China's Use of Military Force in Foreign Affairs

The Dragon Strikes

Markus B. Liegl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315529318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book explains why China has resorted to the use of large-scale military force in foreign affairs.

How will China use its growing military might in coming crisis and existing conflicts? This book contributes to the current debate on the future of the Asia-Pacific region by examining why China has resorted to using military force in the past. Utilizing fresh theoretical insights on the causes of interstate war and employing a sophisticated methodological framework, the book provides detailed analyses of China's intervention in the Korean War, the Sino-Indian War, China's border clashes with the Soviet Union and the Sino-Vietnamese War. It argues that China did not employ military force in these wars for the sake of national security or because of material issues under contestation, as frequently claimed. Rather, the book's findings strongly suggest that considerations about China's international status and relative standing are the principal reasons for China's decision to engage in military force in these instances. When reflecting the study's central insight back onto China's contemporary territorial conflicts and problematic bilateral relationships, it is argued that the People's Republic is still a status-seeking and thus highly status-sensitive actor. As a result, China's status ambitions should be very carefully observed and well taken into account when interacting with the PRC.

This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese foreign policy, Asian politics, military and strategic studies and IR in general.

1 Introduction

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be put at risk even if you have a hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

East Asia is steering toward an uncertain future. In the South China Sea, tensions are on the rise as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is unilaterally bolstering its extensive territorial claims by building a ‘Great Wall of Sand.’ In the East China Sea, the simmering conflict between China and Japan over Senkaku/Diaoyu intensified when Tokyo decided to re-nationalize the islands in 2012. On the Korean Peninsula, tensions increased markedly after China’s client and ally North Korea sank a South Korean frigate in 2010, declared re-entry into the state of war at the height of the Korea Crisis in 2013, and conducted its fourth nuclear weapons test in January 2016. All these regional hotspots inherit a decent potential to escalate into militarized conflicts and could do so with dramatic implications, as any confront ation in this globally important region will have extensive consequences for other regions, too.

It is thus the more worrisome that all of these conflicts are affected and even fueled by the direct or indirect involvement of China and the United States. Unfortunately, the relationship between the two most powerful nations of the current international system, often characterized as the most important dyad in the twenty-first century, has taken a turn for the worse and is now heading toward a great-power rivalry that “continues to unfold across geopolitical, economic, and even cultural realms and is now extant in all corners of the globe.”¹ This situation not only harbors the prospect for a Cold War-like standoff between Washington and Beijing in Asia, which is – according to a recent Carnegie study – the second most likely outcome of current trends by the year 2030,² but also raises the potential for an actual military confrontation through increasing the number of latent cleavages and actual issues under contestation between Beijing and Washington. The concomitant risks and costs of such a collision are hard to underestimate, given the military strength and global significance of both powers. Currently, it seems that such a catastrophic outcome is fortunately far from inevitable, as there still exist stabilizing patterns in U.S.–China relations and sufficient prudence and political leeway on both sides of the Pacific;³ even so, a further intensification of tensions between China and the United States is nonetheless looming on the horizon.

Besides attention and admiration, China’s unprecedented rise has generated serious concerns, too. While Beijing, anxious not to be perceived as a revisionist or aggressive actor, traditionally emphasizes its peaceful intentions and cultivates the narrative of ‘China’s peaceful development’ based on soft power, diplomacy and a ‘new type of great power relations,’⁴ scholars and practitioners alike point to the worrisome increase in the PRC’s hard-power capabilities. Since the early 1990s, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undergone an intense modernization and armament program, which has transformed the PLA from an outdated peasant army into a modern, three-dimensional military force. As Beijing steadily expands the operative reach and effectiveness of its assertive capabilities, China’s future global role does not necessarily seem limited to that of the ‘world’s workbench’ or an economic powerhouse; on the contrary, the PRC aspires to become a first-class military power with the capacity to project military force by land, air, sea, and cyberspace well beyond its immediate peripheries.⁵ At the same time, observers have found that Beijing now opts for a more comprehensive, self-confident, proactive and tougher, occasionally assertive approach in its foreign policy.

The obvious discrepancy in China’s words and deeds worries policymakers in Washington and Asia-Pacific, and gives rise to more than just doubts about the strategic orientation of an economically prosperous and militarily ever more capable ‘Middle Kingdom.’ Will China emerge as a profound challenge to the existing regional and international order, or will it be possible to peacefully integrate China as a stakeholder and thereby manage a non-violent power transition? These questions dominate the current debate on China’s rise, and proponents of the neorealist-inspired ‘China threat’ theory provide us with the most straightforward answers: according to this school of thought, it is inconceivable for China’s rise to be peaceful because history has shown that growing economic power will translate into military capabilities that in turn awaken the desire for regional dominance and expansion.⁶ China’s ‘new assertiveness’ in foreign affairs and Beijing’s strategy to erect and militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea might indeed be regarded as the first proof of this line of reasoning.⁷ Moreover, the empirical record of non-peaceful power transitions also leads to the conclusion that a rising China will follow the unambiguous example set by its historical predecessors and inevitably, sooner or later, will collide with the most powerful state in the international system.⁸ While some observers already predict a military confrontation between China and the United States, others emphatically urge the U.S. government to do everything it can to contain China now in order to preserve regional peace and stability in the future.⁹

While “the view of an all-menacing China is often exaggerated by academics, pundits and politicians,”¹⁰ these warnings do not appear to have fallen on deaf ears in Washington, as China is increasingly perceived as a strategic challenge to the United States’ military dominance and political leadership in East Asia.¹¹ In view of this, it should not come as a surprise that despite numerous public statements by U.S. government officials encouraging China to seek a more active role in regional and global affairs, “the majority of the foreign policy community in Washington is more likely to see China as a threat to American power that needs to be actively contained.”¹² As strategic trust has become a scarce resource in U.S.–China relations, Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’ – unambiguously perceived by Beijing as targeted on the PRC – will almost certainly add its share to the further aggravation of tensions.¹³ This is exactly what might lead to a dangerous conflict situation with all the prerequisites for a substantial security dilemma, plus all associated risks.

Aim of the book

In the decades to come, peace and stability in East Asia will increasingly depend on how China uses its growing military power in coming crises and conflicts, which already today characterize the volatile security environment of the region. China is presently involved in virtually every major regional hotspot, from the maritime territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas over the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the still unresolved Sino-Indian territorial dispute to the Taiwan Question. With intensifying competition between China and the United States over power, status, and influence as a background condition, this makes for a highly delicate setting in which China as a rising power is emerging as a challenge to the regional status quo by demanding a greater say in world politics and by expecting greater deference to its interests and wishes in the region.¹⁴

A brief look back at the history of modern China confirms that worries about a potentially aggressive ‘Middle Kingdom’ might indeed be reasonable. Since the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, China has demonstrated on several occasions that it will not refrain from the proactive use of large-scale military force in order to safeguard its interests and to force others into obedience. Despite its self-proclaimed ‘principles of peaceful coexistence’ and during the seemingly stable bipolar setting of the Cold War, China challenged the United States in Korea, resorted to force against its former friend India, provoked armed clashes with the Soviet Union, and went to war against its socialist sister state and long-standing ally, Vietnam.

This book is about these four cases of China’s use of force in foreign affairs. Specifically, I am interested in answering the question of why China resorted to the use of military force in these four instances. Examining the concrete causes for China’s use of force is appropriate, meaningful, and relevant for at least three reasons. First, all four cases of China’s use of force reveal specific characteristics and patterns that cannot or can only poorly be explained by the well-established and broadly accepted theories for interstate warfare in International Relations (IR) based on the rational-choice assumption. As this dominant strand of theorizing on the outbreak of war between states fails to provide us with comprehensive and accurate rationalizations for the cases at hand, we do not know for sure why China has used military force in the past. This deficit in knowledge is more than worrisome, especially with regard to the current developments in East Asia. Second, providing more specified and precise explanations for these “outlier cases”¹⁵ is highly relevant, and not only with regard to historical or theoretical perspectives. In order to assess the inherent potential for conflict in the emerging structure of East Asia, a promising line of inquiry starts by identifying the specific issues and concrete reasons China regarded as valuable enough to fight for in previous instances. If these issues and interests reveal trans-epochal relevancy and are thus of significance for today’s China, their identification allows for more accurate assessment of the escalatory potential of ongoing conflicts involving the PRC.¹⁶ In doing so, the findings of my analysis might be of help for avoiding the unnecessary repetition of history. Third, as policy-makers in Washington apparently frame China’s rise predominantly through a neorealist prism and react to it with policies that are well known from the Cold War era, a look back at China’s strategic behavior during the actual Cold War not only appears reasonable, but gains even more relevancy when cast through an alternative theoretical lens that allows for a critical re-reading and evaluation of well-established and broadly accepted findings on the causes of China’s use of force in foreign affairs.

Taking these three arguments as the starting point for my project, this book attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate on the future of the Asia-Pacific region by digging into China’s past. In doing so, I seek to identify the concrete motives behind China’s proactive use of force as my primary research interest. Approaching the inquiry from this perspective appears particularly promising, as the analysis of motives provides direct insights into the immediate causes of a specific conflict escalation, rather than just disclosing underlying or enabling conditions as the permissive causes.¹⁷ Focusing on motives as an analytical category also encourages me to take into account non-material incentives such as considerations about social status or the role of emotions, which are basically neglected by existing theories that focus predominantly on material incentives and/or security as the principal causes of interstate war. However, as states “frequently go to war for reasons that have little, if anything, to do with security,”¹⁸ any analysis of interstate warfare would thus be well advised to also take these non-material incentives into account. For that reason, I utilize Ned Lebow’s Cultural Theory of International Relations as the theoretical framework that will guide my empirical analysis. In contrast to other approaches, Lebow focuses decidedly on motives as explanations for political behavior and systematically integrates material and ideational variables in an encompassing explanatory model for collective action such as national foreign policy.

In the universe of theorizing about international relations, Lebow’s Cultural Theory is still a relatively new approach and – at least to my knowledge – has not yet demonstrated its explanatory capacity for empirical cases beyond those used for its development. This provi...