Chinese Scholars and Foreign Policy

Debating International Relations

Huiyun Feng, Kai He, Yan Xuetong, Huiyun Feng, Kai He, Yan Xuetong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367140083
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How does China see the rest of the world? One way to answer this question is to look at the work of China's scholars in the field of International Relations (IR). This leads to a second question – to what extent do Chinese IR scholars influence Beijing's foreign policy and outlook? The contributors to this book seek to answer these key questions, drawing on their own first- and second-hand experiences of involvement in scholarly IR debates in China.

Discussing fundamental aspects of China's foreign policy such as China's view of the international structure, soft power projection, maritime disputes, and the principle of non-interference, this book provides insights into the hinterland of Chinese foreign policy-making. It is an invaluable reference for global IR scholars, especially those with a direct interest in understanding and predicting China's actions and reactions on a range of international issues.

1Why do Chinese IR scholars matter?

Huiyun Feng and Kai He

Introduction

Since 2010, China has become the second largest economy after the United States in the world. China’s military spending is also the second largest, just behind that of the United States’ in recent years. In 2016, China announced a further increase in its military budget by 7–8 per cent. Although the power gap between China and the United States is still significant, “the rise of China is the big story of our era” (Shambaugh 2013, emphasis in original). China’s “assertive diplomacy” has also drawn deep suspicions from the rest of the world since the global financial crisis in 2008 (e.g. Swaine 2010, 2011; Swaine and Fravel 2011). The 2012 Scarborough Shoal crisis with the Philippines, the still ongoing flare-ups with Japan on the Senkaku/Diaoyu disputes, as well as the maritime competition or even rivalry between China and the United States in the South China Sea have further intensified the strategic concerns over China’s rise. How to understand China’s rise and its implications for Asian security is an imperative challenge for policy makers in today’s world and in the foreseeable future.

In order to better manage the rise of China, the United States and other nations need to know what Chinese leaders think about its own power and status, and perceive the US power and status, so as to predict how China will behave with their increasing economic and military capabilities in international affairs. Understanding the Chinese perspective is the first step in making effective policy on China. As Henry Kissinger (2011: vxi) advises, we “do not always agree with the Chinese perspective…But it is necessary to understand it, since China will play such a big role in the world that is emerging in the twenty-first century”. If “strategic distrust” is a major obstacle in the bilateral relations between the two nations as Kenneth Lieberthal and Jisi Wang (2012) suggest, deepening our understanding of Chinese perceptions and views on international relations (IR) will be a crucial task for bridging the perception gap and mitigating the strategic distrust between the United States and China.

China experienced its once-a-decade leadership transition in 2012, and China’s new President Xi Jinping is expected to remain in power for at least ten years (until 2022). Chinese foreign policy is moving in a new direction under Xi’s leadership, as reflected in China’s policy preference of “striving for achievement” (有所作为 you suo zuo wei) in recent years (Yan 2014). How will Chinese leaders perceive China’s power versus the United States in the next ten years? How do the Chinese view the US “rebalancing” strategy in Asia? What are Chinese leaders’ visions for bilateral relations with Japan and other neighbors? Will China abandon its “peaceful rise” policy? These are some questions of vital importance to policy makers in the Asia Pacific in making a sensible China policy and forging a mutually beneficial relationship with China. It is time to investigate the Chinese leadership under Xi and their perceptions of Asian security and IR, so that the outside world can better prepare for both opportunities and challenges brought about by China’s rise.

One obstacle in making sense of China’s policy is that there is no direct way to gauge Chinese leaders’ perceptions and opinions due to cultural, political, and social system differences. This book is intended to explore and understand Chinese leaders’ perceptions and attitudes regarding Asian security through the eyes of China’s IR scholars. Chinese IR scholars’ views can be a “proxy measure” to make sense of Chinese leaders’ perceptions on Asian security, given the lack of reliable alternative methods to directly measure Chinese leaders’ perceptions in detail. Chinese IR scholars serve as the mediators between Chinese leaders and the general public in society.

We do not intend to simply draw a causal and linear link between Chinese IR scholars and policy makers. Instead, we suggest that there are at least four types of relations between Chinese IR scholars and China’s policy makers. First, some Chinese IR scholars may play an active role in influencing China’s foreign policy as part of an epistemic community. Second, some may provide intellectual products in a free market of ideas for policy makers to consume when making decisions. Third, Chinese IR scholars may also play a policy signaling role in facilitating the government’s test of some controversial ideas before new policies or policy changes are formalized. Fourth, the rise and fall of Chinese IR scholars’ ideas and debates can serve as a mirror to reflect the underlying transformations of Chinese foreign policies and domestic politics. Through exploring Chinese IR scholars’ views and debates, therefore, we can better assess how Chinese policy makers may think, behave, and react on major issues in IR.

This introduction chapter addresses the question of why we study Chinese IR scholars. We review the state of the art in the studies of Chinese IR scholars and argue that these scholars as a subject of research have a unique value in understanding Chinese foreign policy. Surveying the existing research, we detect two areas of concern: first is the limited attention to the diversity of views and internal debates among Chinese IR scholars; second is the lack of theorization on the role of IR scholars in foreign policy. Therefore, we discuss next how we study Chinese IR scholars’ views and perceptions by investigating internal debates among Chinese IR scholars. We argue that the internal debates among Chinese IR scholars are more dynamic than widely perceived in the Western world. More importantly, the unique feature of this book is to let Chinese IR scholars communicate their own debates among themselves.

We propose in this chapter four possible models as a starting point for other researchers to investigate the role of Chinese IR scholars in policy making in China’s political system: the “epistemic community model”, the “free market model”, the “policy signaling model”, and the “mirroring policy model”. Then, we introduce the structure of this book. In the conclusion, we suggest that through examining Chinese IR scholars’ debates as well as theorizing their diverse roles in foreign policy, we can obtain a more systematic and dynamic picture of Chinese scholars’ perceptions. This perspective will facilitate a deeper understanding of Chinese foreign policy as well as a better assessment of its possible orientations in the future.

The state of the art in the study of Chinese IR scholars¹

The significance of studying Chinese IR scholars did not appear until after the Cold War. In Beautiful Imperialist (1991), David Shambaugh examined how America Watchers, i.e. Chinese IR scholars who work on US–China relations, perceived the United States between 1972 and 1990. The book was path breaking in that it highlighted the important role of Chinese IR scholars as mediators in connecting Chinese society and Chinese policy makers. Shambaugh concluded that China’s distorted and biased perceptions of the United States contributed to the fluctuations in US–China relations during the Cold War.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, other scholars followed Shambaugh’s example to explore China’s changing perceptions of the United States through the eyes of the America Watchers (e.g. Wang 2000; Chen 2003; Zhang 2005). For example, Bonnie Glaser and Phillip Saunders (2002) examined the evolving roles and increasing influence of Chinese research institutions in China’s foreign policy decision-making process. Similarly, Glaser and Evan Medeiros (2007) explored how Chinese think tank analysts and university-based scholars have influenced a change in China’s foreign policy discourse from “peaceful rise” to “peaceful development” in the 2000s. In 2012, Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell (2012) published “How China Sees America” in Foreign Affairs, based on their extensive interviews and fieldwork in Beijing, in which they analyzed “the sum of Beijing’s fears” towards the United States. In a most recent study, Daniel Lynch (2015) investigates how Chinese academic elites debate China’s economics, politics, and foreign policy through intensive content analyses of Chinese publications and elite interviews.

There are two methodological reasons to treat Chinese IR scholars as a new focal point in the study of China’s foreign policy. First, unlike the general public, the views of IR scholars or experts can be more valuable in examining China’s foreign policy and IR. There is an increasing research trend in the use of elite views to make sense of IR. For example, in 2012, the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project launched a “US-China Security Perceptions Project” with the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the China Strategic Culture Promotion Association, and the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University. The “US-China Security Perceptions Project” aimed to evaluate different views between the general public and experts in both the United States and China regarding US–China security issues. The final report was released in December 2013 and suggested that the US public and experts had different perceptions regarding US–China policies (Swaine et al. 2013).²

Second, the changing decision-making structure in China offers a unique social role to Chinese IR scholars. With widespread use of the Internet and different social media fora, the foreign policy decision-making process in China is no longer “one man’s rule” (Ning 1997; Nathan and Scobell 2012). Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the public has a direct impact on Chinese foreign policy, China’s policy makers face increasing pressure from society in the process of making foreign policy decisions. By measuring how Chinese IR scholars look at Chinese power, US policies, and Chinese foreign policy, we can be more confident in inferring how China’s policy makers might perceive and think of IR when facing constraints from society.

These previous scholarly efforts to examine the perceptions of Chinese IR scholars have formed the foundations of this project. However, there are two methodological and theoretical limitations in the existing research. First, there is no systematic study of the internal debates among Chinese IR scholars. Most research focuses on Chinese IR scholars’ views of the United States, not Asian security issues and IR in general. With a limited quantity of published academic works, there is a significant research gap in the study of China’s IR scholars’ perceptions after 2000. Moreover, most research highlights the dominant views of Chinese IR scholars and uses the “winning” voice to simply infer what Chinese leaders and policy makers might think in foreign policy. However, Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions are in fact much more diverse than widely perceived. Without systematically examining the different views among IR scholars, the origins of their debates, as well as the processes in their debates, we cannot fully grasp and understand the rise and the fall of major ideas in the Chinese IR community as well as the role of Chinese IR scholars in foreign policy.

Second, there is a lack of theorization about the role of Chinese IR scholars in foreign policy. Most research simply draws a linkage between Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions and China’s foreign policy without exploring the internal mechanisms and dynamics between the two. Consequently, this lack of theorization phenomenon drives some scholars to question whether in China the so-called public opinion, including IR scholars’ views, is actually a result rather than a source of governmental policy (Jakobson and Knox 2010; Sun 2011). Other scholars suggest that Chinese foreign policy decision-making is widely seen as the elite’s business while the public stays far away from the decision-making process (Fewsmith and Rosen 2001; Wang and Shirk 2004). Some critics even sharply argue that advising Chinese leaders is a “futile effort” because most recommendations and reports written by scholars and analysts are filtered out by numerous bureaucracies before reaching policy makers at the top (Lu 2012).

As existing research suggests, Chinese IR scholars and the public in general might not affect Chinese foreign policy directly; however, their influence cannot be ignored because of the pluralistic trend in the Chinese decision-making process observed by many Chinese scholars (e.g. Swaine and Zhang 2006; Lampton 2014). Our project is built on this analytical premise. We argue that we need to further theorize the relationship between Chinese IR scholars and policy makers in order to better understand the dynamic role of Chinese IR scholars in foreign policy.

Therefore, this book is designed to address the above two analytical deficiencies in the study of Chinese IR scholars. On the one hand, we focus on Chinese IR scholars’ internal debates and let Chinese IR scholars tell their own stories to the outside world. On the other hand, we propose four analytical models to further theorize the role of Chinese IR scholars in foreign policy. It is not our intention to formalize the relationship between Chinese IR scholars and foreign policy. Instead, we keep this question open in this book for scholars to discuss and investigate. In other words, we only suggest at this point that Chinese IR scholars matter in foreign policy, but how they matter is subject to debate. It will be a major methodological task in this book for our contributors to investigate how Chinese IR scholars matter in their own research.

Why internal debates among Chinese IR scholars matter

There are three reasons for focusing on Chinese IR scholars’ debates. First, the Chinese debates will provide a new perspective on the study of Chinese IR scholars and foreign policy. As mentioned before, there is no systematic research on the internal debates among Chinese IR scholars, especially into the 2000s. Given the fact that both Chinese politics and society are moving in a pluralist direction, Chinese leaders can no longer remain immune from societal influences, e.g. from IR scholars over foreign policy issues. IR scholars are also not easily manipulated or influenced by the government. China’s foreign policy decision-making process has become institutionalized, in that Chinese IR scholars and policy analysts play an important consultative role in advising policy makers through various channels.

Therefore, Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions can provide a “parameter” or “domain” of Chinese leaders’ opinions and thoughts. This perceptual parameter can not only help outsiders understand the domain of actions or the constraints Chinese leaders may face when making decisions, but also make sense of how Chinese leaders may behave in the future and thereby provide some predictive value. As Daniel Lynch (2015: x) points out, “studying these (Chinese scholars’) images can be useful in trying to assess what trajectory is likely to emerge, precisely because the elites are operating inside parameters imposed by the (still) awesomely powerful Party-state”. Through in-depth discussions of the various debates among Chinese IR scholars, this project will present an updated and a more nuanced, comprehensive picture of different schools of thought in the Chinese IR community.

Second, this project is intended to bridge the perception gap between the Chinese IR community and the outside world. Due to the language barrier and different publication requirements, Chinese IR scholars are not very active in the English-based publishing world, although this situation is gradually changing. In public, especially in English-based media, Chinese scholars seem to uphold the party line when they are interviewed or reported. Consequently, the result is a stereotyped image of a “government mouthpiece”, in that Chinese scholars only explain, elaborate, and defend Chinese foreign policies and positions in IR without contributing their independent thoughts and ideas. We have to admit that, in fact, many scholarly works in China fall into this category for two reasons. First, it is safe to follow the party line in China’s political system. Second, it is easy to obtain funding and get published if scholars conduct research on “hot” topics guided by the government. While we are fully aware of this phenomenon, we suggest that Chinese IR scholars play more diverse and important roles in foreign policy than the “government mouthpiece” argument has suggested.

By focusing on Chinese IR scholars’ internal debates, we can explicitly address this “government mouthpiece” problem, because it is impossible for both sides in a debate to support the government’s policy. In other words, the method of exploring Chinese IR scholars’ debates undermines the argument that the views of Chinese IR scholars are simply a “mouthpiece” of Beijing’s party line and have no influence on the perceptions and thinking of Chinese leaders. We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Why do Chinese IR scholars matter?
• SECTION I Key concepts debates
• SECTION II Key policies debates
• Conclusion
• Index