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As more revelations about French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde’s recent visit to China emerge, there are reasons to believe that she may have just secured Beijing’s backing for her bid to lead the International Monetary Fund.
Certainly, Ms. Lagarde herself seems optimistic. At a press conference in Beijing on Thursday, she said she felt “very positive” about the visit, while in an interview with the China Business News – her only interview with a Chinese publication — she said Chinese officials had showed “enormous interest” in her pitch for the post.
“Regarding my bid and my proposals, they listened very carefully. I think we are on the same page,” Ms. Lagarde told the Shanghai-based newspaper.
She may not be exaggerating.
Throughout her two-day visit, Ms. Lagarde adopted a conspicuously conciliatory tone on China’s sensitive currency issue, saying that one shouldn’t expect a revolutionary breakthrough on the reform of the yuan exchange rate, even though the yuan has actually fallen against the euro since China returned the currency to a “managed float” in June last year – and even though that stance is likely to go over poorly with U.S. Congress. She also hinted strongly that she would support Zhu Min, a former deputy central banker in China and current special adviser to the IMF’s managing director, playing a key role in the organization’s future top management.
In other words, she told Beijing exactly what it wanted to hear from a would-be leader of the IMF.
Beijing neither confirmed nor denied a unilateral declaration from Paris last month that China supported Ms. Lagarde’s candidacy. China has likewise remained silent on her recently concluded visit.
Despite that silence, there are reasons to believe Beijing may have already made up its mind.
While tangible economic benefits such as relief on the yuan and more prominent representation in the IMF are important, the decision boils down to the more fundamental question of who China trusts more.
Between Ms. Lagarde and Mexican central banker Agustin Carstens, her main rival in the race, one might expect Beijing to cast a brotherly vote for a developing world ally. But the trademark pragmatism that has dominated Chinese foreign and economic policy over the past 30 years suggests otherwise.
While the competition between Ms. Lagarde and Mr. Carstens may have been billed by some as a faceoff between old and new economic powers, that storyline oversimplifies the relationship between economies, particularly in the developing world.
The troubled Eurozone may suffer for having to account for its member states’ sometimes wildly different interests and cultures, but countries in the so-called “emerging market bloc” arguably boast even greater differences.
Take the currently popular BRICS grouping, for example. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa all boast large and growing economies, but they have little in common otherwise, differing on everything from economic models and political systems to culture and religion.
A similar dynamic was at play in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a crowded and contentious grouping of third-world states founded in 1961 in response to the Cold War’s polarization of global politics.
While ostensibly united in their refusal to side with either the USSR or the U.S., many members of NAM were in fact quite closely aligned with the superpowers and a number were involved in serious conflicts with each other.
A lack of trust in the developing world means that on a bilateral basis, the relationship between an emerging economy and an advanced peer may often be much stronger than one between two emerging economies.
Between a declining but increasingly accommodating imperialist power and an assertive but wary emerging market rival, who will China support? Given Beijing’s post-reform foreign policy track record of putting economic interests ahead of politics and ideology, the choice seems clear. Europe, after all, is China’s largest trading partner.
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