Brian C.H. Fong
In 2000, when arguing for supporting China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States President Bill Clinton imagined a scenario of “Democratic China” in this way:
Now of course, bringing China into the W.T.O. doesn’t guarantee that it will choose political reform. But accelerating the progress -- the process of economic change will force China to confront that choice sooner, and it will make the imperative for the right choice stronger.1
Bill Clinton’s 2000 speech best captured the international community’s aspiration for ‘Democratic China’, an aspiration that many people have shared for over four decades since China’s ‘reform and opening’ in 1978. In these four decades, China underwent dramatic economic transformation, with its gross domestic product (GDP) increased on average by ten per cent a year and 850 million Chinese lifted out of poverty.2
However, political reform does not come hand-in-hand with economic transformation as predicted by Bill Clinton and many China watchers. What the international community is witnessing now is the rejuvenation of the Chinese Communist Party-state (CCP-state) through an unprecedented model of ‘authoritarian capitalism’ (Bloom, 2016). In recent years, ‘we got China wrong’ has become a popular international news headline.3
Instead of moving toward the ‘Democratic China’ scenario, the CCP-state is now exporting influence to its surrounding jurisdictions in Hong Kong, Taiwan and beyond with a similar set of Chinese influence mechanisms; correspondingly, in such surrounding jurisdictions there is a similar rise of counter-Chinese influence mobilization and great-power competition. When a ‘center-periphery tug of war’ is moving quickly to the stage of world politics, how can we study such a phenomenon in a wider geopolitical context?
This chapter is a preliminary comparative analysis of China’s influence in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific states. It aims to advance a concentric center-periphery framework for comparing the geopolitical pattern arising from China’s expanding influence, helping to form a theoretical basis for conducting further comparative investigations of China’s influence across different continents.
1.1 Why compare China’s influence: going beyond the existing literature
Orthodox international relations studies state that ‘power’ means tangible and intangible resources controlled by a state, while ‘influence’ refers to the way in which a state mobilizes its power resources for the purpose of changing the policies and actions of other actors (Goldstein and Pevehouse, 2006: 57-61; Toje, 2008: 12–15). In recent years, China has established stronger and stronger power resources, but such power resources will not be automatically translated into real influence (Goh, 2016). This gives rise to an important research question—how to compare the processes through which China translate its power resources into actual influence across its surrounding jurisdictions.
A survey of the scholarly field reveals that attempts have been made by scholars to study China’s influence, with several syntactically different but conceptually similar terms coined to conceptualize the phenomenon.
Such concepts include: Goh (2016)’s Rising China’s Influence which examined how China has made use of its growing economic power resources to influence its neighbouring states in Asia, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Sri Lanka; Wu (2016)’s China Factor classified Chinese influence mechanisms into direct mechanisms (direct actions by the CCP-state) and indirect mechanisms (indirect actions by CCP-state through the co-opted ‘local collaborators’); Schubert (2015)’s China Impact examined how China is shaping the politics and society of Taiwan in different arenas ranging from elections and migration to foreign politics and security; Li (2017)’s China’s Economic Statecraft conceptualized the systematic efforts of the CCP-state to exercise its economic power resources in international politics; Cardenal et al. (2017)’s Sharp Power examined the attempts of China (and Russia) to wield influence in foreign media, academia and policy communities; Brady (2017)’s Magic Weapons and Hamilton (2018)’s Silent Invasion summarized China’s united front activities in New Zealand and Australia respectively.
Amongst these early attempts of studying China’s influence, two major research issues have not been fully addressed.
First, how can we compare China’s influence across its surrounding jurisdictions? Existing literature either situates the analysis within only one territory (e.g., Wu’s China Factor focused on Taiwan with limited applications to Hong Kong, Schubert’s China Impact concentrated on Taiwan, Brady’s Magic Weapons looked to New Zealand, and Hamilton’s Silent Invasion concerned with Australia) or within a narrow group of territories (e.g., Goh’s Rising China’s Influence looked upon small developing Asian states such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka). Given that China’s influence has become a wider geopolitical issue, this fragmented approach may get us ‘lost in the trees without seeing the forest’. Developing an integrated theoretical framework for comparing China’s influence across its surrounding jurisdictions, ranging from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Indo-Pacific states, is imperative.
Second, how can we operationalize the modus operandi of different forms of Chinese influence mechanisms? To compare China’s influence, we must examine the processes through which China translates its power resources into actual influence in its surrounding jurisdictions. Thus, comparing China’s influence requires us to empirically examine the modus operandi of Chinese influence mechanisms. But the existing literature has either failed to offer a rigorous conceptual framework for operationalizing how the CCP-state exerts its influence (e.g., Schubert’s concept of China Impact has not been precisely defined throughout his volume) or has overly concentrated on certain dimensions of Chinese influence mechanisms (e.g., Goh’s Rising China’s Influence and Li’s China’s Economic Statecraft both focused on the CCP-state’s economic influence; Brady’s Magic Weapons and Hamilton’s Silent Invasion both focused on the CCP-state’s united front operations). Developing an integrated theoretical framework for broadly operationalizing different forms of Chinese influence mechanisms is imperative.
1.2 How to compare China’s influence: developing a concentric center-periphery framework
1.2.1 Jurisdiction as a unit of analysis
I follow the ‘imperialist center-periphery theories’ in conceptualizing China as a ‘center’ and its surrounding jurisdictions from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Indo-Pacific states as ‘peripheries’; and employ such concepts as the basic units of analysis of my integrated theoretical framework.
In political science literature, imperialist center-periphery theories adopt ‘empire-competition’ as the basic focus of analysis. The theories focus on not just formal, constitutional-legal relations but also actual power relations between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’ (Norkus, 2018: 141–161). In this connection, Galtung (1971) provided a classical structural theory of center-periphery relations, interpreting empires as ‘a combination of intra- and inter-national relations’ transcending the local to the international levels; he also theorized the five types of imperialist controls by a center over its peripheries as economic, political, military, communication and cultural mechanisms. Following Galtung, Motyl (2001 :4) conceptualizes an empire as a ‘hierarchically organised political system with a hub-like structure’, where a center dominates many peripheries.
Based on these imperialist center-periphery theories, I conceptualize modern China, the CCP-state, as a ‘center’ in East Asia, functioning as a geographical core of gravity similar to the roles of Russia in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, France-Germany in Western Europe, India in South Asia and the United States in the Americas (Su and Cui, 2016).
As the center in East Asia, the CCP-state is confronting its direct jurisdiction in the Mainland China and surrounding jurisdictions. The direct jurisdiction covers twenty-three provinces and the five autonomous regions of the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia and Guangxi in the Mainland China all coming under the direct jurisdiction of the CCP-state’s centralized nomenklatura system (Sharma, 2009: 24; Zheng, 2010: 103–105).
Outside the direct jurisdiction of the CCP nomenklatura system are three concentric rings of ‘peripheries’, including Hong Kong (and Macao), Taiwan and Indo-Pacific states. Obviously, the sovereign statuses of these three rings of peripheral jurisdictions are different, Hong Kong (and Macao) is a ‘peripheral autonomy’,4 Taiwan is a ‘peripheral contested state’,5 and other Indo-Pacific states are typical ‘peripheral sovereign states’.6 From the perspective of ‘most different systems design’ in comparative politics studies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Indo-Pacific states differ not just with respect to their sovereign statuses, their political, economic, social and cultural systems are also quite different; Yet, they share a similar political outcome of being embroiled in a similar rise of counter-Chinese influence mobilization and great-power competition in recent years, which could be explained by China’s export of its extra-jurisdictional influence—the dynamics of which are the focus of this book.
1.2.2 The concentric center-periphery framework
In this section, I will advance an integrated theoretical framework, namely the concentric center-periphery framework by way of systematically re-articulating the available theories, research and evidence.
Premise #1: Direct and indirect influence mechanisms of the CCP-state over surrounding jurisdictions
The first premise of the concentric center-periphery framework is that China as a center in East Asia is exporting its extra-jurisdictional influences to its surrounding peripheries through a similar set of direct and indirect influence mechanisms, though varying in motivation and intensity.7
Conceptually speaking, because the three rings of peripheries all fall outside the direct jurisdiction of the nomenklatura system, the CCP-state is required to advance its agenda by ‘exporting’ its influence. For this purpose, I conceptualize the CCP-state’s export of influence as direct and indirect influence mechanisms.8 Direct influence mechanisms refer to those extra-jurisdictional incentive and disincentive (carrot and stick) directly...
