As China has risen to global economic power status, analysts have sought to calculate Beijing's foreign policy priorities and changing behavioural patterns – hoping to identify general priorities and eternal principles that would allow the forecasting of Beijing's future voting behaviour and positioning. Most analyses, however, document an apparent gap between Beijing's diplomatic rhetoric and its concrete actions and, as an unspoken consensus, indicate that China's foreign behaviour is guided by (economic) pragmatism and prioritizes domestic developmental interests – resulting in case-specific patterns of China's diplomacy.
Tim Nicholas Rühlig summarizes these multiple attempts to explain China's actions at the global level by grouping them into three categories: 1) studies that depart from the assumption that Chinese foreign policy would exclusively focus on securing the power and control of the state and hence refuse compliance with international rules and regulations wherever state power would be curbed (“sovereignty perspective”); 2) studies that assume that the inclusion of China into international institutions would lead to (at least) partial internalization and acceptance of international rules (“integration perspective”); and 3) studies that analyse the attempts by individual Chinese scholars (e.g. Zhao Tingyang, Qin Yaqing, Yan Xuetong) to develop a distinct “Chinese” approach to world politics guided by ancient Chinese philosophy and traditions (“exceptionalism approach”), as well as those that identify developments and constellations at the domestic level of Chinese politics as the core determinants of China's foreign policy conduct. Elaborating on this sub-national level, Rühlig discusses a selection of the literature on the various layers of legitimacy in China (ranging from ideology to nationalism/national pride to output and performance) and addresses the horizontal and vertical fragmentation of the Chinese one-party state and the multiplicity of (partly competing) actors involved in the making of Chinese foreign policy.
Rühlig's study applies Ernst-Otto Czempiel's division of international politics into three fields – security, the way political rule is exerted, and economy and welfare – as the conceptual framework for his case study-based “anthropological” investigation of observable ambiguities and contradictions in Chinese performance in world politics. The main part of his book discusses well-documented examples of the oscillations and shifts in China's approach to R2P in the case of Libya and Syria, the evolution of Beijing's Hong Kong strategy, and China's compliance versus skirting strategies within the WTO. While, at first glance, the book appears to widely reconfirm the contemporary state of the art in the fields of Chinese foreign policy analysis, the core added value is to be found in the thoughtfully selected interviews with scholars, activists, diplomats and businesspeople between 2015 and 2020 (most of them conducted in 2016 during the author's research stay at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing). Excerpts from these interlocutions illustrate the internal division of the academic communities, think-tank circles and Party factions in China, and hence they empirically validate the hypothesis of a persistent hidden fragmentation of the one-party state and competing policy images impacting the modelling of China's sector- and case-specific foreign strategy. The list of interviewees, as the author explains, has been anonymized. It only contains the role or affiliation of each interviewee as well as the place (city) and date (month/year) of the meeting with the author. One can, of course, expect the author's methodology guiding his “150 in-depth semi-structured and ethnographic interviews” (p. 17) to include reflections on each interviewee's background and, if applicable, their political orientation, as well as their access to relevant information about internal decision-making processes and bargaining rounds. But considering the unpredictability of Chinese politics, this kind of information can hardly be disclosed. Nonetheless, some abstract reflections on the policy preferences and political orientations of the various generations of Chinese scholars and the identification of competing camps and factions and their respective views on China's role enactment in the three issue areas examined by the author would have allowed some more abstract conclusions on the (domestic) drivers and determinants of China's foreign policy behaviour. Moreover, there is no mention of the language in which the interviews in China (Beijing) were conducted. As we have learned from sociological and ethnographic observations on fieldwork designs and interview techniques, the answers received by the interviewer may depend on the language used, as interviewees tend to relate to core frames and theoretical conceptions commonly used by the scholarly (or political) community writing in the target language. As the author claims to cover inner-Chinese debates, more details about which streams of these internal debates have been selected would have been quite illuminating.
The book concludes with a section formulating the takeaways for policymakers and practitioners when trying to integrate China into the liberal, rules-based order. Rühlig convincingly points out that – instead of resorting to a containment strategy – a successful attempt to secure Beijing's compliance with international rules would have to take into account both the country's quest for global status as well as the domestic challenges and vulnerabilities faced by the Chinese Communist government. Furthermore, as Rühlig concludes based on the findings of his case studies, a higher degree of compliance might be achieved by securing unity and consensus among the advocates of a rules-based global order and by strengthening these countries’ resilience towards China's BRI charm offensive(s).
The outbreak of COVID-19 and Beijing's turn to virtual diplomacy (2020–autumn 2022) are not dealt with in this study, as the dataset mainly covers the years 2015 to 2020. The reader might also wonder why the transformations of the international environment that China is facing do not feature more prominently. Changes in China's foreign policy choices might, as (indirectly) conceded in the author's case studies, also derive from the perception of an increasingly hostile regional and global environment and the formation of alliances and networks resorting to containment measures. And, as a short additional footnote: China's willingness to support select international (or multilateral) norms might not be the outcome of compliance but a response to the expectations and demands by its strategic partners (including those in Africa or in the Arab world). For a prospective follow-up study, featuring developments since 2020, it would hence be crucial to take the broader actor constellations as well as the time dimension, i.e. the evolution of Chinese diplomacy, into account.
In a nutshell, by compiling and analysing a broad dataset of first-hand interviews with people involved in the formulation (or in the internal analysis and evaluation) of Chinese foreign policy, Rühlig's book offers insight into the “black box” of the Chinese party-state. By elaborating on the diversity of actors and the multiple layers of Chinese politics, he offers a sound explanation for the perceived contradictions in China's engagement in global affairs and delineates ways to deal with an internally fragmented China.
