1 Gerald Segal’s contribution
Michael B. Yahuda
Gerald Segal’s last important writing, ‘Does China Matter?’ was an article which brought together much of his recent thinking about China for the key journal read by the American foreign-policy elite (Segal, 1999). The article typified Segal’s mature writings, combining innovative scholarship with a policy orientation in which the concern was with the implications for the immediate future, rather than with analysis of how we had reached the present position. Written in his customary crisp and snappy style, the article was illustrative of the particular approach to international politics that he had developed as a mature scholar and commentator. Although Segal was not interested in theory as such, he had a distinctive mode of analysis. He combined a tough-minded appreciation of the realities of power with a belief in the liberalizing effects of market economics allied to governmental transparency and accountability. Above all, Segal delighted in challenging the conventional wisdom of the day. As he once said, it was ‘not always wise’. This article was intended as a kind of wake-up call for many in Washington and elsewhere. In Segal’s view the persistent exaggeration of the significance of China was damaging, as it prevented the development of sustained coherent policies commensurate with the security and commercial interests of the West. Moreover, that exaggeration also made it difficult for people in China to come to terms with their own problems and address the substantive reforms that were needed if China was to reach its true potential. However, the article should be seen as more than just a polemic and more than an argument addressed to policy-makers. It should be seen as a significant mile stone in Segal’s long-standing attempt to persuade the China-watching community and the broader circle of Asian and International Relations specialists to think more critically and realistically about the rise of China and the implications of that rise for academics, opinion leaders and policy-makers.
Other chapters in this volume will review aspects of Segal’s article in detail. My purpose is to discuss briefly Segal’s approach to the analysis of international relations, Asian and particularly Chinese politics and foreign relations.
Gerald Segal’s approach
Gerald Segal’s career, tragically cut short by cancer at the age of 46, essentially spanned the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s. During those twenty years, books, chapters, articles and commentaries flowed from him at a prodigious rate. Segal authored or co-authored 13 books, was a contributing editor or co-editor to 17 more, published over 130 articles in scholarly journals and wrote newspaper commentaries and op-ed pieces that are too numerous to count.
Despite having developed the reputation as one of the West’s leading interpreters of Chinese politics and foreign relations, Gerry Segal never saw himself as a China specialist. He regarded himself more as a generalist who took an interest in China. He never studied the Chinese language, nor took time out to immerse himself in Chinese culture. A Canadian by birth, he graduated from the Hebrew University in 1975 at the age of 23, where his major was international politics and his minor was in Asian politics. His mentor, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Chinese military, Ellis Joffe, remained an important influence and became a close colleague and a warm friend. Gerry then went on to the London School of Economics to carry out a research degree under my supervision. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1979 for a dissertation on the emergence of the ‘Great Power Triangle’. The thesis gave evidence of many of Segal’s qualities that this most prolific of authors and commentators was soon to bring before an ever-widening readership. These qualities included an independent cast of mind that delighted in challenging established views with reasoned argument, deploying wit and a wonderful facility with words. They also included a concern with a generalist approach in seeking to explain how international politics worked, rather than a more country-centred point of departure in which politics was explained with reference to the particularities of culture.
Given his initial interest in the modalities of strategic relations between the great powers, his earlier writings may be seen to fall squarely within the tradition of power politics. He was particularly interested in exploring how these affected relations between China and the Soviet Union. His Ph.D. thesis argued that the tripolarity, or the ‘Great Power Triangle’ emerged in the early 1960s after China broke away from the Soviet Union, rather than in the early 1970s with the Kissinger and Nixon visits to China. Based on what might be seen as a neo-realist structuralist approach, Segal sought to show how the dynamics of triangular power politics shaped developments in Indo-China – from the lack of direct American military intervention in Laos to its initially slow and then massive intervention in Vietnam. Within this framework he was able to delineate China’s changing policies with greater skill and success than would have been possible had he followed the more conventional sinological route (Segal, 1982b).
Thus, far from his lack of traditional sinological skills being a drawback, Segal turned this to positive advantage. This gave him greater confidence in writing on China itself. By treating China as ‘just another country’, Segal was not beguiled by claims from China or from other China specialists in the West that the country should be treated sui generis. Not for him claims that China should be dealt with on its own terms, that is in the self-serving terms advanced by its leaders or by those close to them.
Contrary to what was thought by some in China, especially in official circles, Segal was not motivated by hostility or by concerns to belittle the country or its people. As noted above, his first major work showed that China had become a major international player in great-power relations – a whole decade before the accepted view then and now conventionally allows. Similarly, his next book, on China’s experience of defending itself, pays tribute to the readiness of China’s leaders often to resort to force to overcome adversity, despite apparent inferiority in weapons capability (Segal, 1985b). But, more to the point, Segal’s analysis of each of China’s wars, beginning with Korea in 1950 and concluding with the incursion into Vietnam in 1979, is based on conventional means of assessing military engagements, rather than on China-centred explanations of the special characteristics of Chinese ways of warfare. Accordingly, Segal was able to dispense praise and criticism according to clear criteria. Segal also wrote, with his mentor, Ellis Joffe, on the changing roles of the military in Chinese politics (Joffe and Segal, 1978). Meanwhile he continued to publish on other matters of abiding interest to him, such as strategic questions, Soviet foreign policy and Sino-Soviet relations (Baylis et al., 1983; Segal, 1983).
For most of the 1980s, Segal taught successively at the Universities of Wales (Aberystwyth), Leicester and Bristol respectively. He then moved to major British ‘think tanks’, which he found more congenial. He joined the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, Chatham House) in 1988, before becoming a Senior Fellow for Asian Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in 1991, and its Director of Studies in 1997. By the middle of the 1980s, Segal was recognized in Chinese academic circles as someone with a distinctive ‘voice’ of great interest. Although they may not necessarily have agreed with much of what he wrote, as realists themselves they had no difficulty in understanding the thrust of his arguments and of according him considerable respect. His lack of sinological skills and interests did not pass unnoticed, but they did not prove a barrier to communication. He visited China several times in the 1980s, but gave me the impression that at this stage he did not gain much of intellectual value in his exchanges with Chinese academics. However, he found the visits worthwhile for gaining an impression of the prevailing ‘atmosphere’ or climate of opinion. His Chinese interlocutors found his views of great interest, even if provocative at times. In fact, both sides found it easier to exchange views in the UK, rather than in China, where the Chinese found themselves more constrained from speaking openly about what were for them sensitive issues. The Chinese interest in Segal substantially increased after he left universities in the late 1980s to find his métier in the research institutes.
By this stage in his intellectual development, Segal had begun to place emphasis less on seeking to analyse how a particular point was reached in foreign or domestic affairs than on what were the implications for the future. In other words, his analysis began to take on a more forward-looking dimension. This came easily to a scholar who was also interested in the policy implications of his analysis. This had the result of placing him at the forefront of those who identified new trends at an early stage. As a close student of Sino-Soviet relations (before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), Segal was early in detecting the thaw in relations between the two in the early 1980s. Interestingly, he was the first to point out that, contrary to Chinese claims, it was they who had taken the initiative (Segal, 1985a).
Segal was also to the fore in attempting to come to terms with the international significance of the process of reform in the communist world that was occurring in that decade, especially after the advent of Gorbachev. He convened several meetings and conferences at the RIIA (where he was then based) to focus on the implications for foreign policy and foreign policy-making (Segal, 1992). Although as far as China was concerned, this could have been construed as essentially a domestic issue calling for particular sinological skills, Segal was able to bring his more broad-based interests into play through considering the Chinese case in a cross-communist comparative framework (Segal, 1990a). It was consideration of the character and the implications of reform communism that may be said to have broadened Segal’s approach beyond the conventional bounds of strategic studies and power politics to take more account of what would now be called good governance, or even neo-liberalism. That is to say that he saw the potentiality of reform communism to lead to a more transparent rules-based order that would allow those countries to be better integrated into the international community by following the market, becoming more pluralistic and eventually democratic. He placed much emphasis on the reform of the foreign policy process itself, and on the need for the West to balance policies of engagement with sufficient toughness to deter back-sliding or undue aggressiveness.
By now Segal was beginning to cast his net more widely in geographical terms. As the Cold War receded in the late 1980s, the Asia Pacific had become more important in world affairs, to a great extent because of its rapid and sustained economic growth. At the time much was made of the region’s consensual form of collective decision-making as a major contributor to its astounding economic development. Segal challenged much of that. While giving due weight to the significance of its economic growth, Segal argued nevertheless that it did not make sense to think of it as a separate region and still less as a separate community. In his book, Rethinking the Pacific (Segal, 1990b) he claimed that the new developments in the Pacific area were best understood in the context of global trends in ideology, security and economic affairs.
The end of the Cold War also brought out new dimensions in Segal’s approach to China. Freed of the kind of calculus associated with the strategic triangle, or with that of a comparative communist perspective, he was able to consider what provided a sound basis for thinking about China’s future, especially in the light of Tiananmen and the way in which the Chinese communist regime gradually recovered from that blow to its legitimacy. His approach was affected by at least three sets of questions: first, what were the implications of a China that was driven less by a communist vision and more by a nineteenth-century kind of nationalism replete with an irredentist agenda? Second, were there possible fissiparous implications for the Chinese state that arose from the process of economic and administrative reforms? Finally, in what ways could the outside world and the West in particular prevent China from using force in pursuit of its irredentist agenda and promote its integration into international society? These of course were not questions that endeared Segal to the Chinese authorities. His Adelphi Paper on the possible disintegration of China (Segal, 1994) proved to be a breaking point. Apparently, the analysis was interpreted as advocacy, and it was even misconstrued as advising Western governments to contribute to the break-up of China. Thereafter Segal was denied access to China until shortly before his death.
As the decade of the 1990s unfolded, Segal further sharpened his own approach to international affairs, as a result of thinking through the question as to what facilitated the integration of countries into the globalized international society in the coming twenty-first century. He saw this as entailing the opening of economies to outside influences, embracing pluralistic democracy and surrendering key aspects of sovereign control of their economic, social and foreign policies. This also led to the development of small, professional armed forces, and to an aversion to the use of military force. These pluralistic countries that were tolerant of diversity within and that appreciated the significance of debate and criticism necessarily tolerated differences with similar countries and sought resolution to problems by peaceful means (Buzan and Segal, 1996, 1998). His argument was ‘that if other great powers eventually learned to adapt and become Lite, then we should accept no less from China’. If it were to become rich, in Segal’s view, China would ‘eventually not only be forced to adapt to interdependence, it will also become enlitened’ (Segal, 1997: 173).
In his writings and commentaries on how best the West should deal with China, Segal’s main concern was to encourage policy-makers in the West and in the US especially to adopt policies that balanced the policy of engagement with one of containment that he called constrainment (Segal, 1996). In other words, Segal very much recognized the advantages of deepening the economic, social and political relations with China which, like others, he argued would lead in time to fundamental domestic change, which was necessary if China were to be integrated into the international community. But he argued consistently that such a beneficial change would only be possible if China were simultaneously deterred from using or contemplating the use of force to realize its irredentist claims and/or change the balance of power in its favour. He thought the polarized debate between those who wanted to ‘contain’ China and those who sought to ‘engage’ was misconceived. The former went too far in meeting the potential Chinese threat (that in the case of Taiwan and the disputed islands in the South China Sea was sometimes all too real) so as to provide no incentives for China to adopt more participatory international norms. It was only through the deepening of its interdependence with the outside world that China would change its domestic governance for the better. But the ‘engagers’ erred by conceding too much to a dictatorial Chinese regime without imposing upon it proper costs and penalties for using force to get its way. Hence he favoured ‘constrainment’, by which a ‘carrot and stick’ approach would be followed, in which engagement was matched by a tough-minded readiness to deter the Chinese from aggressive acts.
Such considerations provided a particular impetus to follow developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The impending return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty was seen by Segal as a potential threat to the key institutions of the territory such as the rule of law, a clean civil service, press and academic freedoms, and so on. He stood full square behind the attempt by the last Governor, Chris Patten, to anchor these in a more democratic framework. His book on the subject dwelt on how the international dimensions of Hong Kong could help to sustain its liberal way of life beyond the reversion in 1997. His interest in Taiwan was stimulated by the democratization of the island in the 1990s despite the continuing threat from Beijing. Although he recognized that the dynamics of the democratic process in Taiwan could lead to a degree of unpredictability in the handling of relations with the Chinese Mainland, he nevertheless argued strongly in favour of firming-up the Western (principally the American) commitment to deterring the Chinese from imposing unification by force. He saw that as a necessary component of the policy of engagement. Any softening of the Western position would not only endanger Taiwan, but it would also have a profoundly adverse effect on the evolution of the reform process within China and on the international relations of the entire Asia-Pacific.
Towards the end of the 1990s, Segal became more uneasy about what he regarded as the uncritical adoption of engagement policies by many in the China policy and academic communities in the United States. He was also dismayed by the unthinking embrace of the myth of the Chinese market by business people in the United States and Europe. In his view, this uncritical approach to China risked bringing about precisely the opposite of what was intended. Far from encouraging China’s leaders to face up to the hard choices entailed in meeting the true standards of market reform, Western governmental and business leaders were letting them think that they could have all the benefits without paying the price of genuine reform and pluralization. Treating China in this way would discourage pro-Western neighbours from looking to the West to deter a more assertive China. They might then have little alternative except to accommodate China by policies of appeasement. Moreover, craven Western policies could embolden China’s leaders to overestimate their country’s power and engage in adventurist policies that could undermine the stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region. What made Western policies even more difficult to bear was the sense that they were based on an entirely false appreciation of the true nature of Chinese power and influence. It was this that led to the article, ‘Does China Matter?’, around which this book is organized.
The Chinese response
Gerald Segal and his writing both intrigued and appalled Chinese officialdom. His intellectual frame of reference was not alien, even though he had no sinological affiliation. Neither his realism, nor his liberalism (as demonstrated by his concept of ‘liteness’) was unfamiliar. But the Chinese official classification of Western writers and commentators on Chinese affairs as either friend or foe always threatened to misinterpret a writer as direct and as honest and bold as Segal. From the viewpoint of Chinese officials Segal was discomfiting and difficult. He tended to touch on subjects that were seen as highly sensitive, and that affected notions of patriotic self-esteem. But at the same time he dealt with these matters in a policy-oriented way. They saw him as an influential voice among opinion leaders in the West whom they should cultivate, but at the same time as someone who might cause them embarrassment by being so close to the bone. They sought his views, but preferred to do so in private. Public encounters were more difficult.
Thus Segal’s Adelphi Paper, China Changes Shape (1994), which argued that China was subject to a process of regional fragmentation, and which attempted to point out possible implications for Western governments, was, according to a well-informed Chinese source, seized on as a kind of casus belli by the then Chinese ambassador in London, Ma Yuzhen. He claimed that the monograph amounted to a form of advocacy for the break-up of China and to a call upon Western governments to encourage disintegration and to take advantage of the fragmentation. Segal, who had often enough been regarded as provocative, was now classified as ‘anti-China’ and denied access to the country. Not only was this a total misreading of the monograph, but it showed up Chinese officialdom in a very bad light indeed – as intolerant bullies. The attempt to muzzle or ‘punish’ Western scholars and commentators deemed to be hostile was not only misconceiv...
