Illustration by M. Morgenstern

IF A single impulse has defined Chinese diplomacy over the past decade, it is its smile: near and far, China has waged a charm offensive. With its land neighbours, India excepted, China has amicably settled nearly all border disputes; it has abjured force in dealing with South-East Asian neighbours over still unsettled maritime boundaries. On the economic front, the free-trade area launched on January 1st between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations is the world's biggest, by population. China's smiling leaders promise it will spread prosperity.

Farther afield, China has scattered roads and football stadiums across Africa. By the hundreds, it has set up Confucius Institutes around the world to spread Chinese language and culture. More than anything, the Beijing Olympics were designed to showcase gentle President Hu Jintao's notions of a “harmonious world”. In all this, the leaders appear not simply to want to make good a perceived deficit in China's soft power around the world. A more brutal calculus prevails: without peace, prosperity and prestige abroad, China will have no peace and prosperity at home. And without that, the Chinese Communist Party is dust.

Yet of late smiles have turned to snarls. The instances appear unrelated. Last month China bullied little Cambodia into returning 22 Uighurs seeking political asylum after bloody riots and a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang last summer. On December 25th, despite China's constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, a veteran human-rights activist, Liu Xiaobo, received a long prison sentence for launching a charter that called for political freedoms. Western governments had urged leniency.

Britain had also called for clemency for Akmal Shaikh, a Briton caught smuggling heroin into Xinjiang. Mr Shaikh seems to have been duped by drugs gangs. His family insist he suffered mental problems and delusions. Yet the courts refused a psychiatric evaluation. Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, said he was “appalled” by Mr Shaikh's execution. In turn, China lashed out at this supposed meddling and ordered Britain to “correct its mistakes”. Sino-British relations, painstakingly improved in recent years, have come unravelled.

It is harder to complain of foreign meddling when Chinese actions have global consequences. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 the Chinese held the yuan steady as currencies all about them crumbled. Not only did that avert a round of tit-for-tat devaluations. The regional respect China earned, its diplomats argue, paved the way for the charm offensive that soon followed. New-found respect gave China a taste for more.

In contrast, during this downturn many complain that China's dogged pegging of its currency to the dollar harms others. As the world's fastest-growing big economy, with the biggest current-account surplus and foreign reserves, its currency ought by rights to be rising. By several yardsticks the yuan is undervalued and Americans and Europeans fear this leaves them with the pain of global rebalancing. ASEAN furniture-makers and nail foundries also beg for relief from the mercantilist advantage that a manipulated currency gives China.

Most striking of all were China's actions at the Copenhagen summit on climate change, where the world's biggest emitter appeared churlish. In a bid to avoid being pinned down to firm commitments, China insisted that all figures and numerical targets be stripped out of the final accord, even those that did not apply to China. Further, China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, at first did not deign to sit down with President Barack Obama on the final day, sending relatively junior officials instead. China may have got a deal it liked, but at the cost of a public-relations disaster.

Some think this a prelude to a prickly, more unpleasant China in the decade ahead, but it is too soon to conclude that. More likely, China will now try to patch up relations with Britain, and keep putting a positive gloss on Copenhagen. Peace and prosperity is still the calculus. China is spending billions cranking up its state media to go global, taking Mr Hu's message of “harmony” to a worldwide audience.

A powerful whiff

But the message of harmony will ring hollow abroad if it is secured by muzzling voices at home. Besides, there is now less goodwill to go around. A smile is fresh at first, but loses its charm if held for too long. One problem with China's smile diplomacy, says the man who coined the phrase, Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing, is that China's global impact—its demand for resources, its capacity to pollute—is so much greater than a decade ago. “ For all we may smile, you can still smell us,” he says.

That even applies in places, such as Africa, where enthusiasm for China was once unbounded. China has more than a presentational problem. For instance, it sends Africa both destabilising arms and peacekeepers, the one generating demand for the other. China's manufactures destroy local industries. Many Africans resent Chinese firms' deals with their unpleasant leaders and blame them when leaders pocket the proceeds. China's clout makes a mockery of two guiding tenets of its charm offensive: relations on the basis of equality; and non-interference.

That calls for a new diplomacy. China's presentational problems with the old one speak of an abiding lack of sophistication, and an attachment to a ritualistic diplomacy ill-suited to fast-moving negotiations, such as in Copenhagen, where the outcome is not pre-cooked. Over the case of Mr Shaikh, the official press indulged in the predictable and puerile ritual of railing about the historical indignity of the Opium War. Yet even many Chinese recognise that the world—and even drug-pushing British gunboat-diplomacy—has changed, and that it may be time to move on. Banyan demands that China correct its mistakes.





Economist.com/blogs/banyan