Chinese Foreign Policy

An Introduction

Marc Lanteigne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429795435
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This updated and expanded fourth edition of Chinese Foreign Policy seeks to examine the decision-makers, processes, and rationales behind China's expanding international relations as well as offering an in-depth look at China's modern global relations.

Among the key issues explored in this edition are:

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• The further expansion of Chinese foreign policy from regional (Asia-Pacific) to international interests;
• How the government of Xi Jinping has pursued a more confident great power foreign policy agenda;
• China's growing economic power in an era of global financial uncertainty and the return of protectionism;
• Modern security challenges, including counter-terrorism, cyber-security, maritime power, military reform and modernisation, and the protection of overseas economic interests;
• China's shifting power relationship with the United States under President Donald Trump;
• The deeper engagement of Beijing with a growing number of international and regional institutions and legal affairs;
• Cross-regional diplomacy, including updated sections on Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia / Eurasia, as well as Oceania and the Polar regions;
• The development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a centrepiece of China's foreign policy.

This book will be essential reading for students of Chinese foreign policy and Asian international relations (IR), and is highly recommended for students of diplomacy, international security, and IR in general.

1 Introduction

The reconstruction (and expansion) of Chinese foreign policy

The rise of China (Zhongguo 中国) within the international system has been heralded as one of the most significant changes in turn-of-the-century global relations. So much has been written and discussed about China’s growth in power over the past half-century, often referred to as a “rise” or an “ascent” from an isolated state to a regional power to a potential great power capable of exerting much influence not only within the Asia-Pacific region but also on an international level. This progress can be examined in a variety of international relations areas, from diplomacy to security, and from economics to culture and the environment, all of which leads to the question of which directions the country will take as China settles further into great power status. Will China become a global power (or superpower) alongside the United States, and if it does, what kind of global power will it be? Assuming Chinese power continues to increase in the short term, these questions become ever more important in understanding the ongoing rapid changes to the country’s foreign policy.

Foreign policy has often been examined as the interactions between various political agents, (including individuals with specific requirements), and structures formed by social relationships, (such as the state, as well as organisations and rules which are commonly constructed).¹ In the case of China, the biggest change in the development of that country’s foreign policy has been the expansion both of the number of “agents” involved, directly or indirectly, in Beijing’s foreign policymaking processes, and in the number of China’s international interests as well as global-level “structures” with which it can interact. These structures have been both formal, such as international organisations, but also informal such as global norms and behaviours. In the space of only a few decades, China’s foreign policy interests, originally far more limited to regional issues, have grown to encompass many more international concerns which can truly be called “global”. As with other countries, especially great powers, in the age of globalisation and interdependence, identifying a clear separation between China’s domestic political interests and its foreign policy can be a complicated process. The dividing line has become especially blurry as the number of Chinese international interests and responsibilities grows and more actors, both individuals and groups, within China become involved with global affairs.

At first glance, the decision-making processes in foreign policy matters appear to be more centralised in China in comparison to other states, including those in the West. Part of the reason for this perception has been the shape of China’s government since 1949, when the country’s Communist government assumed power and has since been dominated by a single political actor, namely the Chinese Communist Party (Zhongguo Gongchandang 中国共产党) or CCP. However, the Chinese government still must undertake frequent balancing between its domestic interests, including improving standards of living, promoting stability, combatting corruption, maintaining the dominant role of the CCP in Chinese governance, and advancing the process of economic and governmental reform begun in the late 1970s, while also developing a modern foreign policy, one which is now truly global in nature. This ongoing process of simultaneous government bargaining in domestic and foreign relations, often referred to as a “two-level game”,² has become ever more complex in the Chinese case since Beijing must maintain the momentum of socio-economic reforms in the country, while simultaneously overseeing the country’s rapid rise in power within the international system.

Box 1.1 The foreign policy roles of the CCP

The political hybrid that the CCP is attempting to become today is born out of its study of the reasons that the Soviet and East European regimes collapsed but also very much informed of its study of other modernising and newly-industrialised states, particularly in East Asia, Western Europe and Latin America.

– David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 6.

Currently four principal forces shape Chinese views toward, and actions in, the world: domestic politics and other internal constraints; global interdependence; realist foreign policy thinking; and technology-driven action-reaction dynamics.

– David Lampton, Following the Leader: Ruling China, From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 109.

From the beginning of the twenty-first century, China’s foreign policy interests expanded well beyond the Asia-Pacific region and can now be observed worldwide. This process has been accelerated under the government of President Xi Jinping (习近平), who assumed the presidency of China in March 2013 and was reappointed to that position in early 2018. With the removal of presidential term limits within the Chinese constitution in March of that year, President Xi may now remain in office indefinitely and continue to personally shape both domestic and foreign policy in many ways. On the international level, the Xi government has developed numerous foreign policy initiatives, ranging from enhanced state-to-state relations to the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (yidai yilu changyi一带一路倡议) or BRI, trade networks set to expand into Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, and Russia / Former Soviet Union (FSU), and to other regions.

China’s foreign policy expansion under President Xi has taken place in tandem with the rapid development of Chinese economic power, which assumed even greater prominence in the wake of the post-2008 global financial crisis and the announcement in early 2011 that China had overtaken Japan as the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States. In 2014, it was widely reported that China had, according to some economic measurements such as purchasing power parity (PPP), actually overtaken the United States as the largest economic power in terms of economic output.³ However, income per person remained well below that of Western economies and policymakers in Beijing continued to stress that the economic reform process in China was far from over. Moreover, China is now facing economic headwinds from many directions, including a global economy still recovering from the financial slowdowns which began in 2008, to a United States government under President Donald Trump which is growing increasingly wary of Beijing’s economic strength, as illustrated by an emerging “trade war” between China and the United States starting in mid-2018 when both countries began to levy tariffs on each others’ goods.⁴

China has been front and centre in many scholarly debates about international relations (IR) as well, and there is no shortage of IR theories old and new which have been applied to better explain the country’s role in the international system. Within the wide spectrum of realist IR studies, one branch, offensive realism, is very pessimistic about the ability of China to rise peacefully in the international system, given the history of great power conflicts and the nature of the international system as anarchic, meaning that there is no effective government on the international level. According to this approach, great powers seek to maximise their power, and therefore often find themselves in policy conflicts which can lead to war.⁵Power transition theory also tends to reflect a wariness about China’s rise, suggesting that when a hegemonic power at the top of the global hierarchy is confronted with a challenger power which is both rising and dissatisfied with the status quo, war becomes a strong possibility unless the two actors can find a way to co-exist or there is enough common policy ground that conflict is considered too costly.

However, defensive realism is somewhat more optimistic about the opportunities for war to be avoided, despite significant differences between China and the United States. Great powers may also seek to balance each other rather than risk a great power conflict, (which is much more perilous than ever before, given that both states are nuclear powers). Balance of power, however, has also undergone a rethinking since the end of the cold war. The classic example of “hard balancing”, meaning using military components, has been best illustrated by the cold war, when the United States and the USSR, with their respective allies, squared off against each other using both conventional and nuclear weapons. Such a scenario involving China and the United States is considered unlikely, but there is the possibility of “soft balancing”, meaning the use of non-military policies, such as organisations, diplomacy, and economics, to create an equilibrium.⁶ In many parts of the world, including Africa, Eurasia, and the Middle East, Chinese, and American interests are engaging in various degrees of soft balancing, and this process may also be developing in places such as Europe, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and even the Polar Regions.

Structural realism, often paired with neo-realism, examines whether the nature of the international system compels states, including great powers, to seek more power. Issues such as the security dilemma, meaning that steps taken by one state to increase its own security may be seen as decreasing the security of others, and polarity, meaning centres of power and whether they stabilise or destabilise the international system, are often studied under this branch of realism. As well, since states are worried not only about what gains they make in levels of power, but also where they stand in relation to others, (absolute power versus relative power), international cooperation is seen as often being difficult. The emerging area of neo-classical realism seeks to re-introduce domestic level actors and issues, such as internal Chinese politics, economic issues, government-military relations, and the factions within the CCP, as important variables in understanding the trajectory of Chinese foreign policy.

The other venerable school of IR, namely liberalism, also has several branches. Classical liberalism focuses on the roles of individuals rather than states and looks more closely at the preferences of states as opposed to just their capabilities. While liberalists tend to agree with their realist counterparts that the international system is an anarchy, the negative effects of that situation can be mitigated through communication and information-sharing. Neo-liberalism takes these ideas further and suggests that developing international-level institutions can further dampen the harmful effects of anarchy and create an atmosphere more suitable for communication and cooperation as opposed to conflict. On one hand, it has been argued that China has grown up in a period where there are more institutions, organisations, and regimes, in the world, a process which has accelerated since the end of the cold war in the 1990s, and so there are many opportunities for China to obtain needed goods from the international system through engaging these institutions.⁷

However, as sceptics of this idea have correctly noted, there has yet to be the equivalent of the North American Treaty Organisation (NATO) in the Pacific Rim, nor any counterpart to the European Union, and many regimes in Asia tend to be more informal and may not act as a restraint against a deteriorating security situation. Moreover, the 2018 decision by the Chinese government to eliminate presidential term limits thus allowing Xi Jinping to remain in office for an indefinite period, led to much debate in the West over whether their efforts to “socialise” China into greater acceptance of international democratic norms were unsuccessful.

Other IR schools of thought have also appeared in recent years to add to the discussion of Chinese foreign policy, including the English School, which introduces the idea of international societies and the role of history, as well as the concept of values and using normative approaches, (i.e. seeing IR in terms of the best outcomes rather than only as they currently exist). Constructivism tends to focus not only on the material possessions of states, (such as capital, resources, weapons, etc.), but also their identities. Every state is seen to be in the process of building their identities, but states frequently have their own ideas about the identities of each other in addition to themselves. In the case of China, there has been much debate over how the country is perceived abroad, and one of the purposes of the BRI has been to further establish a global view of China as a partner for economic development. There has also been a developing array of critical theory approaches to IR studies, using variables such as economics and development, ethics, and gender, with an eye to “emancipating” IR discourse from what were considered too-rigid models.

Most of these IR schools of thought are based on Western history and philosophies, but in recent years there have been emerging alternative schools of thought from China itself. One example has been a revival of the concept of Tianxia (天下) or “all under heaven”, which has been emerging critical of the current state-centric system and suggests that it be superseded by a “world system”, commonly seen as a variation of globalism.⁸ As well, there has been emerging discussion in Chinese academic circles about the usefulness of relational theory in IR, namely that the IR system is based on “interrelatedness”: changing and flowing relations between actors, and relations which heavily influence the identities of actors, an idea borrowed from traditional Confucian views of the social “mean” (zhongyong 中庸) in relation to the harmony of interpersonal relations. Although different IR actors, such as states, have different levels of power, their identities are largely based on relationships which are constantly in flux.⁹

This book examines the main issues and challenges facing China in the realm of foreign policy, through two major themes. First, China is a rising power in the international system, and is now a “great power” on the regional (Asia-Pacific) level as well as increasingly on the international level. While China has not yet achieved the status of “global power” or “superpower” (chaoji daguo 超级大国), a designation shared by both the United States and the then-USSR, it is now in a strong position to become one in several areas, including its economic strength but also its developing military power and emerging “cross-regional” diplomacy, which now extends well beyond the Asia-Pacific. It has been frequently demonstrated throughout the history of international relations that great powers have very distinct, and often more numerous, foreign policy interests than other states, and as China grows in global strength and capabilities a similar pattern has emerged. Many of the cases examined here will reflect the effects of China’s rapid growth and its growing international interests, including diplomatic, economic, and strategic.

Second, China’s foreign policy is not only undergoing a process of expansion (kuo-zhang 扩张) but also of reconstruction (chongjian 重建). This process is taking place in a variety of ways. The institutions within China which are responsible for foreign policy development are continuing to undergo reform, enabling them to adjust to changing domestic and international circumstances. For example, it was announced in March 2018 that a Ministry of Ecology and Environment would be created to address the country’s ongoing efforts to combat pollution and promote “green” policies abroad, as well as a Natural Resources Ministry, which would include responsibility for China’s growing interests in the oceans and the Polar Regions. In addition, the number of actors, including sectors of the Chinese government but also non-state actors and individuals within China, interested in and participating in the creation of Chinese foreign policy, continues to grow. Studying China’s international relations by looking at only a small group of governmental actors is becoming less and less a viable approach for scholars of this subject.

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