The Chinese Constitution of Central Asia

Regions and Intertwined Actors in International Relations

N. Godehardt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349471706, 9781137359735
• eBook ISBN: 9781137359742
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

China's commitments in Central Asia illustrate how regional foreign policy works and how long-standing principles of Chinese foreign policy might be revised in the near future. China's rise has 'moved' Asia, which is why it seems that what we have traditionally regarded as the geographic and political scope of Asia might actually considerably change in the near future. Nadine Godehardt gives crucial insights into the Chinese expert discourse on Central Asia - analyzing how Chinese experts define Central Asia when they talk and write about policy issues related to China's immediate Western neighbourhood. In this context, she gives an inside perspective on Chinese voices whose meanings are rarely examined in Chinese International Relations studies.

1

Introduction

Regions are institutions of world politics. Every day when we listen to the news, they help us to locate environmental disasters, foreign countries or political crises in specific places around the globe. When we hear ‘Beijing’, we think of the capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). We read ‘Riots in Osh’, and know of a country called Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. If necessary, our mind can provide us with a lively image of the world. This includes mountains, oceans, rivers or woods, as well as continents, world regions or states. Hence knowledge about these geographic notions is an integral part of our daily life, and it is a knowledge that we use rather unreflectively. It often seems that, according to our understanding, the many divisions of the world are simply ‘out there’, as, indeed, are continents – a perception that is enshrined in, among other places, the five different-coloured Olympic Rings, with each representing one of the continents that participates in the Olympic Games.

This Eurocentric worldview has determined our perception of the world for the last 200 years and, accordingly, ‘Social Science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history’ (Wallerstein 1996, 93). In the Social Sciences, and particularly in the study of regions/regionalism in international relations (IR), researchers also still refer to the geographic divisions of the world as if they are ‘simply out there’. Despite the currently rapidly changing global context, as well as the emergence of non-Western voices in politics and science, world regions are usually considered as being well-known and well-established institutions in international politics.

Today, this one-dimensional way of understanding the world we are living in is being challenged by new perspectives arising outside of Europe – or, more precisely, outside of what is often called the ‘Western world’. The peculiarity of our time is not that Brazil, China or India have differing opinions on world politics, but that the Western world even pays attention to them. Thus, countries such as Brazil, China and India, as well as Russia, South Africa and Turkey, are undergoing a transition from being mere objects of IR to (again) becoming subjects of world politics (Mahbubani 2008). This book contributes to the emerging literature that is ascribing agency to such non-Western actors by focusing specifically on one of these rising powers: China.

The rise of China, its meaning for the Western world and its impact on the international system have all garnered increasing academic interest (see Deng 2008; Gill 2007; Goldstein 2005; Kang 2007; Kurlantzick 2007; Li 2009; Ross and Feng 2008; Shambaugh 2005). Many books have been written about what China thinks or how China will eventually rule the world (Jacques 2009; Leonard 2008). Furthermore, China’s rise is often linked to the decline of the West. The ethos of these writings is often characterized by an ‘either/or’ determinism instead of by the search for ‘co-existence’. In this book, I do not follow such narratives – since my core interest is to investigate China’s perspective on her regional neighbourhood, and particularly on the Central Asian region. More precisely, I aim to analyse how Chinese experts constitute ‘Central Asia’. Even though this limits my study to a specific academic discourse within Chinese foreign policy, it nevertheless gives insights about the broader question of how China has been imaging herself in the world at large.

If today we buy a world map in Beijing, the physical features of it would certainly be similar to those of a map bought in Europe, but the chosen perspective on the world would also be slightly different. Instead of Europe (and Africa), China (or Zhongguo, which literally stands for ‘Middle Kingdom’) would be situated at the centre of the map. In China’s four thousand-year-long history, the ideal of the Chinese emperor always symbolized the cultural, political and geographic centre of their known world. Nothing meaningful was located outside the Chinese Empire, which was known as Tianxia or ‘All under Heaven’. The Chinese emperors, or the ‘Sons of Heaven’ (Tianzi), ruled an empire without clear-cut borders. Hence the transition zones between the civilized Chinese and the non-civilized Barbarian world were never simply marked by border stones. Even the Great Wall, the most obvious attempt to distinguish and protect the empire from Northern invaders, was not a continuous and uniform border; it rather consists of several sections that were even built during different dynasties (Waldron 1990). The stability of the Chinese borderlands – and not only in the Northern areas, but also in the Western steppe (the Turks) or along the Eastern coastline (the Western intrusion) – represented a constant challenge to the rule of the Chinese emperors. Thus, China’s place in what European geographers called ‘Asia’ was from the very beginning ‘fuzzy’.

John K. Fairbank (1968) explains the ancient Chinese self-understanding of their place in the world with the help of concentric circles – wherein the ancient Chinese capital represents the core, the closer circles the primary tributary states, the further circles distant tributary states and the final circle the unknown Barbarian world. Following this perspective, the concept of ‘Asia’ – or more precisely Tianxia – was first and foremost a Chinese one since, as Karoline Postel-Vinay (2007, 560) rightly states, the term ‘Asia’ was ‘not known to the Chinese or the Japanese until the early nineteenth century’, when it was finally exported to the region. It was, however, initially not needed, as Tianxia already included every geographic space under the sun. This further shows that the concepts of ‘region’ or ‘regionalization’ did not traditionally exist in China, generally speaking. ‘All under Heaven’ rather symbolizes that every issue was a domestic one and, consequently, ‘regionalization in the “tianxia” is therefore somewhat of a contradiction’ (Zhang, F. 2009, 19).

Today, the PRC may not be the Middle Kingdom of the past, but there is little doubt that, at least geographically, China still represents the core of Asia. As long as the PRC kept herself politically isolated from the rest of the world this was not much of a problem, but when Deng Xiaoping introduced a reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, China’s economic success story would become a widely discussed issue in both Asia and the world at large (Peerenboom 2008). In addition to Deng’s opening-up policy, the dissolution of the Soviet Union further catalyzed China’s growing significance as an international actor. It determined the end of the bipolar global world order that had permeated regional affairs since the formation of the Eastern Bloc and the introduction of the Truman Doctrine. This paradigm shift led to new discussions about the role of world regions in international relations, a sudden interest in regional institutions and increased scrutiny of the diffusion of power between the regional and global levels – due to the emergence of new, at first mainly regional, actors (Buzan 1991; Buzan and Wæver 2006; Destradi 2010; Godehardt and Nabers 2011; Hurrell 2007; Katzenstein 2005; Lake and Morgan 1997; Nabers 2010; Prys 2010).

The end of the Cold War would, moreover, facilitate China’s engagement in a range of regional economic and security institutions. The most prominent examples of these are: the ASEAN Plus Three (APT), the ASEAN Plus China mechanism, the East Asia Summit (EAS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Six-Party Talks (SPT). Both developments – the end of superpower overlay and China’s opening-up policy – constituted the basis for China’s rejuvenation. Today, more and more Chinese people consider the last 200 years to be an exception in world history (Wang 2013). China’s continuous rise is not regarded as a new historical phenomenon but rather as a way to regain the country’s lost international status in the world. This view is based on a strong belief in China’s ability to finally overcome the ‘century of shame and humiliation’.¹

The period of European domination – the imperial government was forced to sign unequal treaties and granted foreigners privileges of extraterritoriality – and Japanese occupation slowly undermined the empire’s self-perception as the hub of their known world. After all, from a Chinese perspective Imperial China already occupied great power status. Even on the eve of the first Opium War, Qing China made up approximately one-third of the world’s total gross domestic product (GDP) – which at that time was still six times more than the share of the British Empire.² It is thus the case that ‘the Chinese people take the rise of their nation for granted’ (Yan 2001, 34; on China’s international status, see Deng 2008). Since the 1990s China has, therefore, increasingly transformed herself from being a detached outsider located at the heart of Asia to a politically engaged insider embedded in the midst of Asia.

In many ways, it is the rise or rejuvenation primarily of China – as well as to a lesser extent India – that, both in academic studies and politics, continues to provoke questions about the still dominant Eurocentric understanding of the world. Martin Jacques (2009) summarized common Western fears when he published his provocative work, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. In this context, others also speak of a power shift from the ‘West’ to the ‘East’ (Ross and Feng 2008). Bestsellers have been written entitled The Post-American World (Zakaria 2009) or The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, the work of Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani (2008). Whereas Zakaria focuses on the rise of the rest, which he underscores is not only an economic phenomenon but also one that ‘has political, military and cultural consequences’ (2009, xxiii) and is going to condition a post-American world order in the near future, Mahbubani focuses on the interdependence existing between Asia’s rise and Western modernization.

The latter further underlines the sometimes overly critical reactions of the West towards Asia’s economic and political (re)awakening by pointing out the thesis that ‘some Western societies are open in their political systems and closed in their minds’ (2008, xiii). Consequently, China’s struggle for power, recognition and status constantly raises questions about the country’s real intention or the narrative behind Beijing’s ‘peaceful rise’ rhetoric (see Shirk 2008; Yee 2011). It seems that the rise of China and Asia represents a pointed response to John Mearsheimer’s 1990 statement about ‘Why we will soon miss the Cold War’. This might finally lead to a serious academic debate being established about the nature of the future world order, even though it would be with a clearly different meaning regarding who is actually shaping it (Mearsheimer 1990, 35–50).

In short, China’s rise has ‘moved’ Asia, which is why it seems that what we have traditionally regarded as the geographic and political scope of Asia might actually considerably change in the near future. Today, not only states such as China, but also Afghanistan, Australia, Turkey and Ukraine, are difficult to allocate to one specific region; they are rather interlocked between different regional neighbourhoods – or, in the case of Australia, separated from others by sea. The circumstances of these states reveal the problematic relationship between geography and politics, with such states being what I call ‘intertwined actors’.

Intertwined actors either geographically or politically reveal blank spots in our regional mapping of the world, due to the still predominant perception of ‘naturally given’ geographic entities in IR. For instance, Australia is politically (as a liberal democracy) and culturally (as a recognized European civilization) seen as part of the Western Hemisphere (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 50–51). At the same time, the Australian government is increasingly aiming to strengthen its ties with East Asian neighbouring countries through forums such as the EAS. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd even proclaimed the vision of a wider ‘Asia-Pacific Community’ that should be created in 2020 to deal with future challenges in the region. The actual ‘region’ that Rudd was talking about has been a widely debated issue among academics and politicians (2008). However, whether Australia is a Western or Asian country depends ultimately on the perspective chosen – which first and foremost means on each country’s (or author’s) own subjective view.

China is, on the contrary, often naturally understood as being part of East Asia (Buzan and Waæver 2006; Kang 2007). This also becomes apparent in the literature dealing with Asian regionalism and China, which mainly concentrates on developments in East Asia in general or Southeast Asia in particular (Frost 2008, 21–38; Katzenstein 2000; Li 2009; Ross and Zhu 2008; Zhang 2009). Nevertheless, China is also geographically and politically intertwined with other parts of Asia through, for instance, open border issues (India, South Asia), regional institutions (the SCO, Central Asia) or a long and porous border with Russia (North and Northeast Asia). Hence, the country could also potentially be classified as part of Central, North and/or South Asia as well. With regard to China’s increasing regional engagement, the country seems to have become even more entangled between these different ‘Asias’. Consequently, China is difficult to allocate to one Asian region because the country could actually be allocated to every Asian region. This also indicates why China’s perspective on her different Asian neighbourhoods is crucial for an understanding of what ‘Asia’ might mean to the Chinese and where China consequently allocates herself. Intertwined actors underscore, therefore, the need for a serious consideration of how these states perspectivize their regional embeddedness, in other words, how they constitute regions. After all, it is not topography itself that is changing, but, in fact, how these actors understand their own particular embeddedness.

Accordingly, intertwined actors are regarded as an expression of what John Agnew has called the ‘territorial trap’ (1994). They highlight to us the illusory nature of fixed regional boundaries or a clear distinction existing between inside and outside; instead, they strengthen the view that regions are socially constructed, politically contested and historically contingent (Postel-Vinay 2011). Countries cannot choose their neighbours in the same way we cannot choose our brothers and sisters, but how they deal with them is a very different question; it is a political decision. Actors give, therefore, meaning to ‘the neighbourhood’. Regarding China, it needs, therefore, to be asked: what ‘Asian region’ is meant when China’s place in ‘Asia’ is discussed and what exactly are the ‘Asian regions’ pertaining to China?

These questions are the general starting point for my study. China’s decision to open up, her remarkable rise or rejuvenation in the last four decades and her increasing political engagement in her regional neighbourhood since the end of the Cold War have changed the political realities in Asia. ‘China is moving Asia’ thus means that China is persistently changing our understanding of ‘Asia’; put differently, China’s relationship with her neighbours is both redefining her role in Asia and the regional boundaries of Asia itself.

Based on the concept of ‘intertwined actors’, the analysis of how China ‘moves Asia’ – in other words, how, for instance, Chinese experts speak of the country’s regional engagement in its Asian neighbourhood – carries an increasingly important significance. However, I am not turning to just any ‘Asia’ in this book. Instead, I particularly highlight China’s perception of her immediate Western neighbourhood, since most studies dealing with China–Asian relations or China and Asian regionalism concentrate primarily on China’s Eastern neighbourhood. In the discipline of IR, conceptual works about China and/or Central Asia still represent something of an exception (Aris 2011; Kavalski 2012; Laruelle and Peyrouse 2012). In 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the newly established post-Soviet republics created a new geographic and political situation in China’s Western neighbourhood. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, China gained three new neighbouring states that share a 3,300 km-long border with the troublesome Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

In the 1990s, China held several rounds of border talks with all three neighbouring countries and successfully implemented various agreements with them (Fravel 2008). In addition, in 1996 China initiated the establishment of the Shanghai Five Forum, wherein the heads of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia and the PRC signed two treaties to strengthen mutual military trust and facilitate demilitarization in the Western border region. After five years of annual summits, the Shanghai Five member states plus Uzbekistan finally signed the declaration that would lead to the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June 2001. The SCO was created to further support mutual trust and regional cooperation among the member states. In this context, the six member states also signed a convention to jointly fight terrorism, separatism and extremism.

The case of China’s constitution of Central Asia as a region is particularly enlightening because ‘there was not a “region” in place around which China could organize its interests’ (Kerr 2010, 142). Contrary to the situation in East Asia, where China mainly has to deal with regional projects initiated by others, China needed first to invent the Central Asia region ‘in order to have someone with whom to cooperate’ (ibid.: 142). In short, China has had to create an image of what Central Asia represents. In this regard, the proximity of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to the Central Asian republics has also been of crucial significance. Xinjiang borders on three of the Central Asian republics as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many experts in China highlight the connection between the situation in China’s immediate Western neighbourhood and that in Xinjiang. Thus, the questions of how China constitutes Central Asia as a region and whether Chinese experts see China as a regional insider or outsider are of particular interest to this study. It further underpins the specific challenges of defining China’s regional intertwinedness. After all, it is indeed striking that China did not simply leave Central Asia after the territorial questions with her immediate Western neighbours were solved; instead, the country even initiated and widely supported the establishment of a regional organization (the SCO) that until today is predominantly responsible for orchestrating China’s relations with her Western neighbourhood.

Structure of the book

The next chapter covers how the topic of regions/regionalism has traditionally been addressed in IR. Chapter 2 concentrates on two areas: first, regions and regionalism and, second, typologies of regional order. The former is clustered along two lines: first, cooperation – comprising the different approaches to regionalism and, second, security – which refers to approaches such as the regional security complex (RSC) theory. The latter shows how different political patterns in a given regional context have been categorized thus far. In conclusion, I underscore the point that the regionalist debate has not (yet) transcended the boundaries of the inter-paradigm debate, which has essentially limited the context and scope of the regionalist discussion in IR. Put differently, regionalist approaches in IR have not yet been constituted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Study of Regions in International Relations Theory
• 3 The Political Constitution of Regions
• 4 The Regional Embeddedness of Intertwined Actors
• 5 China and Central Asia: Twenty Years of a Demanding Relationship
• 6 The Chinese Constitution of Central Asia
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index