| Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committeeof the Communist Party of China (CPC), pointed out at the Political Bureau’s third collective studies held on January 28, 2013, “We will stick to a road of peaceful development, but never will we give up our proper rights and interests and sacrifice the nation’s core interests. No country should expect that China will trade its core interests or that China will tolerate things that hurt its sovereignty, security and development.” These words clearly show the international community China’s bottom line when it comes to peace and development.
Peace and development is crucial to China. International cooperation has helped its development, which is feeding back to the international community and contributing to human society’s development and progress. This kind of bilateral virtuous interaction relationship needs to be further deepened.
With the development of China’s reform and opening up to the outside world, it has defined six national core interests, namely, national sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, unification, the state political system established in the Constitution and overall social stability, as well as the basic guarantee of economic and social sustainable development. Only when we have developed a correct understanding of overall national and core interests can we tell major contradictionsfrom minor ones and concentrate on the protection of the most fundamental Chinese interests. In this way, the outside world will get a clear understanding of China’s determination on safeguarding peace and development.
The various parts of national core interests are inseparable within an integrated entity. Economic development is the basis for China’s sovereignty and security while solid national sovereignty and solid security is the precondition for economic development. If the relationship between various interests is properly dealt with, China’s core national interests can be pushed forward. If the relationship is poorly dealt with, the headstone for overall national development might be damaged.
For quite a period of time, several countries have made wrong judgments on China’s attitude towards national development and interests. They think that since it took economic development as the priority of priorities, and thus in order to have a peaceful external environment for development, China would like to sacrifice its own national interests for this purpose. In this context, we have seen several issues that hurt China’s marine rights. China’s efforts to safeguard sustainable economic development were once restricted to different extents. These are typical examples of wrong judgments on China’s determination to safeguard its national interests.
Since the second half of 2012, a practice of Japan’s so-called "nationalization" of Diaoyu Islands has damaged the normal China-Japan relationship and delivered a heavy blow to bilateral economics and trade. However, this will not affect China’s principle standpoint on safeguarding national sovereignty. No country should expectthat China will make trade on its national sovereignty and no country should expect that China will waste the valuable opportunities for development due to an unstable external environment.
As the initiator of Diaoyu Islands issue, the united States should clearly know China’s bottom line concerning peace and development. Misjudgment of China’s attitude to core national interests and its capability to safeguard its interests will finally throw one into an embarrassing situation.
China has always valued peace and strives for development, but it will not try to grab it. Peace and development is important, but should not depend on a single country’s sacrifice of its core interests. It instead requires China to keep to developing its national strength and the outside world’s joint efforts with China. It’s a wrong assumption that China will seek peace and development at any cost. China holds a clear bottom line for peace and development. By no means will it give up the struggle for proper rights and interests, nor sacrifice its core national interests, of which the international community must have a correct understanding.
(The author is Professor and Executive Vice President of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University) |
