SHANGHAI, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Two months ago, a small fleet of Chinese naval vessels arrived at a port in China's eastern city of Qingdao after having completed the nation's first round-the-world cruise. The fleet's return, which captured little attention from foreign media, was a highly symbolic event not just to showcase China's status as a rising military power, but its growing role in world affairs.
Lt. Gen. Ding Yiping, Commander of the Chinese navy's North China Sea fleet, told the welcoming crowd of top military officials that the four-month trip "had fulfilled a thousand-year dream of the Chinese nation." This was a somewhat archaic historical allusion to China's period of maritime power in the 14th century, when the renowned Ming Dynasty emperor Yung Lo commissioned a series of naval expeditions to proclaim the empire's splendor and greatness, or "Tianxia" -- "All That is Under the Sky."
But ancient history can serve as a useful reference for Chinese leaders as they emerge from decades of self-impoxsed osolation and try to regain the country's once proud role as powerful force in the regional and international arena.
Over the past year, Beijing has thrown its weight behind efforts to resolve several long-standing regional disputes. Recent initiatives have included taking the lead in arranging a pact between several South Asian nations to avoid armed conflict over the hotly contested Spratly Islands, long been a source of military tensions in the South China Sea.
China has also sent armed police officers to participate in a United Nation's peacekeeping force in East Timor, and dispatched a semi-official envoy to the Middle East to talk peace with top Palestinian and Israeli officials.
It has sought to improve relations with neighboring countries in Central Asia, most notably in Afghanistan, where it has pledged to provide $150 million in post-war reconstruction aid over the next five years, with the first $30 million delivered this year to the Afghan interim government. This week, China agreed to cancel millions of dollars in debt owed to Beijing by the war-torn Central Asian nation.
"We are actively participating in peace and the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told reporters during a regular press briefing in Beijing on Tuesday.
China watchers had expected Beijing to abstain from voting for the tough U.S.-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq earlier this month. Instead, the Chinese grudgingly voted in favor of the resolution which called for an immediate return to Iraq of the U.N. weapons inspectors with no limitations to their assignment.
The Chinese vote was seen as a reflection of Beijing's new flexible policy in its dealings with Washington. Another sign was its cooperation with the Bush administration on North Korea's nuclear-arms development and what is seen as its new restraint in dealings with the United States on weapons exports to Taiwan.
There are also signs that China intends to play a major role in the negotiations between North and South Korea and the United States, in an effort to end more than 50 years of post-Cold War hostility on the peninsula.
Western observers say these moves are part of carefully orchestrated shift in foreign policy that has taken shape in Beijing over the past year, and signify China's desire to play a larger role in global diplomacy.
"In coming years, I think you will begin to see China thrusting itself into the role of arbiter in regional and international disputes, even if the issues don't directly involve them," said a senior Western diplomat.
The diplomat, who spoke to United Press International on condition of anonymity, said China's embrace of the world has not yet been reciprocated by other major global players, but he said time is on Beijing's side.
"The Chinese are the new kids on the block when it comes to international diplomacy, so it will take some time for rival parties like the Palestinians and the Israelis to accept their participation," he said.
Despite China's vast population and its huge standing army, the world's largest, it has not played, nor has it sought, much of a role in international affairs since the communists took power more than 53 years ago.
To date, China has not committed armed military peacekeepers a U.N. operation, despite its position as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and its apparent willingness to cooperate in mediation.
Under Mao Zedong and successive generations of Chinese leaders, China remained closed to the world, focusing its efforts on building a modern nation after several decades of war, famine and foreign control.
It was not until the mid-1990s that China, under the stewardship of Jiang Zemin, emerged as a regional power with global ambitions capable of becoming a major player in crisis situations around the world.
China's Communist Party, which is reshaping itself into a party of technocrats, businessmen and globe-trotting diplomats, is keen to foster the new image of Beijing as a global heavyweight and intermediary.
The People's Daily, the party's flagship newspaper, in an editorial last week, defined China's diplomacy as a "new security concept" of "working to safeguard world peace and promote common prosperity." Zhou Fuyuan, a senior official from east China's Jiangsu Province, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency last week, "We must make the most of strategic opportunities facing us in the first two decades of the new century and open wider to and increase exchanges with the outside world,"
But analysts say China's ambitions are also aimed at countering what it perceives as America's growing "hegemony" throughout the world, which has brought U.S. troops stationed along its western borders.
"China is wary of the U.S.-led global security system of bilateral military alliances, which it fears will lead to a monopoly of power," said Ming Wei, a professor of international relations at Shanghai University.
Beijing is seeking to recast itself as an intermediary between developing and industrialized nations such as the U.S., which emerged from the Cold War as the world's last remaining superpower, he said. "China wants to replace Japan as a bridge between the industrial and developing worlds," he said.
Although China is alarmed about the expansion of a U.S. military presence in the world, it has developed closer economic and political ties with Washington in recent years, and the two nations have pledged to work together on issues such as weapons of mass destruction and the threat of global terrorism.
On Friday, in a further sign of warming diplomatic relations between the two influential countries, the U.S. Navy battleship the USS Constellation and its battle group arrived in Hong Kong on Friday for a visit.
The battle group, which includes two guided-missile destroyers, two cruisers, a guided-missile frigate and a support ship are on their way to the Middle East amid U.S. preparations for possible war with Iraq.
Next week, the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and its battle group are scheduled to dock in Hong Kong while the USS Paul Forster will make a port of call in Qingdao, the first such visit by a U.S. Navy vessel since a American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided over the South China Sea, killing the pilot.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China, said he has noticed an apparent willingness in Beijing to acquiesce to, and even accommodate, U.S. goals in the region, such as the resumption of port calls by U.S. naval vessels to mainland China.
"I think this signals a change of mindset within the elite circles of Chinese power," Cabestan said. "They are becoming more diplomatically sensible and globalized, and they want to be perceived as such."
(Katherine Arms contributed to this report from Hong Kong)
