The New Great Game

China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform

Thomas Fingar, Thomas Fingar

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804797641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

China's rise has elicited envy, admiration, and fear among its neighbors. Although much has been written about this, previous coverage portrays events as determined almost entirely by Beijing. Such accounts minimize or ignore the other side of the equation: namely, what individuals, corporate actors, and governments in other countries do to attract, shape, exploit, or deflect Chinese involvement. The New Great Game analyzes and explains how Chinese policies and priorities interact with the goals and actions of other countries in the region.

To explore the reciprocal nature of relations between China and countries in South and Central Asia, The New Great Game employs numerous policy-relevant lenses: geography, culture, history, resource endowments, and levels of development. This volume seeks to discover what has happened during the three decades of China's rise and why it happened as it did, with the goal of deeper understanding of Chinese and other national priorities and policies and of discerning patterns among countries and issues.

ONE

China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform and Opening

Thomas Fingar

China’s rise and increasing activism in the world during the past two decades have produced admiration, anxiety, and an avalanche of academic and journalistic analysis and speculation about China’s goals, actions, and intentions. Despite the large volume, amount of detail, and interesting insights produced by foreign and Chinese observers, the number of empirically based comparisons is small and the cases examined are often so diverse that it is difficult to determine what is being compared and how to interpret their findings. The net result is a collection of inconsistent judgments that call to mind the conclusions of the six blind men who touched different parts of the elephant.¹ For example, depending on the study consulted, one learns that China has a grand strategy and a rather detailed plan that guide its foreign interactions or that it addresses problems and opportunities in an ad hoc and pragmatic way.² Other studies reach different judgments on the extent to which China acts as a status quo power or is determined to change the international order,³ has coherent and tightly coordinated policies or increasingly acts in ways reflecting the divergent interests of competing actors,⁴ or manifests a new-type foreign policy to achieve win-win and mutually beneficial outcomes or ruthlessly pursues its own objectives with little regard for the interests of others.⁵ Another dichotomy is that between analyses that emphasize historical continuities—the so-called Middle Kingdom Syndrome—and those that focus on China’s communist authoritarianism and efforts to maintain party rule.⁶

Evidence can be found to support all these—and other—interpretations, but many of them are contradictory and not all of them can be correct. More importantly, it is not obvious whether a particular course of action—for example, construction of infrastructure to facilitate trade with a neighboring country—was intended to preserve or change the status quo, or to restore China’s preeminence or maintain communist rule. In short, the generalizations are not very helpful.

One reason for the disparate findings and generalizations about China’s international behavior is that analysts approach the subject using different perspectives and expertise. The different perspectives can be summarized as those that deduce and explain the actions of China and other countries from the laws and lessons of international relations (IR) theory, China-centric interpretations that focus on China’s goals and actions toward one or a few specific countries, and those that examine and interpret China’s actions from the perspective of the target or partner country.

International relations-based analyses and predictions of China’s goals and behavior focus on the nature and dynamics of regional and global systems. Most who write in this genre are IR specialists who do not claim to have deep knowledge of China or its policy-making processes. Their lack of deep knowledge about China is not regarded as a serious impediment because their system-dominant approach treats China as a generic rising power or, in more refined versions, a rising power “with Chinese characteristics.”⁷ In this approach, the modalities of decision making in China (and elsewhere) are much less important than the dynamics of the international or regional system in which it operates. Objectives and behaviors associated with rising states, such as a tendency to perceive the actions of others as intended to constrain or thwart the rising state’s ascension to its “rightful” place in the regional or global order, are imputed to China, and Chinese actions are interpreted as evidence that it is behaving as a stereotypical rising power.⁸

The system-level analysis category can be further divided into “realist” and “liberal internationalist” subdivisions. Realists, like John Mearsheimer and Aaron Friedberg, generally interpret—and predict—China’s behavior as intended to regain supremacy in Asia and, ultimately, to challenge the United States for global leadership.⁹ Liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry, Bruce Jones, and Joseph Nye, in contrast, place greater emphasis on China’s increasing integration into the US-led global order and growing dependence on that order for the attainment of its developmental and political objectives.¹⁰

IR theorists and others who focus on the international system tend to assess China’s actions primarily in terms of its relationship with the United States and a small number of other major powers, and to interpret China’s interactions with other countries as extensions or manifestations of Beijing’s goals vis-à-vis the United States, India, or, in the first half of the period examined here, the United States and the Soviet Union.

A second genre of work on China’s global engagement is more China-centric and tends to explain Chinese policy and behavior in terms of the country’s history, culture, political system, domestic situation, and security calculus. Unsurprisingly, most who employ this approach are China specialists who build on their detailed understanding of the country.¹¹ In contrast to system-dominant analyses that emphasize universal factors, those by China specialists tend to focus on factors that are China-specific (although not necessarily unique to China), such as the nature of the political system, the importance of historical memory (and mythology) of China’s past greatness and “century of humiliation,” and increasing economic capabilities and requirements.¹²

China-centric analyses of China’s actions on the world stage assign different importance to specific factors shaping Chinese perceptions and policies but generally focus on what China is attempting to do, and why it is attempting to do it, more than on the objectives and actions of the countries that are the target of China’s attention. Implicitly, if not explicitly, China’s aspirations and actions are treated as independent variables, and the reactions of other nations are assessed as dependent variables. The result is often an unbalanced assessment that gives inadequate attention to the goals, strategies, and second- and third-order consequences of a country’s interaction with China.

The third and much smaller category of works on China’s engagement with the world consists of those written from the perspective of other countries or regions.¹³ From the perspective of a China specialist, most of these works provide unsatisfactory descriptions and explanations of China’s objectives and policy calculus. However, and more important, they provide useful insights into the way the countries in question perceive China and its actions and what the other countries do to capitalize on opportunities resulting from China’s rise and to mitigate adverse consequences for their own interests.¹⁴

The essays in this book attempt to redress this imbalance, in part, by demonstrating that the countries that interact with China do not simply respond to challenges and opportunities from the People’s Republic. They have objectives of their own, sometimes leverage their relationship with China to entice or counterbalance third countries, and often seek to take advantage of spillover effects of engagement with China, such as the ability to use infrastructure financed or built by China in order to access specific markets or resources. Chapters 5, 6, 9, and 10 examine the perceptions and actions of countries in the region.

This volume builds on the insights of others who have examined foreign-policy dimensions of China’s rise by employing empirical approaches to discover, describe, and explain China’s interactions with the states of South and Central Asia during the period of “reform and opening” that began in 1979. All have eschewed single-issue focuses, diplomatic history, detailed chronologies, archival research, interview-based approaches, and other methodologies in favor of approaches that synthesize insights from their own and others’ research to assess and explain what they regard as the most important drivers, characteristics, and trajectories of interactions between China and the nations of South and Central Asia. The contributors do not explicitly assess or apply the approaches and findings of others or develop broad generalizations, theoretical models, or detailed predictions of how events will unfold in the future. Instead they focus on three questions that, to the extent they can be answered, provide a basis for comparisons within and among regions, over time, and across issue areas. Those questions are

• What happened?

• Why did it happen that way?

• What impact have China’s interactions with the countries studied had on China, the other countries, and the global system?

Taken together, the chapters in the volume provide the basis for addressing two additional questions—namely:

• What patterns, trends, and trajectories can be discerned when comparing the findings of the individual chapters?

• Do the findings of the book suggest or support predictions about future actions and interactions?

Rationale for Focusing on a Single Region

The decision to focus on a single region was not the result of a Goldilocks-like judgment that attempting to cover the entire world would be too ambitious and focusing on a single country would preclude comparison and generalization, although both considerations are true. Nor did it result from a judgment that the countries in the region were especially important to China or that the evolution of China’s engagement with South and Central Asia was particularly useful for understanding China’s objectives and choice of policy instruments. The reason is less obvious and more subjective. During the decades that I have studied China’s interaction with other countries, especially the fifteen years during which I supervised and edited assessments of developments in and interactions among all countries on all issues while a senior official in the US government, I thought that I observed patterns of behavior in China’s relations with other countries that varied by region and over time.¹⁵ The patterns appeared to result from changing Chinese assessments of the country’s security situation and changing requirements of its quest for economic growth and rapid modernization. In addition to its other objectives, this book represents an attempt to refine and test preliminary judgments and hypotheses about China’s priorities and calculus of decision.

The framework developed here is based on two key judgments about China’s priorities. One is that national security always has highest priority even if it is not always identified as such. As used here, and in China, security is a compound and elastic concept that comprises the country’s ability to deter or in other ways manage actual and imputed threats from abroad, threats to internal stability, and at least some of the time, threats to continued rule by the Chinese Communist Party.¹⁶ Without security, in the analysis of Chinese officials, it is impossible to pursue other objectives. This implies that policy makers must do whatever is necessary to manage or mitigate military threats from abroad and internal or external threats to domestic stability and party rule. Chapters 2 and 4 address external threat concerns, and Chapters 7 and 8 examine the impact of concerns about internal stability.

The second-highest priority is rapid and sustained development. Development, or modernization, has been a Chinese priority for more than a century, but its elevation to second position dates from the late 1970s. Modernization is seen as critical to the achievement of the prosperity and power necessary to ensure security, stability, and continued legitimacy of the regime. This implies that one of the principal considerations when Chinese leaders make foreign-policy decisions is whether a particular course of action or form of engagement with another country will assist or impede the quest for modernization. Chapters 4 and 7–11 illuminate different dimensions of this consideration.

This way of conceptualizing the Chinese calculus of decision posits that when thinking about whether, when, and how to engage with particular countries, two of the principal considerations are the nature and magnitude of the threat that they pose to China’s security (or what they can do to mitigate the threat from others) and whether a country can provide what is most needed at a particular time to sustain a high rate of growth and acquisition of advanced technologies. This might be summarized as consideration of what they can do to China and what they can do for China.

Geopolitics is a strong determinant of both the nature of the threat to China and the potential to assist China’s drive for development in specific ways. Thus, for example, countries located far from China generally pose less significant threats and have fewer historical issues than do countries located closer to China. The obvious and important exceptions are the United States and, particularly during the Soviet era, the USSR/Russia. Similarly, the wealthiest and most advanced countries (in North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia) have the greatest ability to provide markets, capital, technology, and training. Nations in other regions have greater capacity to provide oil, timber, minerals, or other inputs to China’s economy.

The sequence and way in which China engaged countries in different p...