The US policy-making community has gravitated toward a belief that China under Xi Jinping’s leadership is aggressive – specifically, that Beijing wants to seize more territory and seeks to supplant the US role as regional strategic leader and global superpower.
A new article by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong and Zenobia T. Chen in the prestigious journal International Security argues that this conventional wisdom is “dangerously wrong” and will unnecessarily worsen geopolitical tensions.
This article presumably puts forth some of the best arguments supporting one side of a debate that is vitally important as the US-China rivalry intensifies, making war look increasingly possible.
The authors fail, however, to prove their main assertion that China is essentially a status-quo power with limited and reasonable aims.
To make their case, the authors make three main arguments.
Priorities
First, they say China is focused on things other than expanding its power, influence and territory. Beijing “is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion,” they say. The PRC government wants only “domestic stability; sovereignty and territorial integrity; and social-economic development.”
Even if internal challenges are the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) highest priority, they can lead to aggressive or bullying behavior abroad. Take regime security, for example. Mao Zedong’s fear that the new CCP regime would not survive the political pressure of a US ally on its border – distinct from the threat of military invasion – was perhaps the crucial consideration in his decision to intervene in the Korean War in 1950.
In an extension of the internal issue of controlling Tibet, China has encroached into and built infrastructure in disputed parts of Bhutan as a means of punishing that country for hosting Tibetan refugees.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, concern with saving face for the PRC leadership led to several instances of low-level bullying. Beijing pressured Southeast Asian governments not to bar travelers from China, even though this would risk the health of these governments’ own citizens. Chinese diplomats demanded that foreign governments publicly praise China as payment for Chinese medical supplies. And China launched a campaign of economic coercion against Australia as punishment for requesting an investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
The controversial but persistent idea of Beijing possibly launching a diversionary war stems from the premise that its peculiar political environment could make China prone to fomenting an external conflict.
These peculiarities include the government’s cultivation of national grievance and selective hatreds, restrictions on political discussion, over-concentration of power in the hands of one or a few individuals, and the lack of mechanisms empowering society to expel leaders who prioritize regime security over public interests.
We’ve heard many times before that the Chinese don’t want to hurt anybody, they just want to raise their own living standards. This assertion, however, overlooks the historically common phenomenon of a country’s drive for economic development leading it to engage in imperialism.
The desire to gain control of economically-valuable resources partly explains China’s annexation of Tibet and attempt to assert sovereignty over the South China Sea. PRC resource-extraction arrangements in South America and Africa have drawn accusations of neo-colonialism.
Economic development also motivates other aggressive Chinese actions, including extensive overfishing of distant oceans (China is the world’s top perpetrator of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) and massive government-sponsored industrial espionage (of which China is also the world’s top practitioner).
Territorial disputes
Second, the authors downplay China’s territorial disputes, which are the immediate likely triggers of a military conflict. China is not, they say, “an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.”
While this statement may be true, upon close examination it is not reassuring. It implies China may well be an “existential threat” to the countries whose territory Beijing does claim sovereignty over, most notably Taiwan.
The amount of disputed territory that China claims is so vast that it involves rival claimants India, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines, not to mention the US, which patrols regional airspace and waters to highlight aspects of China’s non-compliance with the Law of the Sea. (Russia, which took a million square kilometers of Chinese land in the nineteenth century, gets a pass for now.)
With each of these countries, plus Taiwan, Beijing’s irredentism maintains permanent tensions and a danger of spontaneous and unplanned violence.
The danger China poses to its region is not limited to the “existential” scenario of territorial conquest. Rather, for most of the region the issue is Finlandization: Beijing using a combination of military and economic power to acquire veto power over the policies of its neighbors.
The authors argue that China’s territorial claims pre-date the founding of the PRC. This point is important because it challenges the neorealist expectation that the demands of a rising great power will increase along with its strength relative to the other countries in the international system. “China’s claims are the same today as they were in the mid-twentieth century when it was desperately poor,” they write.
China’s territorial claims have in fact increased in recent years, although modestly, and most notably in Bhutan. The reason recent new claims are small is because previous claims were already surpassingly vast. As a poor country, China had vast residual claims because it was a fallen former great power. As a resurgent great power, China is now in a position to re-take “lost” lands.
Thus, the real significance of China’s territorial claims is not that they are static, but rather that the relatively strong Xi-era China is moving more aggressively to unilaterally enforce its inherited claims through
- the building of military bases on artificial islands and harassment of foreign vessels in the South China Sea;
- the construction of military infrastructure in areas near the China-India border;
- routine incursions by PRC government vessels near the Senkaku Islands
- encroachments into South Korea’s part of the Yellow Sea, and
- increased military pressure on Taiwan.
Because they say so
The authors’ third main argument is China will not seek regional or global hegemony because the PRC government says so.
The authors conducted a content analysis of authoritative Chinese sources: People’s Daily, Qiushi and speeches by senior officials. They found that “China’s top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy.” They note that Chinese schools and internal media repeat these same messages to the Chinese public.
From this they conclude that Xi’s China lacks “ambition to be a global or even regional leader” and “does not intend to challenge or displace the United States.”
The authors do a surprisingly poor job of addressing the obvious suspicion that CCP-approved discourse is not a reliable indicator of the Chinese government’s intentions.
China has a long tradition of combining a ceremonial strategic discourse – one that emphasizes morally upright behavior by the Chinese government – with ruthless strategic behavior.
The fact that PRC official discourse does not reveal certain intentions does not prove that the intentions don’t exist. Alternatively, it might indicate the government thinks the intentions sound dishonorable.
We don’t hear Chinese officials announcing their intent to bully other governments, interfere in the politics of foreign states, carry out cyberattacks, hold foreigners as political hostages, conduct unsafe and unprofessional maneuvers in the air or at sea or imprison huge numbers of Uyghurs for flimsy reasons, although we know these actions occur in practice.
Similarly, actual PRC policies – including a massive military buildup, with the US as its pacing threat; diplomacy and strategic communications aimed at disparaging US regional and global leadership and at breaking up America’s alliances; a partnership with Russia to oppose America’s international agenda; and a plan to make China the world leader in emerging technologies – strongly suggest the very aspirations that Kang, Wong and Chen deny.
Even the PRC’s “internal” concerns can threaten or harm its neighbors.
Territorial disputes with neighbors involve potential military conflicts with most states in the region. The Chinese government takes a nineteenth century approach to solving them, blowing off modern norms such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (to which China is a signatory) and self-determination.
Assurances from Beijing are not trustworthy. The PRC has demonstrated aspirations that, if fulfilled, would cut into the national interests of other states.
The authors correctly argue that the US strategy for coping with the challenges presented by a rising China should not overly rely on military preparations, but should also include robust economic and diplomatic approaches. But it would also be a “dangerous” mistake to assume a powerful and unopposed China would remain mostly passive and cooperative.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
