Lan Xue is a professor in and dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Yanbing Zhang is assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University.

The Role of the G8 in the G20 Era

The Chinese media adopted three approaches in reporting about the recent Canadian Summits including: general reports about the news related to the Summit events, follow-up analysis, and reports of media reports from other countries. They mainly focused on three themes: President Hu’s formal State Visit to Canada; the G20 summit; and the meetings President Hu had with the leaders of Canada, the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Russia, Japan and South Korea. There were no detailed reports about the G8 Summit at all in the mainstream media, such as Xinhua News Agency, China’s state news agency. Nor could one find any analysis about the relationship between the G8 and the G20. But some Hong Kong and Shanghai newspapers did discuss the G8 and G20, arguing that the G8 was the old global governance mechanism and the G20 was the new one, and that it would take time for the new to replace the old.

There were also some other interesting reports about the attitudes of foreign governments toward the G8 and G20. First, at the G8 summit, Japan made an informal proposal to invite China to join in G8. Second, the US may only want the G20 to become the centre for global economic governance but Europe hopes that the G20 will be the committee to govern all global issues. Third, after the G8 Summit, the Chinese media reported that Canadian Prime Minister Harper accepted that, as far as global economic decision making was concerned, the G8 was in decline and G20 should take more responsibilities.

Overall, it seemed clear that China supports the G20 rather than the G8+. According to Mr. Yang Jiechi, China’s Foreign Minister, China believed that this G20 summit was successful and is trying to work with other countries to make the G20 a real platform for international economic cooperation.

G20 Conflict or Cooperation

It should be mentioned that the G20 still has not captured the attention and imagination of the general public in China. Reports on the G20 did not appear on front pages. At the same time, scholars and policy analysts are still paying close attention to G20 and have provided many commentaries to the news media.

There were a lot of reports about the divergent and convergent views at the Toronto G20 Summit in the Chinese context. But, it was quite clear that the former was much more prevalent than the latter. It seemed as though there were various deep divergences among G20 countries on the key issues and that convergence only existed on some general principles, for instance, consolidating global economic recovery, opposing protectionism and promoting economic growth.

China’s media mainly reported on two big divergences at the G20 Summit. One was the different views between the US and Europe on stimulus policy. According to their reports, the US wants to maintain stimulus in order to promote growth but Europe hopes that stimulus policies be ended soon to save the Euro. The other divergence concerned bank taxes. The US and Europe support a global bank tax but countries like Canada, Japan, Australia, China and India do not accept this idea.

Compared with reports on the previous three G20 summits, the reports of the outcome of the Toronto summit were less optimistic. From reading these reports, it was somewhat difficult to perceive how “equivalence, consistency and cohesion” are being achieved and communicated. 

The G20 Framework 

There was no detailed report about what this framework is in the Chinese context. I can only find President Hu Jintao’s three suggestions about this framework, namely making the G20 the centre of global economic governance, building a new and fair international financial system and defending the global free trade system. According to some analysts, the first suggestion implies that there is a need to establish an effective operating mechanism for the G20. Otherwise, the G20 will not be able to play the role people have hoped for.

G20 Record of Achievement

The Chinese media gave a quite positive interpretation of the achievement of the previous three G20 summits. The Washington Summit was described as the starting point of reforming the international financial system; the achievements of the London Summit were summarized as providing funding to IMF and enhancing financial regulation; the achievements of the Pittsburgh Summit included the consensus among G20 counties on reforming the international financial system and the institutionalization of the G20 as the premium forum for international economic cooperation.

The Toronto Summit was defined by Chinese media as the first G20 summit after the G20 was institutionalized in Pittsburgh. As mentioned above, although there were a lot of reports about the divergent views among G20 countries at this summit, China’s official media still gave a quite positive evaluation of this summit and argued that it was a success. Xinhua News Agency stated that the successful aspect of the Toronto Summit was that it tried to achieve what had been promised in the last three summits and also made a timetable for reducing deficit, reforming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and opposed protectionism. More importantly, it argued that the G20—as a new institution—will also be helpful to facilitate reforms of the World Trade Organization (WTO), IMF and World Bank, which have been used by the developed world to govern the world economy. In general, within the G20 framework, developing countries, including China, will play a more important role in world economic cooperation.