With leaders of the Group of Seven nations gathering in Hiroshima this weekend, Beijing is watching warily as Japan and the United States seek to smooth divisions and galvanise support for a broad international coalition against China and Russia.
This is by no means an easy task. While Russia's brutal war against Ukraine has reinvigorated the G7 and united the West, how to deal with a rising China remains one of the most divisive issues for the US and its allies.
Consolidating support for Ukraine and strengthening sanctions against Russia will take centre stage at the three-day summit, which started on Friday, while Tokyo and Washington are pushing for a tougher stance on China.
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Observers said that with Japan holding the G7 presidency, the Hiroshima summit was particularly important for the Indo-Pacific amid fears about an intensifying Cold War-style confrontation between two opposing camps led by the US and China.
The summit will be a test of the G7's unity, as members - which also include Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the EU - are expected to seek consensus on a host of China-related issues, from Taiwan and supply chains to Beijing's quasi-alliance with Moscow and its alleged economic coercion against other countries.
In a move some analysts said was aimed at Beijing, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida invited eight non-member countries to the summit in a bid to expand the US-led coalition's influence among China's Asian neighbours and developing countries.
The unusually long list of non-G7 invitees includes the major emerging economies of Brazil, Indonesia and India as well as Indo-Pacific powers such as South Korea, Vietnam and Australia.
"The G7 has now become the centre of global governance," said John Kirton, director of the G20 and G7 research groups at the University of Toronto.
He added that Russia's invasion of Ukraine had given the G7 a "new purpose and unity" while constraining the G20 and the UN Security Council from reaching consensus.
However, observers said Beijing should not be too concerned about anti-China coalition-building at the summit, noting that there were different approaches to China-related issues within Europe and the transatlantic alliance.
US President Joe Biden's decision to cancel much-anticipated trips to Papua New Guinea and Sydney for a Quad summit has also cast doubt on America's commitments to the region.
The Quad security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States is a centrepiece of Washington's Indo-Pacific strategy. While few questioned Biden's decision publicly, the last-minute cancellation - prompted by debt ceiling negotiations in Washington - has forced the Quad meeting to be held at the G7 in Japan instead.
Despite denials that the Hiroshima gathering would have an anti-Chinese tone, pundits said it was likely to exacerbate animosity between the rival camps and renew tensions in the region, especially over Taiwan and the South China Sea. It could serve as a stress test for China's relations with the West, which have shown signs of a thaw in recent weeks.
In the lead-up to the G7 event, China launched a charm offensive by sending Foreign Minister Qin Gang to Europe, resuming high-level dialogue with Washington and dispatching Beijing's special peace envoy Li Hui to Kyiv and Moscow to mediate the conflict.
This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping also hosted leaders of five central Asian states in Xian for their first in-person joint summit - a move designed to showcase their "enduring friendship" and solidarity to counterbalance Washington's regional alliances and partnerships.
In a pointed message at the end of his visit to France, Germany and Norway last week, Qin urged European powers to join China in opposing a "new cold war" and attempts to decouple economies and sever supply chains.
Philippe Le Corre, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Centre for China Analysis, said while G7 nations were in broad agreement on how to deal with Russia, the situation was more complex when it came to China.
"The US, Japan and the EU have different approaches: Washington is in a rivalry with Beijing, especially in the run-up to the 2024 elections, while Europeans (including the UK) do not want to be in a conflict with China," he said, adding that Japan was sitting in the middle.
But despite concerns about irritating China, Europe had nonetheless hardened its stance on China, Le Corre said.
"In the past, Europeans hesitated to qualify China and Russia as revisionist countries, but now they admit that China wants to change the Western-dominated international order. On this issue, Western countries are unified," he said.
"I don't think Qin Gang's discourse has helped reassure the Europeans on China's goodwill. They only see this as a 'charm offensive'."
According to Sari Arho Havren, adjunct professor at the George C. Marshall European Centre for Security Studies, China has focused on creating distance between Europe and the US as Beijing's relations with Washington and Tokyo worsen.
"China is putting a lot of diplomatic efforts on Europe right now. In addition to the Chinese diplomats being active in wooing Europeans, Foreign Minister Qin Gang has been touring Europe, and Li Hui added Brussels to his peace talks itinerary. All these emphasise Beijing's efforts to weaken the transatlantic alliance," she said.
She said that what worried Beijing at the moment were Brussels' proposals to target those who had helped Moscow blunt the impact of sanctions, including Chinese companies with suspected ties to Russia.
"This could potentially hit China, and China's foreign minister Qin warned against such actions while touring in Europe. Despite China's peace rhetoric, Beijing is seen by the G7 members as siding with Moscow and helping in Russia's war efforts," Havren said.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his G7 counterparts are seeking to issue a separate statement on China's economic coercion, Kyodo reported, citing officials with knowledge of the planning.
In a communique last week, G7 finance chiefs expressed "serious concern" about economic coercion, but fell short of naming China as a threat.
The communique underlined the rifts between the US and Europe on how to deal with China, according to Lu Xiang, an expert on US affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
"It shows that Europe does not want to be tied to the US ship, preferring to play balancer between the US and China," he said.
Beijing has dialled up its criticism of the G7, the US and Japan in recent weeks. China has also hit back at allegations of coercion, with the foreign ministry accusing the US of using similar methods and blasting the G7 as a "small clique that puts the US first".
Beijing protested against a meeting last month of the G7 foreign ministers, who expressed strong opposition to any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait by force or coercion and warned China against "militarisation activities" in the South China Sea.
Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on April 18 that the meeting "grossly interfered in China's internal affairs and maliciously smeared and discredited China" and reflected "the group's arrogance, prejudice and deliberate desire to block and contain China."
On Thursday, Wang lambasted Kishida's plan to include concerns about cross-strait tensions in the summit's final statement, accusing Japan and the US of "playing with fire" by "hollowing out the one-China principle".
"We urge the US, Japan and other G7 members to adhere to the political documents on their bilateral relations with China, follow the one-China principle, stop conniving at and supporting 'Taiwan independence' forces, stop making provocations and playing with fire on the Taiwan question and never stand on the opposite side of over 1.4 billion Chinese people. Those playing with fire will get burnt," he said.
The feud between Beijing and Tokyo has escalated since the Kishida government pledged a "stronger than ever" security alliance with the US and announced a groundbreaking shift in its defence strategy in December that labelled China as an "unprecedented strategic challenge".
Kishida said last month that "peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is not just important for Japan, but the international community and the world more broadly as well".
China, in response, accused Japan last week of using its position as host of the G7 summit to whitewash its history of militarist aggression, stoke confrontations and undermine regional interests.
Shi Yinhong, a professor of international affairs at Beijing's Renmin University, said the Hiroshima summit was expected to issue a broad and harshly worded statement on China.
He said the Ukraine war and China's ambivalence towards Russian aggression had "significantly hardened the G7's stance on China".
"With the US and China showing little sign of changing their [confrontational] approach, the summit in Japan will no doubt exacerbate regional tensions," he added.
Benoit Hardy-Chartrand, an international affairs specialist at Temple University Japan in Tokyo, noted that Kishida and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi had made a flurry of trips this year to Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Pacific island nations.
"While not all countries, especially the so-called Global South, were entirely receptive to Tokyo's views, all in all, it's been a successful presidency for Japan, as it has reinforced its position as a pivotal and indispensable player in the Indo-Pacific," he said.
He also said the G7 nations would deliver "strong and pointed" messages when it came to their shared concerns over China, Taiwan, North Korea and other priorities.
He added that for China, the trilateral Japan-South Korea-US summit on the sidelines of the G7 gathering was probably a bigger concern.
"Given the rapid rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, the trilateral summit will serve as a stepping stone for the three countries to reinforce their coordination on sensitive security and military issues."
"While in past years, the deep strains between Tokyo and Seoul were major stumbling blocks in the trilateral relations, there's a clear willingness from all parties to move towards greater three-way cooperation, rather than the US dealing separately with its two treaty allies," he said.
"This enhanced trilateral mechanism is an important vehicle for all three powers to advance their regional interests, which China will view with deep suspicion."
Liu Jiangyong, a regional affairs expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, warned that the emerging military alliance between China's Asian neighbours and Washington would pose threats to Beijing and regional stability amid heightened tensions over Taiwan.
He said from China's perspective, Japan's recent diplomatic drive, its push for the three-way military partnership and its vocal criticism of Beijing's stance on Taiwan underlined Tokyo's ambition to use its close ties with Western powers to contain China.
"With China in mind, the rapid thaw in Japan-South Korea ties and their joint partnership with the US on military, diplomatic and supply chain cooperation would increase frictions with China, pose security challenges to China, Russia and North Korea and further complicate complex regional geopolitics," Liu said.
But Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, said China should not be too concerned regarding anti-China coalition-building compared to a year ago, after Putin invaded Ukraine, or during the peak of allegations about a genocide in Xinjiang or speculation about the origins of Covid.
"Even on the US-inspired supply chain resilience and decoupling front, the gaps among the G7 powers are beginning to show up, especially as Beijing's relationship with Brussels thaws," he said.
Despite G7 leaders' efforts to project an image of unity on China-related issues, Havren said it would be "a huge challenge" to turn the commitments and statements into action.
"Although we can expect the G7 to publish a statement that alarms - once again - about China's economic coercion, I doubt the EU members would agree on going much further than a statement," Havren said, noting Germany, France and Italy's dependence on Chinese trade.
According to Gupta, China was smart to schedule special envoy Li's visit to Kyiv as well as the China-Central Asia Summit at the same time as the G7 summit as it helped project its support for the territorial integrity of sovereign states.
But he said Beijing should not overreact to the summit diplomacy and must be careful when reconsidering its ties with neighbouring countries that have pivoted towards the US, such as South Korea.
"So long as the military relationship between Seoul, Tokyo and Washington is expressly directed at North Korea and, more importantly, does not bleed into geopolitical matters beyond the Korean peninsula, Beijing has no reason to be particularly upset with Seoul," he said.
Gupta said Beijing must also reflect on its failure to rein in Pyongyang's "incredibly dangerous nuclear and missile antics" despite having a fair degree of economic leverage over North Korea.
He added that other countries in the region were "ganging up" on Beijing precisely because it had "fallen short in its own geopolitical responsibilities to its neighbours".
Pang Zhongying, a professor of international affairs at Sichuan University, said that given the G7's prominence in global politics, China should see the group positively and reestablish friendly ties to reduce rivalry with the West.
Under Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao, China maintained close ties with the group, which was founded in the 1970s and became the G8 after Russia joined in 1997. Moscow was suspended in 2014 after annexing Crimea from Ukraine.
Hu attended four G8 summits between 2003 and 2008. He skipped the 2009 L'Aquila summit in Italy due to a riot in Xinjiang in July 2009.
"The ever more united G7 has yet again put China on the spot," Pang said. "But given its domestic woes and its economic difficulties, China needs to tone down its rhetoric and stabilise ties with the West."
"Now there is a window of opportunity as China and the US have both expressed interest in lowering tensions and mending ties, and we should definitely seize it."
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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