With economic assets to secure, China embraces the Taliban | Al Jazeera

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan the first time in 1996, China refused to recognize their rule and left its embassy shut for years. This time around, Beijing has been among the first to embrace the Islamist militants next door.

China’s remarkable shift was on display little more than two weeks ago, when Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed a Taliban delegation to the northern port of Tianjin as the group made gains against the administration of President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country on Sunday. Wang’s endorsement of the Taliban’s “important role” in governing Afghanistan provided a crucial boost of legitimacy for an organization that has long been a global pariah due to its support of terrorism and the repression of women.

China’s reasons have as much to do with its own rise as a global power as the Taliban’s surprisingly swift march on the Afghan capital. China today commands an economy worth $14.7 trillion — more than 17 times its size in 1996 — and a massive trade-and-infrastructure initiative that stretches across the Eurasian landmass.

Beijing’s fears about Islamist extremism among its own Uyghur minority have also deepened in recent years, leading it to build a vast police state adjacent to Afghanistan. Moreover, an increasingly intense rivalry with the U.S. has prompted Chinese President Xi Jinping to seize any opportunity to push back against Washington’s dominance and push American forces away from his borders.

Those interests make China look like the next great power with a stake in bringing order to Afghanistan as the Taliban prepare to declare an Islamic emirate in Kabul. After the failures of the Soviet Union and now the U.S., China will be hard pressed to avoid repeating the same mistakes in a rugged and landlocked nation notorious for exhausting empires.

“Twenty years ago, China wasn’t a global power and what was happening in Afghanistan didn’t bother China,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center. “But today, there are so many new factors — there’s the Uyghur issue, there’s economic interests and China’s self-perception as a global power.”

China has sought to portray itself as more pragmatic and less interventionist than the West while urging a negotiated peace. “China hopes the Afghan Taliban can unite with other political parties and with all ethnic groups and build a political framework in keeping with national conditions that is broadly inclusive and will lay the foundation for enduring peace,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Monday in Beijing.

Still, Hua stopped short of endorsing the Taliban’s rule, saying only that the situation in Afghanistan had “experienced major changes.”

It was all part of a long evolution by China, which once denied any connection with the Taliban before hosting the first delegations from the group in 2013. Now, as Taliban fighters made their entrance into Kabul, posts circulated on China’s heavily censored social media comparing the event to Mao Zedong’s taking of Beijing in 1949.

Meanwhile, state media gloated over the American withdrawal, with a commentary in the official Xinhua News Agency declaring it the “death knell for declining U.S. hegemony.”

“The sound of roaring planes and the hastily retreating crowds mirrored the last twilight of the empire,” the piece said.