In what is perhaps an emerging American consensus, numerous observers see an East Asia in which not only are tensions rising, but war is possible and perhaps imminent, driven mainly by a powerful and increasingly aggressive China. Fueled by maritime disputes among China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian nations and coupled with a muscular U.S. rebalancing effort toward the Pacific, many observers see the region as ripe for rivalry. The challenge is not just regional: many see an impending “Chinese century” in which China comes to replace the United States as the world's leading superpower, attempts to rewrite the rules of international politics to its own ends, and challenges many of the accepted international norms and values as embodied in the Westphalian system of international relations. The fears of an increasingly aggressive China arise from a belief that nations inevitably have rising ambitions when they become more powerful. As China grows richer and modernizes its military, it follows that there will be an increasing Chinese willingness to bully its neighbors and seek greater influence on the world stage.
In an important new book, Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell have produced a masterful overview of the sources of China's foreign policy views. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that sees a confident and assertive China, they argue that “vulnerability to threats is the main driver of Chinese foreign policy” (p. 3). In fact, Nathan and Scobell conclude that “China is too bogged down in security challenges within and around its borders to threaten the West unless the West weakens itself to the point of creating a power vacuum” (p. xi). Rather than China seeking to overthrow the current system, the authors argue that China's aspirations are much more modest. China's Search for Security is a counterintuitive argument and a needed corrective to the contemporary debate about China.
Deeply knowledgeable about Chinese history, society, and contemporary economics and politics, the authors have divided China's Search for Security into four parts, which examine China's interests and identity; security challenges from the United States to East Asia and around the globe; the central problem of Chinese territorial integrity; and China's military, economic, and soft power.
The key argument in China's Search for Security is that the Chinese leadership and the Communist Party are primarily concerned with domestic instability. In this “first ring” of threats—defined as the entire territory that China administers or claims—the government has the enormous task of dealing with massive internal migration, bureaucratic corruption, economic and environmental challenges, and a continent-sized country riddled with potential and actual challenges to its borders. These internal challenges to CCP rule and Chinese identity are amplified by external threats to the Chinese nation-state: immigration, consistent criticism about Chinese human rights, and foreign businesses and other actors that are trying to affect the Chinese economy, its culture, and its people.
Compounding these domestic problems is China's uniquely complex geostrategic environment: China is contiguous with twenty other countries, many of them large or politically unstable, most of whom view China with suspicion, and a number of which have fought against China in the previous century. Furthermore, the United States views China's rise with increasing suspicion. Given this domestic and international environment, Nathan and Scobell do not argue that China is peaceful, nor that it is simply a victim—to be driven by vulnerability can also lead countries to lash out. Rather, Nathan and Scobell show that Chinese foreign policy is driven by fear, not ambition.
Perhaps most centrally, China's Search for Security shows how vulnerable China's borderlands are, and why the issues of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan cause such fear in Beijing. They write that loss of Tibet would create severe security and economic pressures on China, and “India and other rival powers would gain a new opportunity to constrain or threaten China” (p. 199). Similar concerns about geography and natural resources—not to mention ethnic issues—underlie China's interests in Xinjiang. Hong Kong and Taiwan, while less strategically important, carry immense emotional appeal for a China that self-defines these two territories as part of China itself. Thus, even though the PRC has negotiated away over one million square miles of territory in resolving its border disputes with various countries, these four territories remain nonnegotiable: they are economically and strategically important to the Chinese state, and are central to the contemporary Chinese nationalist identity.
Nathan and Scobell conclude that China has “stronger interests in favor of than against regional stability, and for rather than against cooperative relations with its great-power rivals” (p. 345). Although the authors are cautious about making any predictions for the future, they do see the opportunity for China and the United States and other great powers to arrive at a balance of power and interests that includes China and does not fundamentally threaten the interests of other states. Whether such an equilibrium can be achieved will depend centrally on the actions taken by the leaders of China and other powers—nothing is foreordained.
This is a superb book, richly detailed, and will be required reading for anyone wishing to understand how China views its own international situation.
