China's Global Engagement

Cooperation, Competition, and Influence in the 21st Century

Jacques deLisle, Avery Goldstein

• Editore: Brookings Institution Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780815729709
• Argomento: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoria: Geopolítica

Assessing China's rapidly changing role on the international stage

China is again undergoing a period of significant transition. Internally, China's leaders are addressing challenges to the economy and other domestic issues after three decades of dramatic growth and reforms. President Xi Jinping and other leaders also are refashioning foreign policy to better fit what they see as China's place in the world. This has included a more proactive approach to trade and related international economic affairs, a more vigorous approach to security matters, and a more focused engagement on international cultural and educational affairs.

In this volume, China specialists from around the world explore key issues raised by a changing China’s interaction with a changing world. They chronicle China’s emergence as a more capable actor whose engagement is reshaping international affairs in many dimensions. These include: global currency and trading systems; patterns of cooperation and competition in technological innovation; economic and political trends in the developing world; the American-led security order in the Asia-Pacific region; the practice of international military and humanitarian intervention; the use of naval power; the role of international law in persistent territorial and maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas; the international human rights regime; the circulation of Chinese talent trained abroad; a more globalized film industry; and programs to reshape global cultural awareness about China through educational initiatives.

Across these diverse areas, China’s capacity—and desire—to influence events and outcomes have risen markedly. The results so far are mixed, and the future trajectory remains uncertain. But across the wide range of issues addressed in this book, China has become a major and likely an enduring participant.

ONE

A Rising China’s Growing Presence

The Challenges of Global Engagement

AVERY GOLDSTEIN

The second decade of the twenty-first century has been a period of transition within China and in China’s international relations. At a moment in its history when China’s leaders have been addressing domestic challenges that have emerged after three decades of dramatic reforms, they have also been refashioning their country’s foreign policy to better fit what they see as China’s place in a changing world order. The recalibration of China’s foreign policy has been visible in an increasingly proactive approach to international economic affairs, a more vigorous approach to international security affairs, and a more focused approach to its engagement with international cultural and educational affairs. In each of these areas, the trajectory of China’s international relations has reflected dramatic developments within China in the decades since the death of Mao Zedong and within the international system its leaders have faced. While the future of China’s global role defies prediction, it is possible to take stock of national and international factors that account for China’s current posture. This chapter begins, however, by briefly looking backward, to put recent trends in historical perspective.

FROM A REGIONALIZED WORLD ORDER TO THE MODERN ERA

China’s rise to prominence in the twenty-first century actually marks the country’s reemergence as a political entity with important relations extending beyond the realm over which its leaders formally rule. Beginning in 221 B.C., a series of imperial dynasties controlled territories in the area that is today’s China. During these millennia, the empire’s relations with the world beyond its boundaries were mostly regional rather than global in scope as interactions across often loosely defined borders and vast oceans were limited by prevailing transportation and communications technologies. In its part of the globe, however, China was typically the greatest economic and military power.

The Celestial Empire itself consisted of a political core (or heartland) that interacted with and typically dominated its periphery.1 Connections between the core and periphery and the extent of the latter’s subordination to the imperial throne varied over time but, in principle, their relations remained hierarchical; the latter paid deference to the throne’s preeminent status within what John King Fairbank described as a distinctive “tribute system” that defined a Chinese world order.2 The organizing principle of this order contrasted sharply with that of the modern international order of formally sovereign and equal states first established in the European regional system by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But despite this distinctiveness, exchanges between the empire’s core, its periphery, and even more distant reaches of the world resembled what we now think of as international relations. Goods and ideas (especially the religious beliefs of Buddhism and Islam) flowed into China across the mountains that marked the southern periphery and across the vast and desolate western periphery along what became known as the Silk Road. China’s maritime reach, though generally limited, also led to interaction with the closest parts of the periphery in East Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, and Oceania.

China’s prestige as the center of Confucian culture and the regional dominance of Sinitic civilization in East Asia proved resilient even during periods when the capacity of the ruling dynasty waned. On the two occasions when invaders from the northern periphery (Mongols in the thirteenth century and Manchus in the seventeenth century) used military victories to establish their own dynasties (the Yuan and the Qing) to rule the core, these “outsiders” embraced the essential practices of the political, economic, and cultural system already established by the Han Chinese “insiders” centuries earlier. Thus, for nearly two millennia imperial China’s influence as the key player, if not always the omnipotent hegemon, within its regional system endured.

In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the regionalized era of international relations ended. Technology and industrial modernization provided Western countries (and, by the end of the century, Japan) with the ability and the motivation to challenge China’s long-standing dominance in its neighborhood. Europeans and Americans grew increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of the last of China’s imperial rulers, the Qing, to accept diplomacy based on the principle of the formal equality of sovereign states that the West had embraced. International commerce, too, became an issue. Imperial China resisted efforts by the West, spearheaded by Great Britain, to promote commerce resting on the modern notion of mutually beneficial free trade rather than the traditional mercantilist notion of trade managed by and for the benefit of the state. As important, for the first time outsiders from well beyond the usual periphery were able to tap superior military force to impose their will on China’s rulers. Their success required the Qing dynasty to agree to concessions that undermined China’s erstwhile dominance of its regional subsystem. Defeat after military defeat at the hands of foreign powers not only cast doubt on the regime’s claims about the superiority of China’s Confucian civilization, the pillar of dynastic rule for centuries, but also compounded new internal military challenges arising within the empire’s core that were testing the Qing court’s grip on power. As imperial China’s domestic control and international prestige were simultaneously being shattered, it began to lose political sway over its periphery; as it did, foreigners began establishing their own imperial influence in these surrounding areas. China had entered what later generations would retrospectively label a “century of national humiliation” that began in the 1840s. It was only after decades of civil strife triggered and then exacerbated by repeated foreign military attacks and interventions that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 finally succeeded in establishing a regime—the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—that restored effective central rule over most of the territory once controlled by the Qing dynasty.

A CHANGING CHINA IN THE COLD WAR ORDER

The PRC emerged within an international order that was no longer regional. As it did, Beijing remained sensitive to the legacy of humiliation suffered by China at the hands of foreigners. While Chinese officials remained wary of international military and economic relations, under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1949–76) ties with the outside world were at times recognized as necessary, even if they might require unpleasant compromises of national autonomy.

Most notable among such compromises were those that facilitated the strategic cooperation needed to help ensure the regime’s security. The PRC faced serious threats from much more powerful adversaries for most of the Cold War years—first from the United States, and then from the Soviet Union. Although the risk of a full-scale invasion and occupation was low, the superpowers’ unprecedented power projection capabilities (including aircraft and missiles that could carry nuclear weapons) meant that they could use military force to coerce or attack China without first having to invade and occupy its territory. Until Beijing was able to develop its own military capabilities that could dissuade these adversaries by threatening to inflict punishing retaliation, Mao and his colleagues had little choice but to forge strategic links with one superpower as a way to check the other. China turned first to the Soviet Union to dissuade threats from the United States, and then later to the United States to dissuade threats from the Soviet Union.3 Despite such collaborations, China’s leaders resisted the closely integrated sorts of alliances that other countries formed (especially those allied with the United States) and instead limited their international strategic relations, even in the context of a formal Sino-Soviet treaty alliance, to what they deemed absolutely necessary.

China’s international economic relations were also limited during the Cold War years. In the 1950s, while the United States encouraged its global partners to isolate China, Beijing’s international economic engagement was mostly restricted to the Soviet-led socialist bloc. Although Soviet direct investment and technical assistance were helpful for China’s initial industrialization, by the mid-1950s Mao and his associates were already chafing at what they saw as the unacceptable price of assistance—an unseemly need to defer to foreign (in this case, Soviet) leadership and advice. During the 1960s, ties with the Soviet Union unraveled entirely and China’s modest international economic profile was further reduced. Perhaps making a virtue of necessity, Mao promoted an economic strategy that emphasized extreme self-reliance. Even when a serious military threat from the Soviet Union induced Beijing to pursue strategic ties with the United States in the 1970s, Mao continued to carefully circumscribe China’s international economic engagement. It was only when the political succession to Mao Zedong yielded new leaders whose reform agenda included a redefinition of China’s global role that Beijing’s international economic policy shifted dramatically. Beginning with a landmark CCP Central Committee meeting in December 1978, Deng Xiaoping and like-minded colleagues decisively rejected Mao’s one-sided emphasis on self-reliance and instead eagerly sought the benefits of increased international engagement. Over the last decade of the Cold War, this led to an unprecedented opening of China to the outside world that included trade with and investment by regional neighbors in Asia as well as Europe and the United States.

The new era of growing international involvement that dawned in the early 1980s was distinguished not only from the decades of Maoist isolation but also from the centuries-long traditions of imperial rule. Yet, the contrast with China’s recent and more distant historical experiences should not be overstated. China’s reformers, like national leaders in every country, were not interested in trading the extreme of Maoist autarky for dependence on others. They made clear that even as they pursued engagement and interdependence with the outside world, China’s development would mainly rely on its own efforts. And, although they would not be resurrecting the deference that China enjoyed in the era of emperors, Beijing’s leaders at times displayed a sensitivity to protocol that echoed rituals identified with their imperial predecessors. Of course, they no longer claimed cultural superiority. But they parlayed respect for China as the center of one of the world’s great civilizations, as well as the foreign fascination with a country rendered exotic by its inaccessibility during much of the post-WWII era, into what might be termed modern diplomacy with traditional Chinese characteristics.4

A CHANGING CHINA AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR WORLD

China’s reform program under the leadership group headed by Deng Xiaoping was anchored in a dual mandate, “enliven the domestic economy and open to the outside” (duinei gaohuo, duiwai kaifang), that clearly linked China’s own prospects to greater involvement with the outside world. Over the final two decades of the twentieth century, the new leaders crafted policies to integrate a lagging China with the global system. The PRC joined existing international economic institutions, most of which were established decades earlier under American leadership and from which the PRC previously had been excluded or that it previously had been uninterested in joining.

As part of the reforms, Beijing also adopted new policies that made it financially attractive for foreigners to invest in manufacturing and assembly of their products in China just as falling trade barriers and advances in communications and transportation were giving rise to the globalization of economic activity. When the end of the Cold War eliminated divisions reflecting Soviet-American rivalry and brought down most remaining barriers to the flow of goods and people, the process of globalization accelerated. Global production chains enabled China to leverage a large, relatively cheap, and disciplined labor pool, business-friendly government policies (including significant tax breaks), and a currency exchange rate that the government carefully managed to become a favored site for international corporations to establish manufacturing facilities. At first churning out mostly textiles and other low-end consumer goods, soon factories in China included those assembling imported components for electronics and appliances that would be re-exported for sale on global markets. By the end of the twentieth century, the economic significance of China for the world and of the world for China was dramatically increasing.

In contrast with China’s transformation that reflected domestic economic reforms and globalization, the end of the Cold War did not result in comparably dramatic changes in the country’s military-security situation. By 1983 Beijing had already become much less concerned about the threat that an internationally overextended and internally troubled Soviet Union could pose to China. As such, even before the Cold War ended, Beijing believed it faced a much less dangerous world, one that provided a more favorable environment in which China could focus its attention on economic modernization. The final decline of the Soviet Union that played out over the 1980s only reinforced that view.5 To be sure, Beijing soon grew worried about the potential threat that an America unconstrained by concerns about its defunct superpower rival might pose to Chinese interests, especially after 1989 when the specter of internal instability was raised by massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and by the ouster of communist parties from power across Eastern Europe and eventually the Soviet Union itself. But the challenge was initially perceived as political rather than military in nature. The CCP responded by reasserting its grip on power—first by brutally crushing popular demonstrations in June 1989 that called for political reforms and then by standing firm in the face of the international condemnation of the crackdown that followed. Once it felt securely back in command, Beijing reengaged the global community. By the middle of the 1990s it was embracing a new, reinvigorated approach to foreign relations.

Under this approach, what some labeled the grand strategy of “peaceful rise,” China placed top priority in its foreign policy on creating an international environment that was conducive to the country’s economic development while minimizing what were seen as the low risks of military conflict. This strategy, banking heavily on creative diplomacy, reflected a recognition that China’s continuing economic and technological shortcomings meant that Beijing could not rely mainly on its military capabilities to advance the country’s national interests.6 And despite misgivings about the possible implications of unchecked American military power, it also reflected a recognition that the United States and its Cold War legacy alliances in East Asia continued to supply the collective good of a peaceful environment that enabled the region’s states, most notably China, to invest in economic development rather than military competition.

CHINA’S ECONOMIC ARRIVAL

By the opening years of the twenty-first century, China had reaped substantial and growing benefits from its engagement with an ever more globalized world economy and a peaceful East Asia. Indeed, China had benefited to the point that its choices were beginning to shape, as well as be shaped by, this international order.7 As a surging China moved toward becoming the world’s leading trading state and second largest economy, its ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Rising China’s Growing Presence: The Challenges of Global Engagement
• 2. True Revisionist: China and the Global Monetary System
• 3. Rising Nationalism: China’s Regulation of Investment Trade
• 4. Teams of Rivals: China, the United States, and the Race to Develop Technologies for a Sustainable Energy Future
• 5. Concentrated Interests: China’s Involvement with Latin American Economies
• 6. Competing Visions: China, America, and the Asia-Pacific Security Order
• 7. Is There Something Beyond No? China and Intervention in a New Era
• 8. The Rise of the Chinese Navy: From Regional Naval Power to Global Naval Power?
• 9. China’s Territorial and Maritime Disputes in the South and East China Seas: What Role for International Law?
• 10. China and the International Human Rights Legal Regime: Orthodoxy, Resistance, and Legitimacy
• 11. Leaders, Bureaucrats, and Institutional Culture: The Struggle to Bring Back China’s Top Overseas Talent
• 12. The Chinese Dream in Popular Culture: China as Producer and Consumer of Films at Home and Abroad
• 13. Chinese Culture in a Global Context: The Confucius Institute as a Geo-Cultural Force
• Contributors
• Index