This book stands out as one of the very best in a crowded field of studies looking to illuminate the motivations, mechanisms and outcomes which shape China's “search for security.” From its first line – “[v]ulnerability to threats is the main driver of China's foreign policy” – the book is a balanced effort to simplify but clarify, aimed not at the highly expert audience, but rather a readership of interested observers, including students, who need to better distill and understand the complexities and contradictions of China. That is not to say that experts will not enjoy this work; they shall and they should. But this balance means that China's Search for Security will rightly reach a wide audience.
The authors make clear this volume builds on The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security, written by Andrew Nathan and Robert Ross (W.W. Norton, 1997). They also acknowledge that while the world and China's position in it have surely changed since then, the basic conclusion of the earlier work has not: “China is too bogged down in the security challenges in and around its borders to threaten the West unless the West weakens itself to the point of creating a power vacuum” (xi). They also find that the “puzzles of Chinese foreign policy most often yield answers through the insights of a theory called ‘realism’” (xv). On balance, they are right. But, as discussed below, they sometimes err by relying on conclusions determined a very long decade-and-a-half ago.
Readers will appreciate the clarity of organization, language and consistency. Regular reference throughout the book to the “four rings” – concentric circles around China which make up its security environment: the “home” territory which China controls or claims; a second ring comprising some 20 countries immediately adjacent to China (including, in this framework, the United States); a third ring of “six nearby multistate regional systems”; and the fourth outer ring of “the rest of the world” – proves a useful framework for learning and understanding. The chapters proceed in a well-ordered fashion, starting from what and who drives Chinese foreign policy (chapters one and two), and then moving across the “four rings” to explain and interpret China's increasingly global security environment (chapters three to seven). More analytically oriented chapters follow on territorial integrity (chapters eight and nine) and the instruments of power (economic strength, military modernization, and “soft power”; chapters ten to twelve).
Chapter eight, which delves in to the “problems of stateness,” and in particular the challenges for China's security picture of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, is especially incisive and engaging. Yet, while the book gives some dedicated space in chapter eight and parts of chapter ten to the importance of stability in China's “first ring” – its home territory, controlled or claimed – this aspect of China's security picture deserves a far more extensive treatment given its fundamental importance to China's perception of “vulnerability” and its powerful role in shaping China's security policy more broadly. Relatedly, in answering “who drives Chinese foreign policy?” (chapter two), the authors say very little about the role of newly emerging domestic actors – provinces, state-owned enterprises and other players in the business sphere, and a variety of channels for the expression of public opinion – which increasingly affect foreign and security policy thinking and decision-making in China.
Some other concerns and small flaws arise. The endnotes suggest that sourcing remains reliant on many works dating back more than a decade. But perhaps more importantly, it is somewhat surprising how little the authors reference original Chinese-language sources given their conversancy in this literature and the insights it would shed on Chinese security perceptions, debates and policies. South Korea is cited as the world's fourth largest economy (p. 127) and many important names and topics discussed in the text do not get a listing in the index.
But these drawbacks do not add up to significantly undermine what is a comprehensive, cogent and compelling analysis about China's approach to its security. In their conclusions (chapter 12), the authors are cautiously optimistic about what their findings tell us about the future, and present findings from The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress as still valid today: “China is still ‘not a satisfied power’” but China still has “stronger interests in favor of than against regional stability, and for rather than against cooperative relations with its potential great-power rivals” (p. 345). In acknowledging the possibility that China could nevertheless still pose a challenge to regional and global stability, the authors argue that mitigating that outcome will very much depend on assuring positive changes in China, in the regional security environment and in the United States – i.e. avoiding a dramatic decline in US power – if the stability they see thus far in China's ongoing “search for security” is to be sustained in the decades to come.
A critical factor in all of this will be for China and the US to “enhance Chinese security by creating a new equilibrium of power that maintains the current world system, but with a larger role for China.” The authors maintain – perhaps too sanguinely given their realist predilection – that this is all possible to achieve.
