Late last year, the Free China Review interviewed David Shambaugh, co-editor of Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice. Shambaugh is editor of the China Quarterly and a senior lecturer in Chinese Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has written extensively on China’s domestic politics, foreign relations, and military affairs, and on international politics in Asia. Excerpts from the interview follow:
FCR: What is the cutoff date for the material in this book?
David Shambaugh: The book appeared in the spring of 1994 and the material is current up to the end of 1993. But this is not one of those publications that’s going to lose shelf life. It’s not about current events; it’s about four-plus decades of PRC behavior. The idea was to look backwards for patterns of behavior over time.
The book is divided into five parts. The first looks at domestic sources of Chinese foreign policy—what drives it, and the domestic elements that contribute to it: ideological, elite, political, perceptual, and historical. We next look at two elements in the international system that influence and constrain Chinese foreign policy, so-called strategic factors and international science and technology.
In the third section we look at China’s foreign policy functionally, examining China’s relations over the years with the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The late Harold Hinton also contributed an article on China as an Asian power.
In the fourth section, we examine how China has behaved along four continua: in international organizations; in negotiations; in international commerce, finance, and trade; and in cooperation with other countries. The latter is a considerably different approach, because most studies emphasize the conflictual nature. Harry Harding, the writer of this chapter, finds that in China’s relations with foreign countries there are patterns of cooperation, patterns of fallout, and even patterns of regeneration.
He finds that with the exception of North Korea and Pakistan, China’s relations with foreign countries have invariably deteriorated and fallen out. There is not a single country in the world with which China has had a good relationship that did not go sour—and a sour relationship that has not eventually gone sweet. There are patterns in these relationships. When they begin to go sour, for example, China raises its rhetoric and accuses the other side of violating the principles that guide the relationship. It’s never China that is responsible for the deterioration of the relationship; it’s always the other party.
We look at international relations theory in the final section. The book is a non-traditional study of Chinese foreign policy. The chapters are broad gauged, historical in focus, and have a depth that we hope will give the book a broad readership.
How does the chapter on negotiating compare with Richard Solomon’s well-known studies of Chinese political negotiating behavior?
That chapter is by Paul Kreisberg. He finds that Chinese negotiating behavior is not unique, whereas Solomon finds it unique. Solomon used the political culture approach, which indicates that Chinese are unique interlocutors.
Kreisberg is a long-time American diplomat who has negotiated extensively with the Chinese, Thais, Indians, and Indonesians, as well as with some African and Middle Eastern states. He finds patterns of Chinese negotiation tactics are much the same as those in other countries. Indeed, there are unique factors, but there are as many commonalities. That’s an interesting, important finding. One would have expected that there would be many more unique than non-unique factors, but this is not the case.
One more question on negotiating tactics: China has usually been successful in getting what it wants from the United States, even though it is not in a position of substantial economic, political, or strategic power. But if China does so well with the promises of markets instead of real markets, for example, what is going to happen when mainland China has real power?
That’s a good point. China has been very successful in negotiating with the U.S. and other countries—and doing so from a position of weakness, really. It has exaggerated its market and it has exaggerated its strategic importance, especially during the Cold War. And now that it’s gaining some power, we find that China is using its economic clout vis-à-vis the United States, Japan, and other countries. It has used it against France to penalize its sale of Mirages to Taiwan; it has threatened the loss of markets to foreign investors; and it is now apparently offering large amounts of aid to developing countries so they will abandon relations with the ROC on Taiwan. This shows that China is beginning to play hard ball and use the traditional instruments of power now that it has them.
None of this bodes well for either Asia or the West, especially because China’s negotiating power is combined with an assertive nationalism, a rapidly growing military, and a large chip on its shoulder because it’s trying to redress a hundred and fifty years of weakness vis-à-vis the West. China is going to be a very difficult partner and interlocutor. I would even argue that in the years to come it will destabilize international politics in East Asia.
Why doesn’t this book include papers specifically on Taiwan? It seems, for example, that any given country’s orientation toward Taiwan has considerable impact on Beijing’s foreign policy toward those countries.
The omission is not an intentional oversight. But only so much could be fit into the twenty-two chapters and 600-plus pages. We excluded China’s financial role in the world, as well as Taiwan’s. But the omission also indicates that the dynamics of Taiwan-mainland relations do not fall squarely into the subject of Chinese foreign policy. They do so only insofar as mainland China tries to induce pressure on foreign governments in order to influence their relations with the ROC on Taiwan. And, of course, Taiwan’s attempts to get into the international arena have an impact as well. But generally speaking, Taiwan has not been a major issue in Beijing’s foreign policy, with the exception of the U.S.-China relationship, and this issue is discussed in my chapter.
Has the ROC on Taiwan become more of a major issue over the last couple of years because of its active U.N. bid and its economic links within the so-called Greater China region? If you were doing a second edition of this book and you could add a paper or two on Taiwan, what would be the highest priority issues to include?
My view of the Taiwan-mainland relationship is not that it deserves a chapter in a broader book about China’s foreign relations, but that it deserves a more extensive monograph in its own right. There are so many elements to it—and in fact many people are writing on this topic. The China Quarterly has already published a special issue on Greater China, and we are going to have a special issue on the Taiwan-mainland relationship next year.
Obviously, the key issue is commercial investment across the Taiwan Strait. Secondly, mutual perceptions across the strait should be examined—the understanding, or the lack of understanding, each has of the other. I think the lack of understanding that the mainland has of Taiwan—by that I mean so-called Taiwan specialists on the mainland, the Taiwan research institutions, and some of the state security organizations—show remarkable naïveté and misunderstanding about events in Taiwan. You find it also at the level of central leaders and, indeed, among the ordinary population when you talk to mainlanders about Taiwan. They simply don’t know what goes on here and how this island has changed over the last few years.
The understanding of the mainland on Taiwan is obviously better because there is an increasing number of people who visit the mainland and bring back stories. And this includes the press.
Security is a third important issue. The military balance in the Taiwan Strait is once again on the agenda of analysts if not policymakers. There is an increasing military tension across the strait and increasing military pressure from the mainland on Taiwan. The September [1994] military exercises along the mainland coast were the largest since 1979. And with the acquisition of F-16s, Mirage 2000s, and various antisubmarine systems, Taiwan is upgrading its defensive capability against mainland military pressure.
In the last two or three years, Taiwan has risen right to the top of the mainland’s national security agenda. This is evidenced in a number of ways: active invasion scenarios, war gaming, and books published by the mainland’s National Defense University concerning blockades and invasions of Taiwan. So the security dimension, along with investment and mutual perceptions, should be examined.
And fourth, I suppose the diplomatic dimension should be looked at in order to analyze Taiwan’s increased efforts to legitimize its role in the world as a state.
You said in the introduction that one of the book’s goals was to help bridge the gap between international relations (IR) studies and Chinese area studies. What does this mean?
What is involved is a deeper problem that exists in the United States between social science and area studies. There has been long-standing contention between the two in American universities. Area studies specialists are considered an odd breed within social science departments. Although some area studies scholars have employed social science theories to study their countries—that includes China specialists—the bulk of them have not. They see China as sui generis, and indeed other countries as well. That extends to the fields of IR and Chinese foreign policy studies.
Very few scholars of Chinese foreign policy over the years have employed methods drawn from the broader field of IR theory to study Chinese foreign policy. Tom Robinson, my co-editor, and Samuel Kim, one of the contributors, are two noteworthy scholars who have done so consistently. We addressed this issue in a whole section in the book. The very noted IR theorist, James Rosenau, contributed a chapter. So did Allen Whiting, who has also done much to bridge the gap between the two, and Wang Jisi, who is an extremely fine Chinese scholar of international relations theory.
Moreover, in each of the chapters in this book we have tried to instill some theory. We asked the authors to consider this in the IR chapters, and I think the effort shows through. So this book is not just a cataloging of China’s foreign relations over four decades. It also tries to establish patterns of behavior, to step back from the minutiae to look at broad patterns that we can summarize. We’ve seen four-plus decades of PRC behavior in the world, and there are indeed patterns. We then generalize on those patterns and try to wed theory to evidence. For these reasons, I think this is one of the more important books on China’s foreign relations that has ever been published.
Do you see a basic historiographical shift in the scholarship published on China since mid-1989?
Very much. The study of contemporary China is beginning to assume some of the characteristics of the study of late Imperial China, not only in the central-periphery relations, where scholars are paying more attention to localities and provinces, but also in the patterns of administration. We are beginning to look way beyond Beijing at issues and actors that we should have been looking at for many years. And that’s bringing the levels of analysis down to lower levels. For example, we’re looking at bargaining between locality and province, and province and center, and the devolution of economic power as well as political power.
A number of people are seeing today the same signs of disintegration in the mainland that also characterized the end of the Ching dynasty and, indeed, the end of the Republican period before the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. These include corruption, official despotism, rising crime, inability to collect taxes, and the devolution of power. So the short answer to your question is, yes, contemporary China specialists are beginning to wake up to something they should have investigated many years ago, namely the historical patterns of administration and interaction.
Along with the trend of analyzing regional and lower levels of issues and actors, there seems to be a growing reluctance to stand back and generalize. Is it getting more difficult to find scholars who do this?
That is very much the case. I’ve edited another book, American Studies of Contemporary China, which was published recently. One of the principal points made by a number of its contributors, including myself, is the increasing particularism in China studies.
We now go into the mainland and study at a very precise, micro level. Literally, a county is considered a large unit. We are now studying villages and sub-villages. Very few people are studying national politics—very few people are even studying elite politics or concentrating their studies on Beijing as a national or even international actor. Even though we have substantially enriched our knowledge of the various components of the Chinese administrative hierarchy and mentalities, that has come at the loss of an ability to generalize.
I'm not sure one should generalize the notion of a "China" with a capital C—that's always been something of a fiction, and probably never more so than now. But we should generalize. There are broad patterns of macro-behavior in the mainland and it is incumbent upon China analysts to search for those patterns, bring them up for consideration, and try to qualify them.