Looking for Balance

China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia

Steve Chan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804778473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

Debate surrounding "China's rise, " and the prospects of its possible challenge to America's preeminence, has focused on two questions: whether the United States should "contain" or "engage" China; and whether the rise of Chinese power has inclined other East Asian states to "balance" against Beijing by alignment with the United States or ramping up their military expenditures.

By drawing on alternative theoretic approaches—most especially "balance-of-threat" theory, political economic theory, and theories of regime survival and economic interdependence, Steve Chan is able to create an explanation of regional developments that differs widely from the traditional "strategic vision" of national interest.

He concludes that China's primary aim is not to match U.S. military might or the foreign policy influence that flows from that power, and that its neighbors are not balancing against its rising power because, in today's guns-versus-butter fiscal reality, balancing policies would entail forfeiting possible gains that can accrue from cooperation, economic growth, and the application of GDP to nonmilitary ends. Instead, most East Asian countries have collectively pivoted to a strategy of elite legitimacy and regime survival based on economic performance.

1

Introduction

As I write these words, the People’s Republic of China is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. Since 1949, the government in Beijing has undoubtedly made huge progress in improving the living conditions of the Chinese people; over one-fifth of humanity is no longer facing the constant danger of hunger and starvation. Life in China has changed enormously for the better. There have of course also been trying times, especially during the “lost decade” of the Cultural Revolution, when the country faced the abyss of political and economic breakdown. Since its economic reforms launched in 1978, however, China has sustained the most rapid and protracted economic growth in modern history. Its economy has grown at about 10% annually in real terms in the years that followed—meaning that it has increased more than thirteen times in just over three decades (Bergsten et al. 2008, 106).

This economic expansion has increased China’s technological and military capabilities. China’s comparatively high growth rates, combined with its large size, have caused concerns abroad about a power shift in regional and even global political economy. There has been a surge in scholarship discussing China’s rise and the concomitant prospects of power transition presaging its possible challenge to America’s preeminence (e.g., Brown et al. 2000; Goldstein 2005; Ross and Zhu 2008; Shambaugh 2005). One salient theme of this debate among Americans has been whether to contain or engage China. Another strand of this discourse has been whether China’s rise has inclined its neighbors to balance against it.

The participants in this discourse are of course fully aware that an imbalance of power has characterized East Asia and the international system. The United States has been the preeminent power, even during the Cold War. Since the Soviet Union’s demise, its preeminence has been further strengthened. Even though China’s recent growth has improved its relative position, the United States still has a vast lead in different measures of national power and will likely continue to enjoy a large advantage in the next few decades, especially in military capabilities. The failure of other states to balance against the United States presents an enigma to balance-of-power theorists. A similar puzzle presents itself in the reactions of China’s neighbors to its reemergence as a major power. They have not ramped up their defense spending or scrambled to form a countervailing coalition in response to increasing Chinese capabilities. This book tries to explain this phenomenon—the non-occurrence of the expected outcome according to balance-of-power reasoning.

Several scholarly and policy-relevant concerns motivate my approach to this book. First, I try to ground my analysis on theories of international relations and political economy. In addition to extensive surveys of the literature on balance-of-power theories (and theories on power balances and balancing), I attend to recent rationalist theories about the origins of war and the conditions for peace, focusing especially on the idea of credible commitment.

Second, I try to introduce historical parallels in order to compare China’s rise with other major power shifts. Not all such cases occasioned war or defeated hegemonic bids. Our thoughts tend to be warped by hindsight bias and the ease of recalling a few dramatic cases, such as Napoleon’s France and Hitler’s Germany. We tend to overlook cases in which “the dog did not bark,” or occasions when the expected did not happen—such as when Mikhail Gorbachev decided not to continue his predecessors’ policy of contending with or balancing against the United States. Few American scholars count his decision, the Soviet Union’s demise, or the absence of war afterward, as a disconfirmation of balance-of-power theories.

Third, my analysis gives as much attention to the United States as it does to China. In this sense, my treatment is also different from the usual approach, which tends to focus on Chinese conduct and motivations without considering how these are influenced by others whose actions impinge on Chinese interests and perceptions. China’s foreign policy clearly cannot be studied in isolation—how the United States acts influences how China acts. When it comes to balance-of-power dynamics in East Asia, the United States is the proverbial “elephant in the room.” In bringing the United States explicitly into my discussion, I also call attention to the tendency by some analysts to apply different logics of analysis and rules of evidence when studying different countries. In such cases, the proper names of the countries being studied rather than the theoretical variables in question come to drive an analyst’s conclusions.

Moreover, I take the position that theories based primarily on Europe’s or America’s experiences cannot be automatically assumed to be generalizable to Asia or China but at the same time, Asia’s or China’s experiences are also not necessarily unique (Hui 2005). Neither Chinese uniqueness nor American exceptionalism provides a fruitful basis for engaging scholarship or policy. Finally, to paraphrase Karl Marx, people make choices even if they make them under circumstances not of their choosing. Therefore, structural conditions constrain officials’ policies but do not necessarily determine them. How China’s neighbors react to its reemergence as a major regional power depends in large part on what Beijing does with its power, and the outcome is hardly preordained, as is sometimes implied in some deterministic formulations of balance-of-power theories. Commenting on the victory of the Kingdom of Qin during China’s Warring States era—the culmination of “universal” domination over the dynamics of balance of power—Victoria Hui (2004, 202) offered this important caveat: history is open-ended, and one should not mistakenly think that contingent outcomes reflect universal laws.

The larger conclusions from this book can be summarized as follows. Although theorizing about balance of power has had a very distinguished tradition and continues to influence international relations scholarship, it also has some debilitating limitations. This perspective overlooks important cases in history when balancing against an aspiring hegemon did not happen or when hierarchy prevailed over anarchy. Even more important, it places too much emphasis on military capabilities and diplomatic alignments as a response to ongoing or prospective power shifts, treating these changes as zero-sum challenges and giving insufficient attention to the fundamental causes driving these changes. To put it starkly but simply, my argument is that China’s neighbors are not balancing against its rising power. There are sound reasons for the non-occurrence of this outcome expected from the balance-of-power perspective. The fundamental one is that officials are not myopic. They realize that balancing policies—by increasing their country’s armament or seeking foreign allies—are at best short-term solutions and at worst self-defeating actions. They are short-term solutions at best because, in the long run, the fundamental drivers of a country’s economic growth—and thus its national power—are located within it, and external attempts to bend its developmental trajectory are likely to have only a limited and transient effect. Balancing policies can be self-defeating because they entail important opportunity costs and induce reactions that trigger cycles of escalating recrimination. The default strategy is not to balance because balancing policies require a strong domestic consensus to pay the current and prospective costs of these policies (Schweller 2004, 172). My argument goes even further, suggesting that balancing policies would entail forfeiting possible gains that could accrue from cooperation, gains that states are wary of foregoing in the absence of demonstrable hostility from a stronger neighbor. In this latter sense, my argument agrees with Stephen Walt’s (1987) balance-of-threat theory.

Significantly, if states react to threat perception and not simply to power shifts, then there is something they can do about how others see them. This proposition suggests that officials do not have to make worst-case assumptions about others’ intentions. If so, the balancing phenomenon does not have to be a constant feature of international relations, even though power shifts are always occurring. Rather, this phenomenon indicates choice, not destiny. I claim that this choice is fundamentally tied to an elite’s strategy for garnering and sustaining domestic popularity and control. East Asian elites have collectively pivoted to a strategy of elite legitimacy and regime survival based on economic performance rather than nationalism, military expansion, or ideological propagation. In this respect, my interpretation differs sharply from other analysts whose studies emphasize Chinese nationalism, defense modernization, and an ambition to assert Beijing’s cultural and political preeminence in East Asia. I see that such factors often have no less an influence on the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy; this was particularly true during the administration of George W. Bush.

Whereas American officials and scholars continue to be concerned about military capabilities and security, or what Richard Rosecrance (1986) has called a “strategic vision” of national interest, East Asian countries—China included—have turned to an internationalist outlook that assigns priority to economic growth. To the extent that this model of governance has become pervasive in East Asia with few exceptions (e.g., North Korea, Burma), it has had a region-wide effect of dampening those forces that would have otherwise abetted the balance-of-power dynamics exemplified by competitive armament and exclusive alignment. To borrow from a summary observation made nearly two decades ago, I count myself among those who “are persuaded that the events of recent years are not moving in the direction of typical realist predictions, but rather away from them.” Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein (1993, 11–12) went on to note, “Looking at the past, [the contributors to our volume] are impressed by the number of occasions in which other than strictly ‘realist’ determinants appear to have influenced or even decided national policy. Collectively, they believe that domestic factors have been neglected as determinants of grand strategy and that ideas, institutions, or interdependence play important roles in shaping national policy.” A singular focus on balance of power—defined primarily in terms of military capabilities—in scholarship, policy statements, and popular discourse reflects American ambitions and obsessions more than it does Asian reality.

How can a rising power, or for that matter an extant hegemon, try to reassure other states about its benign intentions so that they will not balance against it? Its ability to communicate a credible commitment to honor agreements and to eschew opportunistic behavior naturally becomes a focus for understanding how international cooperation can be initiated and sustained—even when all the parties involved are fully aware of the power asymmetries that characterize their relations and realize that the more powerful among them will not entirely foreswear their advantages. I interpret the burgeoning commercial and financial ties among the East Asian countries as a form of credible commitment to cooperate and as a harbinger of such cooperation in the future. This does not mean that states with close economic relations would not go to war, but only that the probability of militarized conflict is reduced among such states.

Instead of policies traditionally understood as balancing efforts, I see more evidence of East Asian countries engaging in behavior that has been variously described as engagement, enmeshment, or entanglement—or to employ liberal terms, collaboration, cooperation, and integration. The key distinction is between organizing countervailing power to balance against a country on the one hand, and instituting networks of shared interests and interlocking relations to defuse its power on the other hand. The other important point to bear in mind is the synergy between self-restraint and restraint by others. The idea of balance of power has historically included both an associational aspect (self-restraint based on common expectations and norms, as in the case of the Concert of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars) and an adversarial aspect (the Concert members’ power competition to avoid relative loss), even though the latter aspect has dominated contemporary American scholarship on balance-of-power theories, in contrast with the English School.

Whether by self-restraint or reciprocal restraint, the exercise of power can be tamed in different ways. Washington’s construction of multilateralism offers one example of credible commitment to cooperate (Ikenberry 2001). This multilateralism integrated the United States with its West European allies after World War II and at the same time checked preemptively the latter countries’ potential challenge to U.S. leadership in the future, thereby underscoring both associational and adversarial motivations. In contemporary East Asia, bilateral and multilateral hostage-giving and hostage-taking provides another example of jump-starting and then sustaining cooperation that would have otherwise been impaired by mutual distrust. This perspective emphasizes economic interdependence rather than military collaboration as a basis for building confidence and maintaining stability.

Whereas in standard formulations of balance-of-power theories balancing policies entail armament and alignment, such policies are not necessarily motivated exclusively or even primarily by balancing considerations. Defense spending can stem from domestic pork barrel politics, the influence of the military–industrial complex, and military Keynesianism to stimulate and manage the macro economy. Defense treaties can also have purposes other than the declared rationale. These treaties can be a pactum de contrahendo, intended as much to restrain an ally as to deter an adversary (Schroeder 1976). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was, for example, developed as much to deter the Soviet Union as it was designed to manage West Germany’s rearmament and to sustain Washington’s military preponderance by a policy of integrating the other NATO members’ armed forces and subordinating them to U.S. leadership and control. If by bipolarity one means that the two bloc leaders need not depend on their allies for their own security, then why should the United States and the Soviet Union have bothered to protect their respective allies by entering into defense treaties with them during the Cold War? By this definition, these allies should not have mattered in the power balance between these bloc leaders—and the current U.S. global position, with its unassailable primacy, would have made these allies even more dispensable. Regime affinity, cultural identity, and other such variables are not typically admissible evidence in standard realist balance-of-power reasoning, and cannot therefore be invoked to explain such seemingly bizarre phenomena. If the preponderant power in a unipolar world can take on all military challengers, why again should Washington bother with entangling alliances?

In a recent special issue of the journal World Politics, John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth (2009, 10) quoted Paul Kennedy’s 2002 observation about the extent of U.S. global preponderance: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power, nothing . . . I have returned to all of the comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled for The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close.” The United States, spending nearly half of the globe’s military expenditures, is so much more powerful than the other major states that it seems odd to speak about its balancing against other states as opposed to the reverse. When balance of power is invoked to justify U.S. foreign policy, this concept is often intended to endorse the maintenance and even expansion of U.S. dominance rather than redressing the power asymmetries characterizing its relations with other states.

It is moreover often taken for granted that the United States is a statusquo power whereas others, such as a rising power like China, are dissatisfied challengers of the international order, or at least potentially so. Hence, there is much reference in both U.S. official and scholarly discourse about somehow transforming China into a “responsible stakeholder.” Less attention has gone to considering the proposition that “The structural and contingent features of contemporary unipolarity point plausibly in the direction of a revisionist unipole, one simultaneously powerful, fearful, and opportunistic” (Ikenberry, Mastanduno, and Wohlforth 2009, 13). Robert Jervis (2009, 204) put matters more directly, remarking “What is most striking about American behavior since 9/11 is the extent to which it has sought not to maintain the international system but to change it. One might think that the unipole would be conservative, seeking to bolster the status quo that serves it so well. But this has not been the case.” The more preponderant a country’s power over others becomes, the freer it feels to pursue its ideological proclivities and the greater the role its domestic politics is likely to play in this pursuit. Significantly, remarks such as those just quoted are in the minority. Most American scholars tend to accept almost reflexively the assertion that the United States is a status-quo power and that all rising powers—with the exception of the United States overtaking Britain—are at least potentially revisionist, and they treat these assumptions for analysis as conclusions from it.

Of course, one does not have to be a realist or a balance-of-power proponent to acknowledge that weaker states are concerned about being dominated (or abandoned) by stronger ones—just as the latter countries are concerned about their strength relative to their peers. If “balancing” is taken to mean statecraft generally, it is surely possible for the secondary and even minor powers to engage in various forms of strategic behavior to manage, even manipulate, their relations with those that are more powerful (Bobrow 2008a). It is therefore not always self-evident who is being balanced by whom (such as in Pakistan’s complicated relations with the United States, China, India, and Afghanistan). Moreover, although armament and alignment policies represent the quintessential forms of balancing behavior, they can very much have a domestic source, such as powerful lobby groups influencing military spending and foreign patrons being sought in order to protect a regime from its domestic opponents (e.g., Saudi and Yemeni rulers facing challenges from Islamic fundamentalists). It is not difficult to imagine that national security and the imperative of balance of power can be invoked for domestic parochial or partisan reasons. This being the case, domestic factors can influence both the nonoccurrence and the ostensible occurrence of balancing behavior. These factors can affect officials’ incentives and hamper their efforts to address an emergent foreign threat. At the same time, just because officials sometimes appear to engage in this behavior and even say so in their public statements, it does not necessarily follow that their behavior is in fact being motivated primarily by foreign rather than domestic considerations. Officials have been known to misrepresent—that is, to lie—about their motivations and intentions.

The preceding discussion raises naturally the question, “What [is the] price [of ] vigilance?” (Russett 1970). How much security is enough, and can excesses in military expenditures undermine not just civilian consumption but also the long-term prospects of a country’s economy? As already mentioned, East Asian countries have adopted a conception of security that extends beyond a narrow definition of military strength, giving priority instead to economic performance, one that provides the foundation for this strength. This view is associated traditionally with liberalism. At the same time, prominent realists have also warned that excesses in extending national power can have a boomerang effect. Tempering the definition of “national interest” and moderating the pursuit of power have been recurrent themes in the writings of Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt, and Christopher Layne. Despite my criticisms of realism and balance-of-power theories, I am in the company of these realists. Saying so, in turn, acknowledges that this book is not just about China and other states’ reactions to its rise.

China offers a mirror to reflect on U.S. policies. Waltz (1986, 1988), for example, has warned that a concentration of power is dangerous and that it can provoke balancing behavior from other states. He and other realists have thus counseled that the United States should adopt the role of an offshore balancer rather than getting directly involved in East Asian countries’ security. Still other “postclassical realists” would argue that military security does not and even should not always trump economic capacity as a policy priority, and that leaders can favor the latter over the former in making an intertemporal tradeoff so that a country may be better off in the long run both in its security and economic capacity (Brooks 1997). Whether such advice is sound can be debated. It is not helpful, howev...