Jamie F Metzl: China must earn its global leadership

CHINA'S willingness to join negotiations on potential sanctions against Iran and to send President Hu Jintao to a nuclear security summit in Washington this month are important preliminary steps towards taking more responsibility in managing international affairs.

But joining conversations or showing up for meetings is not enough. Given its growing profile, China must do far more to demonstrate its bona fides as a responsible global leader, or risk undermining the system that has enabled its own rise.

China has emerged as a world power far more quickly than most observers – and China's own leaders – might have predicted . China's rapid economic growth, juxtaposed against America's problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, monumental debt and role in sparking the global financial crisis, have changed global power realities.

China's current international influence likely outstrips its desire or capacity. This puts it in a difficult position in relation to the so-called international system – the structures and rules created by the United States and others after the Second World War to check national sovereignty through a system of overlapping jurisdictions, transnational obligations and fundamental rights. China has been an enormous beneficiary of this system, and its rise would have been unthinkable without the free-trade system and globalisation process, access to US markets and global shipping lanes secured by the US Navy.

Because China's leaders are not popularly elected, their legitimacy stems largely from two sources – their connection to the Chinese revolution and their ability to deliver national security and economic growth.

The economic foundation of the Chinese government's legitimacy also places a burden on China's leaders to make calls that foster domestic economic growth at the expense of virtually everything else. This creates a difficult situation as China emerges as the world's second-largest economy. If China, in the name of national sovereignty, does not buy into the international system, it becomes hard to argue that this system exists.

China's unwillingness, for example, to join other members of the international community in pressuring Iran and North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons programmes foreshadows the potential collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

China will destroy the international system if it does not actively endorse and work to maintain it, or reframe it for the greater common good.

The US and the international community must acknowledge that today's fast-rising China has earned the right to play an important role in shaping how the 21st century unfolds. But if China's leaders will neither do more to support the current international system, nor articulate an alternative, and instead continue to hark back to 19th-century models of inviolable sovereignty, they will destroy a viable global order.

• Jamie F Metzl, who served on President Bill Clinton's US National Security Council, is executive vice-president of the Asia Society.