Afghanistan “is a sort of early test case” for how China will handle “a specific group of countries that the U.S. has been so deeply absorbed with over the past couple of decades,” Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a policy think tank, told me. “There is this question of what China’s approach is actually able to deliver.”
Beijing’s Afghan policy will also be something more, though: a test of its entire worldview, and the specific form of international relations it has created. Beijing and Washington have the same basic concern about Afghanistan—that it will again become an international threat—but China’s leaders see the problem in an entirely different way.
The Chinese often deride America’s penchant for foreign interventions (though in the case of Afghanistan, they derived some benefit from it), and Washington’s promotion of democratic ideals through its foreign policy. China’s leaders advocate the principle of “noninterference” in other countries’ affairs. That translates to a diplomatic order stripped of its values (or at least those of the liberal variety). While Americans try to make other societies more like America’s, the Chinese don’t much care what kind of government another country has, or what it might be doing to its own people, as long as it’s not causing trouble for China.
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