More than twenty leading specialists on China’s foreign relations gathered together for several days in August 1990 in Aspen, Colorado, to discuss what they believed were the principal sources and patterns of the PRC’s foreign policy behavior during the preceding forty years. The participants also used the occasion to begin bridging the gap between the fields of international relations (IR) theory and Chinese area studies (see accompanying interview). Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice presents the results of that meeting along with some selective updating.
Co-editor David Shambaugh, while acknowledging that the field of Chinese foreign policy studies is already rich in monographic literature on specific periods and bilateral relations, says the field is still deficient in “aggregate and reflective perspectives.” These well-written essays succeed in doing something about this. This comprehensive and well-organized book is likely to be consulted for years to come, appropriate for a work dedicated to two of its own contributors, Allen Whiting and the late Harold Hinton, both pioneers in the study of China’s foreign relations.
The volume ranges widely yet systematically over its broad, elusive topic, assessing the domestic and international sources of Chinese foreign policy. The contributors evaluate how China has interacted over time with other countries, focusing on specific types of behavior and, at the same time, exploring the interrelationship between Chinese foreign policy and IR theory. A concluding chapter by co-editor Thomas Robinson provides a synthesis and partially updates developments since the conference.
Shambaugh’s appendix is a sixteen-page bibliographical essay on new sources for studies of China’s foreign relations and security policy. He describes the plethora of research material that has become available in recent years, certainly as compared to the paucity of such information earlier. Major potential sources of insight, for example, are the recently opened Foreign Ministry, KGB, and Central Committee archives of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Shambaugh points out that the materials available are still but a fraction of what exists in China itself. Most of these are not accessible because Beijing regards them as extremely sensitive, censorable subject matter.
William Kirby leads off the volume with an apt discussion of China’s driving aspirations since the late-Imperial and Republican periods to preserve its autonomy, despite the harsh reality of its relative marginalization and eroding autonomy in modern international society. He examines China’s efforts to adopt strategies of cooperation designed to promote security and develop the economy. These aspirations were accompanied, he asserts, “by a no less consistent desire to control the domestic effects of contact with the outside world.”
Steven Levine looks at the role played by ideology in shaping the PRC’s foreign policy and interaction with other countries. He points out that a persistent disjunction has existed between the ideological framework and the practice of foreign policy. Levine sees that modern China’s authentic ideology is “an evolving Chinese nationalism” that “is likely to incorporate elements of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist worldview into a new amalgam that will also contain elements from the Imperial past and the Republican-era teachings of Sun Yat-sen and his followers.”
How best to understand party elites in the making of foreign policy?Try combining "theory and the fortune cookie," says one scholar—both generalists and specialists provide useful insights into China's international relations.
Barry Naughton considers the crucial role of China’s economic development strategy in foreign relations. He reviews the changing policies since 1949, but focuses primarily on Beijing’s post-1978 opening to the world. Naughton sees regional economic “Chinas”—the southern coastal provinces, the “Communist core” of the north and northeast, and the neidi or interior of the country—as having different developmental priorities and, therefore, different foreign policy concerns. According to Naughton, China will continue its move toward a dramatically more open economy. It will also become more integrated into the East Asian economy, especially the northeast, as well as the global market economy.
Carol Lee Hamrin identifies the key elites and the changing and pluralizing bureaucracy involved in the complexities of foreign policymaking. In conclusion, she says that China’s intransigent international posture is a thing of the past, “something even a Mao Zedong could not enforce in an era of mass instant communications and global economic interdependence.”
These early chapters are complemented by two others that analyze international considerations: William Tow looks at China’s relationships in the world’s increasingly multipolar strategic system. He is skeptical about how well China’s leaders comprehend international interdependence. Wendy Frieman analyzes the effect of international science and technology systems on China’s foreign relations, indicating the importance of non-state actors such as professional scientific societies. But she stresses that the internationalization of scientific study worldwide has had a greater impact on China’s domestic policy than on its foreign policy.
One whole section of the book is given to China’s bilateral and regional relationships. This includes David Shambaugh’s coverage of the relationship with the United States, which emphasizes its cyclical nature. He points out that the “characteristic disequilibrium” between the two countries “augurs for an unsettled future.” Steven Goldstein surveys the past Sino-Soviet relationship, noting the important roles of Chinese nationalism and of Mao’s personal interventions. This in turn points out the extraordinary influence that a limited number of Chinese leaders have had on the country’s foreign relations. Other chapters cover China’s relations with Europe, Africa, the Middle East and, more generally, with other countries in Asia.
Another section looks at specific categories of China’s international behavior. Harry Harding examines China’s cooperative relationships with other nations, differentiating its various state relations as being with patrons, clients, and partners. He sees a preference in recent years for partnership relations. Madelyn Ross looks at China’s behavior in the areas of trade, aid, and investment, showing that while China’s goals have remained constant, its partners have changed considerably over time.
Samuel Kim demonstrates that international organizations have been important stimuli in shaping both China’s foreign policy and its domestic agenda. Experienced scholar-diplomat Paul Kreisberg gives a sensible and fair-minded comparative analysis of China’s negotiating patterns, holding that the Chinese style has become increasingly homogenized and similar to Western styles. He notes that the influence of Chinese negotiating patterns in Greater China—including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore—“has increasingly permeated the negotiating behavior of Chinese officials in the coastal areas, and in Beijing as well.” Nevertheless, on important issues such as sovereignty, security, and human rights, “decision-making remains extremely tightly controlled by older generations whose approaches to negotiations and policy are not modern.”
It is difficult to single out individual essays from this rich array of presentations, but the three on IR theory and the study of Chinese foreign policy demand special attention. Wang Jisi, the only Chinese contributor—in “a chapter with ‘Chinese characteristics,’” as he puts it—makes it clear that there are distinctive Chinese approaches to observing international politics in general and that China’s IR specialists are keen to learn how their country’s foreign policy is interpreted in the West. He flatly concedes that “in contrast to cultural explanations, Marxist-Leninist theories of international relations do not appear to be a very useful analytical tool in studying Chinese foreign policy.”
Wang’s essay complements Allen Whiting’s discussion of IR theory and its usefulness when taking a Sinological approach to forecasting Chinese foreign policy. Whiting, speaking from his singular experience as an academic and a State Department official, contends that analysts should use both the generalist and the specialist approaches, which he says is a way of “combining theory and the fortune cookie.”
In the third essay, James Rosenau offers a theoretical discourse on China’s options in a world in which states coexist with non-governmental organizations and actors devoid of specific concerns about sovereignty. Such actors, including international newspapers, magazines, television networks, and even fax machine users, make it impossible for any state to remain isolated. As for China’s state-centrism, Rosenau says the multicentric world community will pressure China until it relaxes economic and political controls. This process has in fact been discernible throughout the 1990s, even if the effects are uneven and uncertain.
As fine and informative a compilation as this work is, it invites criticism on at least two grounds. First, only one of the twenty-one essays is by a Chinese scholar. And Wang Jisi’s especially fine contribution only underscores the gravity of this shortcoming. Certainly there are many other Chinese who can speak with exceptional knowledge and frankness, including scholars from the mainland, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Thomas Robinson, in a footnote to his concluding essay, remarks that certain kinds of information necessary for analyses are not generally available, including details of Chinese decision-making and assessments of policymakers’ attitudes. This fact emphasizes the necessity for cooperating more fully with Chinese scholars who have an advantage in this regard because they are sometimes privy to such information.
A second criticism concerns the neglect of the Republic of China on Taiwan in this book. Although Taiwan is mentioned in many of the essays, this only highlights the problem. Taiwan is an important entity in its own right, and not solely because of Beijing’s efforts to pressure other nations to isolate Taipei in the international community. Surely, Beijing takes into consideration Taipei’s diplomacy, particularly with regard to the island’s efforts to broaden existing bilateral relationships around the world beyond its important trade activities.
Other matters of concern for Beijing are Taipei’s purchase of advanced weaponry, its strong campaign to gain re-entry into the United Nations and the WTO (World Trade Organization), and its implementation of a “go south” strategy that deflects investment away from the Chinese mainland. Each of these must have some impact on Beijing’s foreign policy planning and implementation, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
In a related vein, little mention is made in these pages of “Greater China,” the very loose but increasingly interdependent economic grouping of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China’s southern maritime provinces. The omission is curious. Although the term fell out of use for a few months in 1989 until the initial shock of Tiananmen wore off, not long afterward it again became a fashionable and useful way of looking at this part of Asia. In fact, The China Quarterly, edited by David Shambaugh, published a special issue on the topic in December 1993. That issue, incidentally, included an article on the foreign relations of Greater China; it was written by Michael Yahuda, who in this volume contributes an essay on China’s relations with Europe.
In the book’s concluding essay, Robinson says a shift can be seen among the determinants of Chinese policy, “from domestic primacy to a changing mixture in importance of domestic and international factors.” He also sees a shift in emphasis from political to economic concerns as well as a decline in the relative importance of the military.
Robinson says that the exponential growth of China’s national power “has not, for the most part, been reflected fully in terms of China’s general acceptance in world councils, in its military power projection capability, in its strength in the world economy, or its cultural attractiveness.” He believes that long-term trends, in China and internationally, favor the PRC’s acceptance as a responsible participant in global affairs.
But before the PRC can emerge as a global power, it has to manage the transition from Communism and authoritarianism to a market democracy. Moreover, Beijing has to learn the economic, diplomatic, and national security rules of the international community, including such priorities as environmental concerns. “Until there is a full generational succession in China,” Robinson says, “until the economic transformation of the country is much more advanced along many dimensions, and until new Asian and international security systems are in place, China and its foreign policy could remain largely outside accepted channels and norms of international relations.”
Stephen Uhalley, Jr., is a professor of Chinese history at the University of Hawaii.