Sinicizing International Relations

Self, Civilization, and Intellectual Politics in Subaltern East Asia

C. Shih

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137289445
• eBook ISBN: 9781137289452
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book brings civilizational politics back to the studies of international relations and foreign policy through a study of the multiple meanings of international relations and related terms in East Asia and the intrinsic relation of international relations to individual choices of scholarly identity.

PART I

A World Sinicized into Harmony: Centralized Perspectives

CHAPTER 1

Harmonious Realism: Undecidable Responses to the China Threat

Chinese foreign policy practices contribute to international relations (IR) theory and the conduct of foreign policy analysis (FPA) in a peculiar way—they do so not necessarily by transforming IR/FPA theory but by refocusing IR theorization on the civilizational aspect.¹ From the imperial times through the Republican and socialist eras in China, the purpose of achieving modernity from the point of view of Chinese leaders and intellectuals has been to transform a civilizational gathering in pervasive space, which could be practical, customary, or spiritual, into a rational construct in territorial space in order to exclude imperialist intrusion. Ironically, in the twenty-first century, China’s successful emergence as a nation-state resulted in the Chinese people’s spilling over their territorial boundary. However, from time to time, Chinese people from all over the world respond to the call of the Chinese foreign policy of national consciousness, making civilizational politics noteworthy again.² Ambivalence among Chinese people toward China’s civilizational image causes a division in Chinese foreign policy between those motivated to reaffirm the civilizational pride of being Chinese and those who desire to transcend civilizational incapacity and act rationally on behalf of territorial China.³ Together, the two approaches create a self-role conflict within Chinese foreign policy and its analysis. This conflict further complicates and at the same time transforms the external analysis of Chinese foreign policy. In the past, FPA was not focused on ontological issues. However, as China’s unsettled situation between a civilizational and a territorial state gives it an increasingly uncertain identity, the self-role conceptions that sustain Chinese FPA become ambiguous. This ambiguity is a challenge to both Chinese foreign policy practitioners and internal as well as external narrators of Chinese FPA.

Two major leitmotifs have begun simultaneously to inform the self-roles of Chinese foreign policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, namely, the “harmonious world,” which is a classic Confucian ideal that came into the spotlight in 2005 to indicate the coming of a non-threatening international relationship even between powerful countries, and “core national interest,” which became significant at roughly the same time to enable mutual respect among nation states.⁴ Both can be taken as responses to the “China threat” image , which is part of the nascent notion of “China rising” against a background of reflections over the past two decades concerning the “clash of civilizations” and the “end of history” in the literature of international relations and offensive realism.⁵ The fact that China has been undergoing liberalization under one-party rule provides optimistic hints of the imminent end of history as well as pessimistic ones concerning the inevitability of Sino-US confrontation.⁶ Beijing authorities desire neither an end of history that implies the end of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule nor a head-on hegemonic confrontation with the United States. The official line has always been that China is not becoming another or the next superpower.⁷ However, based on enthusiastic discussions in contemporary academic literature and the media, China’s rise is agreeable to most Chinese IR and FPA thinkers who are now writing on China’s proper place in the world for the second decade of the twenty-first century. Nowadays, the harmonious world refuses to believe that China’s rise could lead to hegemonic war; and the core national interest is a plea for minimal living space within the existing IR parameters for everyone. The former sets the ideal condition of IR, whereas the latter alludes to the method of achieving that condition.

Both concepts have philosophical roots, and have been appropriated by Chinese foreign policy makers. The “harmonious world” is a classic Confucian value that constrains the antagonistic socialist revolution to the extent that the party continues to denounce self-interest, so the group and its internal harmony can be cherished. In contrast, “core national interest” is a modernist, realist belief, albeit defensive, that reflects the uncompromised volition of each national actor to protect its own national security. Despite the notion that core national interest is defensive in the realist analysis, Beijing sometimes uses the concept in an assertive way intended to reclaim or consolidate a sphere of influence lost to Western imperialism in premodern times, most notably in Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and, before their return, Hong Kong and Macau. In practice, Beijing does not hesitate to reach tentative compromises whenever the notion of a harmonious world is invoked. However, the world, including anxious Chinese critics, still thinks that Beijing has become arrogant in the way it appropriates China’s own cultural resources/models vis-à-vis the liberalistic norms.⁸ Invoking the harmonious world involves civilizational politics with reference to premodern China proper while sticking to the core national interest subscribed to in the statist discourse centers on mutually exclusive territorial sovereignty that defends an enlarged China proper. Consequently, role-playing that asserts the harmonious world can defeat harmony in the following hypothetic sequence:

1. Beijing unilaterally compromises on a certain or even a core national interest in favor of another country’s national interest to demonstrate harmony in a bilateral relationship. However, this implicitly imposes a duty on the other party not to push further on the issue.

2. The other party, recognizing Beijing’s short-term compromise, does not refuse, accept, or even understand its own reciprocal duty, which is implicit in Beijing’s role-playing.

3. Beijing unilaterally declares that the two sides have achieved a harmonious partnership, adapts accordingly, and from time to time seeks reconfirmation from the other side.

4. The external and internal politics of the other party compel it to show that it is not complying with China’s unilateral role expectation.

5. Beijing loses face, reacts negatively and strongly, and enlists its self-perceived restraint as justification for imposing sanctions, often symbolic at first.

6. In the other party’s view, Beijing’s symbolic sanctions act as confirmation of Beijing’s malicious intentions, thus fulfilling the prophecy that it will be betrayed. The same view is echoed in China, resulting in a vicious circle for both sides.

Harmonious World and Self-role Conception

China as a civilization is almost a curse on China as a territorial state. As Lucien Pye proclaimed, China is only a civilization pretending to be a nation-state.⁹ Chinese foreign policy is incomprehensible unless we first penetrate this pretense. Let us conceive civilization as a way of life that can be taught and learned without a shared meaning between the giver and the taker. Civilizational foreign policy is not rational because it does not serve a tangible national actor with a definite (institutional) purpose. Rather, it comes out of one’s motivation to preach a way of life practiced by those sharing the same civilizational rather than national identity or to acquire it for them.¹⁰ Constrained by civilizational imagination, China, as a nation-state that institutionally frames the creation of foreign policy, is neither entirely territorially oriented nor entirely security driven. Whenever Beijing authorities act as the representatives of Chinese civilization, their preaching, and even learning, easily arouses suspicion because civilizational expansion trespasses on territorial security.¹¹ Therefore, it is critical for Chinese FPA to attend to how civilizational imagination prescribes the national self-role concept of the Beijing authorities in terms of communities teaching and learning alternative ways of life.

Teaching and learning are typical and spontaneous mechanisms of interaction that are used by the civilizations involved to understand each other’s unfamiliar phenomena. Unfortunately, cultural meanings associated with any specific way of life are not easy to pass on, as they can create mutual misunderstanding. Thus, national role conceptions mediate between civilizational imagination and FPA. For many premodern latecomers, acquiring a national role conception is a confusing process. Watchers in Europe hardly appreciate that the latecomers’ acceptance of the institution of the territorial state may rest upon antagonism toward European imperialism, rather than upon their national interest calculus.¹² FPA is the expedient vehicle for the postcolonial government to make use of the perceived opportunities, and deal with the threats, arising out of misunderstanding. These postcolonial nations have suffered from unfinished nation-building or even witnessed civil wars, and have thus been the targets of continuous intervention by the old colonial power or a hegemonic United States. Their national role conceptions are uncertain and changeable. China may appear to have successfully emerged from its postcolonial condition to become a leading nation-state, but confusion still exists and is increasing.

One result of this success is the spillover of influence in a pervasive process of Sinicization to which the world has to adapt. Chinese foreign policy assumes the additional mission of demonstrating China’s civilizational attraction, representing regional politics along the civilizational fault line and yet attempting to present alternative principles of international relations. One important cultural resource appropriated by contemporary Chinese leaders to help them cope with the rise of China is the Confucian notion of a harmonious world. In China’s return to civilizational politics, the harmonious world has both an ontological and an epistemological theme. The harmonious world is an imagined world in which its member states must play mutually congruent roles. Self-centrism is anathema to role-playing. National interest premised upon multipolarity is a typical example of such self-centrism because it exists on the presumption of the irreducible ontology of differing individual territorial states.¹³ Protecting national interest involves assuming an irreconcilable conflict of interest, whereas a harmonious relationship requires transcendence of territorial divisions.

If Chinese leaders subscribe to harmony as the foundational norm of interaction, compromising Chinese national interests from time to time allows it to demonstrate that harmony is the supreme rule of human gathering. However, any compromise by China carries with it the expectation that others should also compromise. As long as no individual is deliberately taken advantage of, everyone will be comfortable with his or her role of reciprocating harmony. In this way, in one domestic example, when the reform policy of enriching a portion of society to provide sufficient incentives for production was announced in the early 1980s, those who benefitted from it were expected to help enrich the latecomers. Externally, the occasional concession of territorial gains—for example, China’s unilateral withdrawal from captured territory during the Korean War, the Sino-Indian border war, and the “punitive” war with Vietnam—are classic invitations to reciprocal self-restraint and efforts to preempt the territorial ambitions of the other side.¹⁴

The reform-socialist style of sequential egalitarianism connects the image of rising China to premodern Confucianism and modern socialism. Briefly, no individual should be left out of a social engagement. Although they are two millennia apart, the two ideologies share the motto that food and security for the people should be the first rule of government. Both internal reform and openness to the outside world over the past three decades have been committed to emancipating individual productivity for the sake of collective welfare. The reality that not everyone has benefited equally is detrimental to the reputation of socialism. The same is true in FPA if Chinese leaders cannot avoid the impression that China is rising at others’ expense. To ensure that all are confident in their social roles, the most powerful player has a duty to perform occasional self-sacrifice to prepare the rest of the society in the spirit of the commonwealth. This duty is not as easy in FPA as it is in domestic politics, where the Communist Party is in charge. In fact, during the Cold War, neither superpower took note of its responsibility to make concessions to weaker nations. Nevertheless, as China rises, Chinese leaders are beginning to see the possibility of preaching the harmonious world.¹⁵ Finally, in the twenty-first century, Confucianism and socialism are officially intertwined.

The nascent quest for a harmonious world justifies and demands concessions on extant foreign policy stances. From the harmonious world point of view, short-term concessions are conducive to long-term harmony. When China achieves a reciprocal role relationship with every nation in the world through such concessions, it will have achieved the harmonious world. Granted that concession is critical to achieving harmony, China’s role of facilitating reciprocal harmony can be broken down logically into three modes. First, China could resort to a unilateral compromise to demonstrate the value of a harmonious partnership. In territorial settlements with North Korea, Burma, and Bhutan, for example, the Chinese people generally perceive that China yielded more land to the smaller parties.¹⁶ Second, China could push for a mutual compromise to ensure that the other side will not take advantage of bilateral relations or abuse China’s consent to retreat from a previous stance. One notable example is the negotiation with Britain over the return of Hong Kong, especially on how democratic elections were to be installed. Beijing backed out of a scheme to which it had already consented in response to what it perceived as insatiable demands from London. Third, when China is not a direct party in any conflict, it believes it should serve as a platform for mutual compromise. This is particularly the case in conflicts involving so-called failed states, such as the attempted international intervention in North Korea and Myanmar.

Harmony is not easily measured. Notably, both premodern Confucianism and contemporary socialism stress a positive attitude toward teaching and learning more than the results of learning and thus testify to the critical relevance of face-saving in Chinese FPA. A compromise is an act of face-giving that invites reciprocal face-giving from the other side. In this regard, unilateral compromise is not only a symbolic act of role enactment but also an indicator of harmony for the rising nation, allowing it to discover how willing the world is to accept Sinicization as a way of life rather than as a threat. This compromise explains why the notion of the China threat is shameful. In fact, the entire Chinese FPA community is devoted to its repudiation, giving rise to a variety of themes, including those in seeming defiance of harmony such as “national interest.” The idea of a harmonious world is a nascent response to the fear of a China threat.

The China threat, as a derivative of realism, is a quintessential point of poignancy. Unimpressed with the pervasive space of a harmonious world, the China threat locks China back into its territorial boundaries. This situation generates anxiety with regard to national security among writers of Chinese FPA and ironically poses an increasing threat to the rest of the world.¹⁷ The question for Beijing is how far China should compromise to establish a friendly image of Chinese civilization on the reciprocal rise. Similarly, Beijing has to decide whether this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: A World Sinicized into Harmony: Centralized Perspectives
• Part II: China International and Intellectual: Perspectives Beyond
• Part III: China Subaltern and Different: Perspectives Below
• Part IV: Worlding East Asia through China: Multisited Perspectives
• Conclusion: Serious Hypocrisy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index