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Foreign Policy
Summer 1998
Guoji xingshi fenxi baogao
1997-98
(Study Reports on International Relations
1997-98)
by Zhongguo zhanle yu guanli yanjiuhui (China Society
for Strategy and Management Research)
Reviewed by Minxin Pei *
In divining the political significance of Chinese writings on domestic politics or foreign policy, American analysts have learned to scrutinize three components: publisher, authorship, and content (not necessarily in that order). Such decoding skills have become even more important in illuminating the opacities of the post–Cold War era, when China is emerging as a potential challenger to U.S. supremacy. Although the raging U.S. debate over China policy has showcased the diversity of American views on the Middle Kingdom, little is known of how China’s élite perceive the United States. Such ignorance could result in dangerous mutual misperceptions. For example, a 1996 Chinese national bestseller, entitled The China That Can Say No, received extensive attention in the United States and was mistakenly interpreted by many as reflective of the Chinese élite’s generally hostile intentions.
That is perhaps why Study Reports on International Relations 1997–98, despite its rather utilitarian title, deserves more than a casual perusal. This publication has all three attributes that should catch the attention of students of Chinese foreign policy. Its publisher, the China Society for Strategy and Management Research, is one of the country’s newer, semiofficial think tanks. Founded in 1993, the organization has gained financial and political support from an impressive array of official and private interests, including the Chinese military. Its bimonthly flag publication, Strategy and Management, contains unorthodox, penetrating, and provocative essays on domestic and foreign issues, making it China’s most influential policy journal.
The society’s second annual survey of international politics, Study Reports on International Relations 1997–98, contains short essays written by Chinese foreign-policy analysts in their mid-40s who have acquired extensive knowledge of the West, either through graduate studies or frequent visits. Despite the uneven quality of the 10 essays collected in this survey, taken together they provide valuable clues as to how China’s rising generation of analysts views the challenges facing their country. The lead essay by Yan Xuetong (who received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California at Berkeley) is a classic example of hard-nosed political realism, methodically addressing the three types of security challenges facing China: military, political, and economic. Discounting a direct military conflict with a major power in the next decade, Yan nevertheless warns of a greater probability of China’s involvement in a limited, regional war, especially in the Taiwan Straits.
China’s more immediate concerns, however, involve political and economic security. Yan points out that the differences between China’s political system and those of the leading Western powers (especially the United States), and the diverging preferences for a new world order (American hegemony versus multipolarity), will result in sustained U.S.–led pressures on China to change its internal practices, particularly with regard to human rights. Economically, globalization and interdependence have greatly increased China’s vulnerability to forces beyond its control. Although China was left unscathed by the financial collapse of Southeast Asia in 1997, Yan singles out the country’s increasing dependence on imported energy and its insufficiently diversified export markets (the United States and Japan absorb 40 percent of China’s total exports) as primary sources of structural insecurity.
In addition to their shared realist perspective, the authors all regard the United States as the most important power influencing, if not determining, China’s security environment and its economic modernization. Their view of the United States may mirror the Chinese leadership’s ambivalence about post–Cold War American dominance. Although they acknowledge the unsurpassed strength of the United States, the authors remain profoundly uneasy about America’s proactive security posture and ideological agenda, as embodied by the expansion of NATO, the emerging American security and economic presence in Central Asia (interpreted as a move to compete with Russia), and most alarming to the Chinese, the newly enhanced U.S.–Japanese security alliance.
Such ambivalence leads these analysts to label current U.S.–Chinese relations as "neither friends nor foes"—a characterization identical to that given by most American foreign-policy analysts. The authors point to two structural sources of tension in U.S.–Chinese relations, which they imply are unlikely to disappear any time soon: inherent differences between the political systems and frictions between the world’s only superpower and its most obvious potential challenger. The effects of these impediments, however, are moderated by a growing number of areas of cooperation, such as security on the Korean peninsula, environmental protection, prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and antinarcotics trafficking. The survey’s most provocative recommendation for improving relations, offered in the essay on the United States by Wang Xiaodong (who studied in Japan), calls for the promotion of democracy and the rule of law in China to narrow the differences between the American and Chinese political systems.
Moreover, these essays show a changing, more expansive Chinese view of the world. When Study Reports on International Relations was first published in early 1997, it covered only six areas: Central Asia, Japan, Russia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the United States. The 1997–98 edition includes three more regions: Europe, the Korean peninsula, and the Middle East, a sign that Chinese analysts are aware of their country’s growing stake in global affairs. This perspective is further reflected in several policy recommendations within this study that indicate China is adopting a more forward-looking, cooperative stance on certain major international issue areas, such as international terrorism, the peace process in the Middle East (a region that supplies more than half of China’s crude oil imports), and stability in South Asia.
The views expressed within Study Reports on International Relations 1997–98 suggest that its publisher, authorship, and content are indeed noteworthy—but not for the usual reasons. Instead of trying to discern how official Chinese policy has seeped into this survey, Western analysts should read these essays for what they reflect about a changing China. Its political system, though still undemocratic, is beginning to open up. Frank and often unorthodox views have gained a measure of acceptance both in official and scholarly circles (even though the Communist Party’s censors have frequently criticized Strategy and Management as violating party ideological guidelines). China’s rising élite of foreign-policy analysts represent a new generation, one that is increasingly cosmopolitan, sophisticated, well informed, and cool-headed. In fact, as the content of this survey indicates, its authors may have more in common—in terms of analytical skills, outlook, and knowledge of world politics—with their American counterparts than with their elder Chinese colleagues.
Notes
*: Minxin Pei is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University and author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Back.