China may not have allies, but it has many friends

US President Barack Obama speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, September 18, 2014. [Photo/Agencies]

It's puzzling to hear some Americans, such as CNN journalist-analyst Fareed Zakaria, say that China has no friends. If that is true, how come the Chinese mainland, along with France, the United States and Spain, is one of most preferred destinations of international tourists? If the number of tourists visiting Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are included, China is by far the most favored tourist destination.

Just a year ago, China overtook the US to become the world's largest trading country. China is already the largest trading partner of 124 nations; the number for the US is 76. And 2014 figures show it has surpassed the US as the top destination for foreign direct investment.

Do these facts suggest China has no friends? If not, why do Western observers have the wrong idea? Actually, what Western observers mean by "China has no friends" is that "China has no allies bound by security treaties". But nobody can say China has no friends.

China was allies with the Soviet Union and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea during the Cold War. Bur since the end of the Cold War, China has followed a foreign policy of non-alignment.

Beijing strongly believes that since the Cold War is over, the concept of allies, which has its roots in the Cold War, should end too. Yet for some Americans, the Cold War is still on.

That probably explains why the US still maintains hundreds of military bases and deploys about a quarter million military personnel at its overseas bases, including those built after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. The US has used these bases to launch wars on many countries, including a dozen in the Middle East since the 1980s.

In 1999, Washington, bypassing the United Nations, led NATO forces to carry out an 11-week bombing on Kosovo. Four years later, it used the so-called coalition of the willing to invade Iraq to topple then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on the pretext that he had stocked weapons of mass destruction. And in 2011, it violated a UN resolution on no-fly zone over Libya to help Western forces topple former Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi.