations. Brussels, Belgium is a case in point. It is the site of government to one of Europe’s smaller countries. More importantly, however, from a global perspective, Brussels is the headquarters of both the European Union and NATO, as well as a strategic international agenda-setting node for multinational corporations.⁵

London is likewise the seat of a national government, but one recently declining in its international role, with the eclipse of the British Empire and Britain’s departure from the European Union. In contrast to the decline of the once-powerful and extensive British Empire, whose scale and influence steadily eroded for a century and more after Queen Victoria, the role of London as a global political city has been steadily rising in influence for over forty years. The expansion of the Euro-markets; the vitality of the London-based global insurance industry and risk assessment sectors, a proliferation of think tanks, strong mayoral leadership, lingering elite networks from imperial days, and the rise of NGOs have together propelled London to a role in world affairs much greater in the 2020s than half a century ago.⁶

The divergent trajectories of London and Brussels as global political cities, on the one hand, from the nation states of which they are a constituent part suggest the importance of understanding the factors that contribute to their rising role as civic actors. These cities, after all, have risen as global transaction hubs, even as the nation states of which they are a part have declined. The concentrated presence of international governmental organizations (IGOs), NGOs, think tanks, and resource-allocating institutions, mainly financial, has contributed to their civic influence. Cosmopolitan trans-national elite networks, with influentials throughout the world, who live in or pass through cities like London, add to the mix. Taken together, these globally oriented yet city-based institutions have created holistic “idea industries” with a capability to quickly, pragmatically, and efficiently analyze problems of both domestic and international imports.

Washington, D.C., and New York, of course, are also host to a variety of cosmopolitan organizations and personal networks, ranging from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation to major think tanks that wield global influence. As in major European centers like London and Brussels, their civil-society institutions, distinct from government itself, constitute an idea industry that also generates policy ideas finding their way onto both domestic and international agendas. Given both the scale and the relative decentralization of the US government itself, this non-governmental “penumbra of power” at times enhances access for non-governmental forces to US official decision-making.⁷ But it also enhances the speed, resilience, and situational awareness of national decision-making as well.

The Rebirth of Global Beijing

Traditional pre-revolutionary Beijing was heavily stove-piped—what some analysts have called a “city of walls and gates”.⁸ This structure had its origins in imperial days, driven by the conflicting needs of China’s leadership for both specialized information and also monopolistic control over information flow, directed toward inhibiting conspiracy against the state. Tradition, prejudice, and politics in Beijing also conspired to limit interaction with the broader world.

Early revolutionary Beijing did, to be sure, have at least a symbolically internationalist dimension. Foreign activists, ranging from leaders of SNCC and the Black Panthers to the South African ANC, gathered in Beijing and pressed global agendas opposing racial discrimination; feminist leaders, including American actresses Shirley Maclain and Jane Fonda, came to support gender equality. And even Hillary Clinton came to keynote the Beijing global women’s conference in 1995.

Despite this internationalist veneer, however, late-twentieth century Beijing remained structurally a city of walls and gates. Its early post-revolutionary “idea industry” remained highly stove-piped.⁹ Ideas flowed upward, from a proliferation of state-dominated research and policy institutions, with little horizontal dialogue.

There was, to be sure, a panoply of knowledgeable institutions; however, narrow and often parochial their individual perspectives might be. Most senior chronologically and privileged politically was the Central Party School, founded in 1933. It was complemented by the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, a semi-governmental people-to-people exchange program founded in 1949.

The initial catalyst for a conventional research think tank in Beijing was most likely the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That shocking, unexpected upheaval within a Socialist bloc within which China had been a core member convinced Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and his colleagues that a systematic understanding of global affairs was essential to China’s national security. The concrete result of this consciousness was the establishment of a Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of International relations, later named the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), supervised by the Foreign Ministry.¹⁰

The escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, which also deeply alarmed China, spurred creation of another important think tank supervised by the Ministry of State Security. It became known as the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). Shortly after the war, as the Cultural Revolution receded, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) was born in 1977.¹¹

Together, these think tanks—CICIR, CASS, and CIIS—make up Beijing’s “big three”. These were followed during the 1980s and 1990s by at least ten more major think tanks—nominally non-governmental, but closely regulated and supervised either by specific ministries; the National Development and Reform Commission of the State Council; the Xinhua News Agency; or the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).¹² As in the case of earlier think tanks, horizontal communication among these institutions remained relatively limited.

A broader paradigm of interaction did begin to emerge in the 1980s, although mainly in the technological sphere. The Zhongguancun area of northwest Beijing, sometimes known as “China’s Silicon Valley”, began to evolve and was recognized as the Beijing High-Technology Industrial Development Experimental Zone in 1988. At around the same time, Beijing’s top universities, several of them also located in the northwest quadrant of the city, began to develop research institutes, such as Tsinghua University’s Research Center for Technical Innovation and Peking University’s International and Strategic Studies Center, with many of the characteristics of think tanks in the West.

Deepening International Ties

As China’s economy became progressively more integrated with the broader world, following advent of the Four Modernizations in the late 1970s, a variety of major international governmental organizations (IGOs) began to appear in Beijing. The first of the large IGOs to establish a Beijing presence, and arguably still the most influential, was the World Bank. The bank set up its Beijing representative office in 1985 and played a central role in conceptualizing China’s early economic reforms.¹³ The IMF arrived in 1991 and was followed by the Asian Development Bank and other IGOs, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2003.

During these early years of Global Beijing’s rebirth, private-sector and semi-governmental networks with the world beyond China also began to deepen, albeit largely within the traditional structures of the past. In 1973 the US-China Business Council was founded. It operated initially from a Washington, D.C. base, but later with offices in both Beijing and Shanghai, and with semi-governmental standing in both nations.¹⁴

In 1987 the Ford Foundation became the first private foundation to open an office in China. Heading the Beijing office was Peter Geithner, father of future US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Several other major global NGOs thereafter also located to Beijing during the 1980s and 1990s, including the German political foundations, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), and Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). Major corporations, such as Google, Intel, AMD, and IBM, also began to arrive, building research centers in the Zhongguancun Technology Park. The international presence was thus rising significantly, even as the Chinese idea-industry structure remained more traditional, with state institutions dominant.

Beijing’s Olympic Era Transformation

In the early 2000s, Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. This in turn propelled a sweeping and historic land-use reordering of the city, comparable in importance to the creation of Tian’anmen Square following the 1949 revolution. The reordering of Beijing for the Olympics, under the innovative leadership of Mayor Wang Qishan (2004–2007), was one of the most sweeping spatial transformations of a major global city since Napoleon III’s restructuring of Paris in the late-nineteenth century. The Olympic transformation, coming amidst China’s high-speed growth, had fateful implications both for Beijing’s idea industry and ultimately for its global role as well.

The governmental complex of Beijing, surrounding the Forbidden City, including Zhongnanhai and the Great Hall of the People, remains of central importance. Beijing’s traditional center, however, is being supplemented, not just by universities and high-tech firms in the northwest of the city, but also by an open and dynamic business and think-tank complex surrounding the former Beijing Olympic site near the National Convention Center. This new idea-industry complex includes the headquarters of China’s major banks; the World Trade Center; the World Financial Center; the People’s Daily; the headquarters of the CGTN media network; and important think tanks, such as the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), and the Boao Forum for Asia.

The increasingly open and dynamic spatial environment prevailing since the Olympics-driven restructuring of the late 2000s has facilitated the emergence and growth of a new breed of think tanks, uniquely suited to meeting the informational and policy demands of China’s rapid growth and globalization. Among the earliest of these new institutions was the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank founded by Henry Huiyao Wang and Mable Lu Miao in 2008. CCG, which has been accorded special consultative status as a non-governmental organization of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations, has over 100 full-time researchers engaged in work on globalization, global governance, international trade, and global migration. CCG has been actively involved with the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference, and other major global agenda-setting bodies, while maintaining active relations with think tanks throughout the world.

Although CCG was a forerunner and pacesetter, several other independent social think tanks have also emerged more recently in Beijing, especially since 2013. The PanGoal think tank, for example, works on de-carbonization; problems of aging societies; the digital economy; and urban renewal and maintains branches throughout China. It engages in consulting for a variety of Chinese ministries, local governments, and enterprises, with a staff of more than 600 researchers.¹⁵

The Grandview Institution is another major independent Beijing think tank, established in 2013. Like CCG and PanGoal, it works with a variety of institutions, including local and municipal governments, as well as the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Development and Reform Commission; and Ministry of Natural Resources. It appears to be somewhat more foreign-affairs oriented than its counterparts, covering ocean security, Belt and Road opportunities and risks, borderland governance, digital governance, and China’s bilateral relations with major world powers, including the USA, Japan, the European Union, and India.¹⁶ Grandview has close relations with nearly 20 global think tanks, including the Carter Center, the Quincy Institute of National Affairs, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London.

One final new independent, non-profit Beijing think tank of note is the Taihe Institute, also founded in 2013.¹⁷ Its research focuses on five principal areas, international relations, ethnicity and religion, education and culture, economic affairs as well as science and technology. Taihe accepts commissions from both the Chinese national and local governments, maintaining ties with a broad variety of foreign think tanks, as well as Chinese organizations.

Challenges for the Future

In the wake of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, both the spatial configuration of China’s capital city and the structure of its idea industry have begun to change profoundly. Centers of intellectual activity have proliferated, horizontal communication has increased, stove-piping is reportedly less pronounced, and trans-national contacts linking Beijing and the world along many dimensions have grown.

Decentralization, pluralism, and globalization, of course, have created challenges of their own. Information is more accessible, but managing information flows, conversely, has become more difficult for those desiring more controlled and orderly flows. The Foreign NGO Law of 2016 has inhibited the emergence of some independent non-profit organizations, although those with purely functional concerns in such areas as energy and environmental protection have continued to be active or even expanded.

As China becomes one of the preeminent global powers, and one intent on playing an active role in defining the future structure of global governance, it will need broad international networks, high-quality information flows and technical problem-solving capabilities to sustain its broadening, increasingly worldwide role, that will require both a high-quality information industry in its national capital of Beijing—one realistically understanding and assessing views from throughout the world. It will also require a dense network of experienced interlocutors conversant with the realities of both China and the broader world.

Recent trends suggest encouraging evolution in the needed direction, although the challenge remains vast, given the speed of China’s transition to global superpower status. Several hundred thousand Chinese annually are studying abroad, and an experienced corps of returnees with broad and increasingly high-level experience overseas, including at major IGOs, is developing.¹⁸ Min Zhu, formerly Deputy Managing Director of the IMF; Justin Lin, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Jin Liqun, former Executive Vice President of the Asian Development Bank are just a few examples of the gifted, veteran senior Chinese IGO executives now supporting China’s rising global role while at home in Beijing.

The Beijing-based institutions working to support a constructive Chinese global leadership role are also beginning to emerge. In 2002 the Boao Forum for Asia was established, now headquartered in central Beijing, near the World Trade Center. In 2003, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization established its headquarters in Beijing, within walking distance of the US Embassy. The SCO now includes eight members, including India and Pakistan, as well as four observers and six dialogue partners; it is growing increasingly active across the Eurasian continent. And in 2016 the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank also established its headquarters in Beijing, with broad global membership, and former Asian Development Bank Ranking Vice President Jin Liqun as its CEO.¹⁹

Despite significant progress, both institutionally and in the realm of human networks, challenges to the ability of Beijing’s information industry to play a dynamic and constructive international role remain, despite China’s steady rise as a global power. One limitation is likely a lack of area expertise regarding parts of the world with which China has not extensively dealt in the past, such as Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East. Another may arguably be the danger of group think due to restraints on pluralism, although independent think tanks may help to arrest this tendency.

China faces a second challenge looking to the future, arguably more serious than overseas observers may often appreciate, that is the daunting challenge of domestic governance in a rapidly growing and changing developing nation of 1.4 billion people. China’s leaders cannot avoid anticipating the needs of that huge population on time lines extending many years into the future. China’s population is four times the population of the USA, with arguably more socio-economic diversity than even the US experiences. And the PRC has land borders with 14 nations, compared to only two for the USA. So the problem of anticipation and social engineering in China is an immensely complex technical and political task, involving both domestic and international variables immensely difficult to aggregate. A knowledgeable, innovative, and resilient Beijing idea industry could play an important role in responding to emerging governance challenges along many dimensions.

Conclusion: The Crucial Importance of Idea Institutions in Global Beijing

China’s growing economy is likely destined to be the largest on earth by any measure inside a decade. And as recent developments in international security also suggest, the People’s Republic of China’s responsibilities in maintaining global stability is also rising. The world that China now confronts thus raises three daunting challenges for Beijing as a global political city, and for its idea industry, in the historic era now dawning.

The first challenge, and the most immediate, is one of understanding: grasping clearly the state of the world today, and what it demands of China. That challenge is for China a relatively novel one—not so much because the facts are new, but because China’s role, as it becomes a super power, is novel. China’s challenge is similar in kind, although of course not in detail, to what the USA confronted during the 1930s, and then with a vengeance at the end of the World War II. The challenge is acquiring diverse types of new information—strategic and economic; global and area-specific—about much broader realms of experience than previously. And it is a need for unvarnished information that presents the world as it really is, and not as one might wish it to be.

The second challenge is one of domestic sensitivity and response. A global role, previous super powers have found, cannot be sustained without resilience in responding to concerns at home. And China’s domestic challenge as a global power could be even more demanding than that of either the USA or the Soviet Union has been, given that its population is four times larger than either, and it remains more of a developing nation than previous superpowers have been.

The final challenge—the most difficult of the three, and the most consequential for the future—is one of definition. China needs to consider, in more explicit and transparent terms than in the past, the sort of world order, and the type of global governance, to which it aspires. And it needs to decide how to realize those aspirations.

National leadership, no doubt, is central to successfully meeting all three of these challenges. Yet leaders cannot act alone. Leaders need strategic information and need to make allocation and agenda-setting decisions that require communal effort and input. Global experience of the past several decades has shown that the eco-system of policy—the institutional profile of global political cities—is crucial to intelligent decision. In that process, the role of idea industries looms large. In future years, the configuration of Beijing’s idea institutions—and their understanding of global trends—will play a crucial role in determining what China’s global role, and its contribution to global governance, will ultimately become.