China's Strategic Priorities

Jonathan H. Ping, Brett McCormick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134592364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The People's Republic of China is the world's most populous state and largest consumer of energy, having demonstrated momentous progress on an unprecedented scale. This global power has increasingly shaped international relations as a result of its population size, economic development and political character.

Identifying the most significant new issues and problems that have arisen from China's rapid development, this book examines the evolution of China's contemporary foreign policy and international relations. In doing so, it underlines the global importance of China's management of its own politics and economics, and demonstrates how all nation-states have a vested interest in —and to varying degrees are liable for —the consequences of Chinese actions. The book aims to spark debate by drawing attention to these critical issues; placing them on the scholarly agenda as well as that of the practitioner. It provides factual evidence, progressive findings, justification and a rationale for action, expert analysis, and the resulting policy prescriptions. In addition, the book highlights the liable costs of failing to address China's strategic priorities.

This interdisciplinary book draws attention to the most pressing issues that China must address for universal benefit, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Chinese Studies and Political Science.

1 Myth-busting

Challenging the conventional wisdom on Chinese strategic culture

Andrew R. Wilson ¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315886909-2

Introduction

As China becomes more militarily capable and politically assertive, especially in its relations with its immediate neighbors such as Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, we who are interested in China are well advised to familiarize ourselves with the historical and cultural antecedents of China’s military and strategic behavior. In other words, we should try to understand what (if anything) constitutes Chinese strategic culture and the Chinese way of war. Fortunately, one does not have to look far for pithy and appealing distillations of the core elements of China’s strategic culture. In this chapter I refer to these as the five myths: the Great Wall myth, the Sunzi myth, the Good Iron myth, the Zheng He myth, and the myth of shi. Of these five, the first three predate the contemporary emergence of China and were proposed as early as the nineteenth century to explain the apparent contrast between China’s military passivity and Europe’s martial vigor. The last two are of a more recent vintage, but have quickly joined the mythic pantheon of the Chinese strategic culture discourse. Unfortunately, however, these myths enjoy little historical basis and even less explanatory power for understanding contemporary Chinese strategy. At best they are reductionist and misleading. And yet these five myths in their various forms and combinations continue to dominate today’s discussions of Chinese strategic behavior. This is the case among outside China watchers and even among the Chinese national security elite. This presents a double challenge: to historians of China the challenge is to try to discern more accurate patterns of Chinese strategic behavior. To those concerned with the future of security and stability in East Asia the challenge is to disabuse the Chinese elite and their foreign interlocutors of dangerously simplistic explanations of Chinese strategic intent and strategic behavior. This chapter offers a tentative step toward meeting both of these challenges as they affect China’s strategic priorities.

The Great Wall myth: China's defensive strategic culture

Chinese statesmen and soldiers, and not a few foreign experts, frequently assert that China possesses a wholly defensive strategic culture and that every war ever fought by a Chinese state has been either the suppression of an internal rebellion or a defense of Chinese territorial integrity. China’s 1998 Defense White Paper was particularly poetic on this point:

The defensive nature of China’s national defense policy also springs from the country’s historical and cultural traditions. China is a country with 5,000 years of civilization, and a peace-loving tradition…. During the course of several thousand years, loving peace, stressing defense, seeking unification, promoting national unity, and jointly resisting foreign aggression have always been the main ideas of China’s defense concept. The defense policy of New China has carried forward and developed such excellent Chinese historical and cultural traditions. ²

China’s strategic culture is therefore the antithesis of the Western tradition: a tradition grounded in the cult of the offense and a thirst for imperial expansion. The mundane version of this conventional wisdom typically points to the Great Wall as the embodiment of the Middle Kingdom’s cult of the defense, while more sophisticated explanations cite the texts of China’s classical period, 770–256 bce. This assertion draws on both the Confucian tradition, with its apparent disdain for the martial, and the military classics, Sunzi bingfa (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) paramount among them. The foundations of Chinese strategic culture, or perhaps more accurately the tradition of strategic debate in China, are, however, vastly more complex and interesting than contemporary caricatures of the classical discourse, and the treatment of the Great Wall as symbolic of China’s eternal defensive posture is almost entirely ahistorical.

Many Chinese wars were defensive, but they were also fought to defend territory previously seized from neighbors. In addition, the wars of the classical age were primarily campaigns of conquest, not merely beyond the Chinese cultural sphere, but also within the Sinic zone. Most of China’s iconic philosophers and strategic theorists accepted that the future of Chinese civilization would be determined not by the geographically limited states along the Yellow River, but rather by the kingdoms on the periphery that enjoyed the fruits of expansion. Only the large, populous, and thoroughly militarized states like Qi in the north, Qin in the west, and Chu in the south could hope to harness the manpower and material necessary to play the role of unifier of China’s Warring States. In short, an ‘harmonious order’ may have been an ideal in the core of the Sinic zone, but expansion of the frontiers was the enabler of the imperial consolidation that was achieved by the state of Qin in 221 bce Rather than eschewing war and expansion, the Chinese classics offer abundant rationales for and rationalizations of offensive military action.

Understandably, the justifications for expansion at the expense of non-Chinese peoples were more common, explicit and far less problematic, as seen in Nicola Di Cosmo’s Ancient China and Its Enemies. ³ The histories commonly linked to the early Confucians, the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuo zhuan, deal extensively with warfare, and the Han era historical chronicle, Shiji, notes some 483 wars in the period covered by these earlier histories. Viewed through the Confucian tradition these wars can be seen as cautionary tales against naked aggression and royal hubris, but they are also the source of many of the critical rationales for expansion and the subjugation of non-Chinese peoples. Confucianism thus presents inherently mixed messages to the military leaders and rulers of the classical and Imperial China. That world insists that the Son of Heaven be a moral exemplar, but is nonetheless obligated to march against anyone who does not acknowledge his authority.

Within the Sinic zone the moralist Confucians and naturalist Daoists ultimately resigned themselves to wars of conquest and annexation. The latter-day disciples of Confucius never abandoned the position that moral excellence was the necessary precondition for political supremacy, but historical realities forced them to concede that morality was not a sufficient precondition. The new forms of political and military organization that emerged during the Warring States era (403–221 bce) were so efficient at consolidating and concentrating the resources of the state that even Confucius’ most important disciple, the moral idealist Mencius, was forced to admit that a ruler might be as virtuous as the sage-kings of antiquity, but if he did not govern a state of ‘10,000 chariots’ he could never become the Son of Heaven. ⁴ The Huang Lao School of Daoism and the Legalists of the state of Qin, who took inspiration from it, were even more direct: In other words expansion, subjugation and annexation were core tenets in Chinese classical thought long before the Qin consolidation in 221 bce.

Thus when the sage attacks and annexes another’s state he tears down their walls, burns their bells and drums, disperses their stores, scatters their sons and daughters, divides their territory in enfeoffing the able, this is known as ‘Heaven’s achievement’. ⁵

During the Imperial era (221 bce–1911 ce), the whole question of defense versus expansion shifted from the contest for internal hegemony to debates about the correct nature and application of Chinese imperial power. At this point the argument revolved around the relationship between the state and commerce. Some saw commerce as a legitimate arm of state power and wanted to see the government partner with the merchants to expand government revenues that could then be devoted to improving the state’s commercial and strategic infrastructure. This created an incentive for imperial adventures in places like Turkestan, Korea, and Vietnam in a quest to open and control new trade routes. On the other side were those who, for ideological reasons, wanted to see the state’s finances drawn entirely from agricultural taxes. Within a certain school of Confucian orthodoxy (most clearly laid out in the Salt and Iron Debates of the Western Han), tying the state’s finances to commerce and territorial expansion was always aberrant. Both commerce and imperial adventurism are driven by greed. Instead, these Confucians argued, the state should always ally itself with the better part of human nature and what was in the public good. ⁶ Debates on this subject continued into the Ming (1368–1644 ce) and the Qing Dynasties (1644–1911 ce), proving that despite the establishment of imperial ‘orthodoxy’ as far back as the second century bce, disputes over expansion and defense remained robust.

If the philosophical foundations of this myth about China’s innate defensiveness are disputed, its physical manifestation, The Great Wall, is also deeply problematic. The ‘long walls’ of the Spring and Autumn periods and Warring States era, from which the first Great Wall was strung together by the First Emperor of China, were as much about defining and holding conquered territory as they were about defending traditional borders. ⁷ Long walls, like extensive Qin and Han highways, also served as convenient logistical channels along which supplies and manpower could be moved and massed in anticipation of further campaigns of conquest and expansion. From the Han in the second century bce to the Northern Song in the eleventh century ce, every major Chinese dynasty undertook significant military action to the north and west of the original line of Qin’s long walls. To impute the defensive purpose of later grand fortifications to those earlier walls is therefore ahistorical and ignores the restless expansionism that has characterized many Chinese states. Even the iconic Great Wall of the Ming era, which was designed as a defensive bastion against the Mongol menace, represented the culminating point of early Ming expansion rather than some natural dividing line between civilization and barbarity. ⁸ Even today, to see the Great Wall from the north is to be struck by the immense power and energy that once lay behind it. Hadrian’s Wall could never be construed as representing the modest or defensive inclinations of Imperial Rome.

Moreover, there was no equivalent of a Great Wall marking China’s southern frontier. Even if they were holding in the north, Chinese states have progressively absorbed vast swathes of the modern China coast, the southwest regions of Yunnan, and the foothills of Tibet, and have occasional attempted to annex portions of what are now Vietnam and Myanmar.

The impetus to expand has historically been rooted in security and prosperity. Chinese polities have expanded territorially to support ever-larger populations and have built buffer zones around the cultivated core. In this sense, China was little different from many ancient agrarian empires. The continued control over and even expansion of imperial territory was also bound up in the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty. The inability to control or expand territory hinted at a decline in the power and influence of the emperor and has historically been viewed as emblematic of inexorable dynastic decline. The Chinese Communist Party and the people of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have inherited this mania for territorial integrity and for stark interpretations of sovereignty. That they continue to do so in a world that is generally becoming less obsessed with sovereignty is particularly dangerous (see Chapter 6). When China’s growing power and military confidence, its nationalist obsession with territory, and its crushing insecurity regarding sovereignty combine, the results can be explosive (the balance between these is discussed in Chapter 3). Fortunately the countervailing tradition of opposition to imperial adventurism codified by the Neo-Confucians of the later imperial period and China’s own rich history of imperial overstretch may induce more caution on the Chinese leadership when setting priorities.

The Sunzi myth: the acme of skill is to win without fighting

One of the most quoted passages from the Sunzi is loosely translated ‘the acme of skill is to win without fighting.’ To someone contemplating the costs of blood and treasure suffered in combat this is a particularly appealing concept. It seems very much in line with the Sunzi’s other admonition that the superior use of the military is to attack the enemy’s strategies and alliance; the inferior use of the military is to attack his armies or his cities. ⁹ However, to understand the author’s meaning requires historical context. The Sunzi first appeared in China’s Warring States era (403–221 bce), in the context of the rise of states that were large and lethal enough to vie for mastery over all of Ancient China. As war became more lethal it also became more expensive. This made the military both the guarantor of the wealth and power of the state and the biggest drain on the state’s resources. Thus winning without resort to costly battle insists that the ultimate purpose of the military is to enhance the wealth and power of the state.

This passage is also directed at anachronistic notions about the purpose of war and the nature of military leadership. Although new technologies and new forms of organization were being deployed on the field of battle, the warrior aristocracy of the earlier Bronze Age still held considerable political power, and old aristocratic values still prevailed. For the aristocrat two qualities were paramount: their noble status in peace and their valorous conduct in war. Rejecting battle precluded a display of martial virtue and social status and completely subverted the aristocrat’s reason for going to war. The Sunzi’s twofold argument forces the reader to look at battle not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. It is an ideal type and meant to shock the Warring States’ aristocracy out of their antiquated mind-set.

In addition, if winning without fighting was the dominant prescription of the text, we would li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: studying China and strategic priorities
• 1 Myth-busting: challenging the conventional wisdom on Chinese strategic culture
• 2 Western river civilization and the logic of China’s strategic behavior
• 3 Analyzing China’s foreign policy: domestic politics, public opinion and leaders
• 4 Crises as impetus for institutionalization: maritime crisis management mechanisms in China’s Near Seas
• 5 The US factor in China’s dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands: balancing Washington’s ‘rebalancing’ in East Asian waters
• 6 China’s relations with India: great power statecraft and territory
• 7 US–China cooperation: the role of Pakistan after the death of Osama bin Laden
• 8 Chinese regionalism: balancing and constraint in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
• 9 Conclusion
• Index