China and Multilateralism

From Estrangement to Competition

Yuan Feng

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429627415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book thoroughly analyzes China's political ideas regarding the international order and their reflection in China's engagement in multilateralism.

It introduces the debates and discussions that take place among Chinese intellectuals in the study of international relations as an important part of non-western international relation theories, generating reflections on the convergences and divergences between China's political ideas and Europe-centric perspectives. With a focus specifically on China's main bilateral and multilateral relations in its principal regions of interest – East Asia and Central Asia – the book also examines China's relationship with the United States, Russia, and the European Union, and the One Belt One Road initiative drawing on a mixture of primary and secondary Chinese language sources, extensive interviews with Chinese officials, academics, and think tanks.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Chinese politics/studies, foreign policy analysis, Asian studies, and international relations.

1 Introduction

As I write this book, the most important news concerning China is the arrest of Huawei’s chief finance officer in Canada under the request of the US. Following this unusual breaking news is the huge debate among several Western countries about whether to engage Huawei’s products and services in the incoming era of 5G. In the understanding of many Chinese scholars and media outlets, this signifies that the tensions between China, the rising actor in the current world order and the US and its allies, the existing dominating actors, have reached a point of unprecedented intensity.

This crisis of Huawei is only the tip of the iceberg of this tension. With the trade war between the US and China and the tide of criticism of China’s human rights and political regime, rumours of a “new Cold War” have begun to spread.

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War between the US and the USSR, China has become one of the most important actors in international affairs in the contemporary world. It attracts much attention, and even worries, not only due to its strong economy, its huge population and its vast territory, but also its non-liberal regime. China has never been a state that embraces liberalism in its history and it is not likely to do so in the near future. With Chinese president Xi Jinping’s amendment of the Chinese constitution, it seems that China is even less politically open than it was.

On the other hand, one should not neglect China’s active involvement in multilateral institutions and its efforts in maintaining the existing world order. This is an interesting phenomenon, as the US has become less supportive of multilateral institutions and turned more to unilateralism since Donald Trump’s presidency. Though China’s domestic politics remain undemocratic, Chinese president Xi Jinping has stated clearly that China supports democratization of international relations and multilateral economic institutions. China has strongly supported the Paris Agreement on climate change, and on the Osaka Summit of 2019, China has emphasized that China, Russia, and India should take more global responsibility and uphold multilateralism (Wong and Wu, 2019). In comparison with China’s attitude towards multilateralism, Donald Trump is pulling the US out from several multilateral institutions and arrangements and insisting on unilateralism.

The trade war between the US and China has caused much turbulence in the world economy in 2018 and 2019, and it begs the question of how two strong actors might work in global multilateral institutions. Yet the accusation of US Vice President Pence of China’s “meddling in America’s democracy” has revealed the long-lasting worries of Western countries: “America had hoped that economic liberalization would bring China into greater partnership with us and with the world… . Instead, China has chosen economic aggression, which has in turn emboldened its growing military” (Johnson and Groll, 2018).

In 2019, both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping chose a hardline strategy to confront each other in the disputes. Following the confrontations in trade, collaboration in education and cultural domains have also been influenced.

Thus a “trade war” is no longer sufficient to describe the ongoing contest between the US and China. The most fundamental divergence between the US and China lies in political ideas and norms. Being a non-democratic regime, China is easily reproached on grounds of human rights, the rule of law with respect to government subsidies, and norm competition in the international world order based on values largely issued from the West.

However, being the second-largest world economy, China’s importance is amplified through globalization and its norms are also easily diffused through globalization. On the one hand, the US is turning away from existing multilateral institutions as it judges that they are no longer beneficial to it. On the other hand, China is actively involving itself in multilateral institutions, including supporting the reform of the United Nations, in order to establish its image as a driver of multilateral institutions.

So by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the picture of the future world order has become quite uncertain as we have China, one of the most important players, pursuing multilateralism as its key foreign policy, while keeping an authoritarian regime in its domestic affairs. This seemingly conflictual combination of China’s domestic and foreign policy makes it difficult to understand what China’s embrace of multilateralism really means. In this book, I would like to try to explain this question, mainly through the lens of an ideational research method.

Given the extremely complex of China’s history and its current political situation, it is necessary to lay a road map to explain the logic of this book.

In the first chapter, I will clarify some basic questions concerning this project. The answers to these questions highlight the need for research. The core concern of these questions touches on the broad issue, asking “Why is multilateralism important for global governance?” It explains the importance of focusing on multilateralism among so many “isms” in international relations theories.

The second question links multilateralism with China’s rise. I try to explain “How is China’s rise related to its engagement in its understanding of multilateralism?” This question covers the necessity to explore China’s multilateralism policies.

The third question that I would like to touch on is the importance of ideas in China’s foreign policy making from 1949 to 2016. This section will focus on the importance of ideas in the formation of China’s foreign policy, and help us to understand what “multilateralism with Chinese characteristics” means.

Thus, with a clear understanding of why it is important to study Chinese political ideas in China’s multilateralism policy, I will introduce the theoretical tool of this book, the combination of discursive institutionalism and historical institutionalism.

The basic questions

Why is multilateralism important for global governance?

One of the undeniable features of our time is that many issues attract global attention and require coordination among several countries.

The coordination among countries is generally defined as global governance, an under-specified concept that has become a popular concept in the Chinese government’s discourse. As the G20 Summit was held in Hangzhou in 2016, China presents itself as a promoter of reform of global governance.

China has already begun to participate in global governance through the provision of public goods. Yet a more efficient global governance involves not only the delivery of public goods but also institutional accountability and normative aspects (Kaul, Grunberg and Stern, 1999; Nayyar, 2002; Higgott, 2004, p. 2). This makes multilateralism the best coordination model of global governance. As Ikenberry has pointed out, states are conducting their business “in or around multilateral forums”, and different multilateral institutions have become places to negotiate, communicate, and share the common rules (Ikenberry, 2011b).

To sum it up, the seeking of responses to challenges and problems that are mutual to the global society has generated the need for global governance. And so far, the most commonly adopted way to realize global governance is multilateralism. And the main channel through which states and non-state powers apply multilateralism is through institutions.

So why is multilateralism so important and relevant to global governance? There are several points to be mentioned here to clarify the most important concept of this book.

First, as John Ruggie has observed as early as 1993, institutions are “in demand” because they are “robust and adaptive”, both in economic and security affairs, and “a core feature of the current international institutional order is its multilateral form”, which “appears to have characteristics that enhance its durability and ability to adapt to change” (Ruggie, 1983, p. ix). Multilateralism has been “increasingly accepted as the modus operandi in world politics” (Powell, 2003, p. 3), as nations have gradually realized that many issues pose challenges to several nations at the same time, thus demanding multilateral cooperation to address them; and there are also many issues that have linkages with different aspects of human activities,¹ requiring multilateral cooperation to provide a comprehensive solution.

The concept of multilateralism has been developing and transforming. Keohane defines multilateralism as “an institutionalized collective action by an inclusively determined set of independent states” and “persistent sets of rules that constrain activity, shape expectations and prescribe roles” (Keohane, 2005). According to Ruggie, multilateralism is “an institutional form that coordinates relations among three or more States on the basis of generalized principles of conduct and reciprocity” (Ruggie, 1993).

Regarding the history of multilateralism, it has developed through three different epochs: first, the nineteenth-century arrangements and conferences within the context of the evolving European Multipolar Concert of the “Great Powers”, setting the first multilateral arrangements about Rhein navigation, post and telegraph, weights and measures, and so forth; second, the institutionalized multilateral system set up at the political and economic levels under the hegemony of the US after the Second World War; and the heterogeneous and uncertain development of multilateral cooperation after the end of the Cold War and within the multipolar world of the twenty-first century (Telò, 2014c, p. 35). It was believed that hegemony is a decisive factor in the formation of multilateral cooperation regimes, as it shoulders the responsibility for providing public goods. Yet in After Hegemony, Keohane has predicted that it is possible to have multilateral cooperation without the coordination of a hegemonic power: “International institutions help to realize common interests in world politics” as the “complementary interests” make “certain forms of cooperation potentially beneficial” (Keohane, 2005, pp. 243–245). It seems that the emerging multilateral institutions, which are rising with new regionalism, confirm Keohane’s statement. As the current era is concerned, according to Telò’s observation, multilateralism is developing into pluralistic multilateralism with the following characteristics: (a) A decentralized multipolarity has proven to be compatible with multilateral cooperation, provided that balance of power and alliance for security are no longer the priority. Hegemony is not necessary for multilateral cooperation, but leadership (either an individual or collective driving force) would be needed. (b) A shift from the specific to diffuse reciprocity occurs (where any exchange takes place in the context of an issue linkage and where gains are expected within a larger time span through enhanced trust). Multilateral agreements historically started with a single policy field and adjusted themselves to the nature of issues according to their political relevance. In this way, multilateralism has become deeper and stronger. (c) The development of pluralistic multilateralism presents the paradox that on the one hand human rights, rule of law, democracy, and global justice are increasingly founded on shared values as pluralistic multilateralism comes into formation, while on the other hand instrumental cooperation, contingent multilateral practices, and exclusive military alliances also occur; (d) Pluralistic multilateralism interacts with the rise of regionalism. This new round of regionalism after the end of the Cold War has become an important phenomenon for research in international relations: new regionalism has developed in the form of multilateralism in order to oppose unilateralism, limiting the old-fashioned logics of balance of power and preventing local conflicts and fragmentation. The balance between the regional and global dimension of multilateral cooperation is an important source for the development of multilateralism (Telò, 2014c, pp. 62–65).

We also need to admit that multilateralism is undergoing challenges from unilateralism as well, especially that of the US under the presidency of Donald Trump. As noted by Edward Luce, what is worrying is not Donald Trump’s presidency, but what is behind it (Luce, 2017). The rise of populism has become an unavoidable by-product of globalization, and its voice is getting stronger as current global governance is unable to provide an efficient solution to certain issues.

As multilateralism is expressed in the form of institutions, it is important to investigate the definition of institutions as well.

The definition of institutions

A clarification of the concept of “institution” is necessary, since it is how multilateralism is expressed and thus makes it one of the fundamental concepts in this thesis. There are many definitions of “institution”; their common point is that they all point out the function of institutions to help actors make decisions in a more efficient way.

Keohane and Nye define institutions as “persistent and connected sets of rules (formal and informal) that prescribe behavioural roles, constrain activity and shape expectations” (Keohane and Nye, 1989, p. 3). North’s definition of institutions is “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction”, and institutions can “reduce uncertainty by providing structure to everyday life” and “institutions define and limit the set of choices of individuals” (North, 1990, pp. 3–4). Ikenberry complements the function of institutions by pointing out that

institutions can embody formal legal or organizational procedures and understandings that strengthen expectations about th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 China’s multilateralism: a challenge to the existing theoretical legacy
• 3 China’s engagement in multilateralism
• 4 The development of multilateral institutions and regionalism
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index