beyondbrics

Like many other nations, China has been scrambling to put together evacuation plans for its citizens stuck in crisis-torn Libya. The real surprise has been just how many Chinese are living there. The foreign ministry does not know for sure but puts the figure at 30-40,000.

The huge contingent in Libya, who work for at least 27 Chinese companies, has brought to light one of the new dilemmas facing China as its economic interests expand.

For a mixture of reasons that are partly political, partly business, Chinese workers are now present in many of the most volatile and dangerous parts of the world, including places where anti-Chinese sentiment over jobs and working conditions is on the rise.

One of the first wake-up calls was in 2007, when a group of Chinese women were abducted in Pakistan, an event which led to the siege of the Red Mosque in Lahore. In the same year, nine Chinese oil workers were killed in Ethiopia. In recent years, Chinese workers have been kidnapped in Cameroon, Congo and Afghanistan.

Publicly, Chinese diplomats admit that the country needs better contingency plans to deal with this sort of situation. Privately, they worry about a different issue: that such incidents will force them to get much more involved in domestic political disputes in far-off lands, pulling the government away from its commitment to a policy of non-interference.

The nightmare, a few diplomats and academics admit, would be a large, violent attack on a group of Chinese which then prompted an intense nationalist reaction at home, forcing the government to take the sort of interventionist positions it tries to shun.

Beijing gave some indication of how it will respond in the future with the decision on Thursday to send the frigate Xuzhou, currently conducting anti-piracy drills off the coast of Somalia, to Libya. Its ostensible mission will be to help the evacuation effort, but it is also a warning to any in Libya who might attack Chinese interests, as well as the latest indication of the growing global reach of China’s navy.

As Andrew Erickson, a China expert at the US Naval War College says: “This latest initiative is part of a larger ongoing increase in Chinese power, presence, and influence around the world, and should come as no surprise. China has global interests, cannot free ride forever, and requires a presence in critical areas and situations in order to have a voice.”