Scholars and policy makers have debated the implications of China's rise to East Asian regional security and the US-centred international order for years now. Typical contentions are that China's rise will surely lead to countervailing coalitions in East Asia in response to increasing Chinese capabilities; and that China is a dissatisfied challenger of the international order, and as a status-quo power the US should try to contain China, or transform China into a “responsible stakeholder.” Professor Steve Chan's book strongly takes issue with such contentions. For Chan, China's re-emergence as a major power in fact has not led its neighbours to balance against her; and the common assumption that China is a revisionist power and the US is a status quo power, particularly among many American scholars, needs to be seriously questioned.

The main thrust of Chan's argument is that China's neighbours have not balanced against it, as the realist balance-of-power theories would have predicted. Chan backs up this argument with close examination of China's neighbouring countries' defence spending data, trade with China, and the deployment of US military personnel in those countries for the past few decades. The broad pattern, according to Chan, is that defence burdens for almost all of China's neighbours have been in decline, with the major exception of North Korea. Trade between China and its neighbours has also increased substantially. Finally, there has been a persistent and substantial reduction of American military personnel in China's neighbourhood, with the major exception of Afghanistan. All these indicators mean that there is scant evidence to support the argument that China's neighbouring countries have started to gear up in a countervailing coalition to balance against it.

To account for why the balance-of-power theories have failed to explain the behaviour of East Asian states, Chan makes a rather complex and layered argument. To start with, Chan argues that the main reason why East Asian states have not undertaken balancing policies toward China is that ruling elites in these countries have made a conscious decision to seek economic cooperation rather than military build-up. This is because in the globalized economy today, the substantial “gun-versus-butter” trade-off means the ruling elites in these countries are not willing to incur those economic costs, because they “have increasingly staked their legitimacy and regime survival on their economic performance and that this decision is consequential in moving their regional relations in a cooperative direction” (p. 13).

Chan further argues that economic interdependence in East Asia serves the function of communicating clear reassurance to each other, thus solving, or at least ameliorating, the crucial commitment problem that has usually been identified by the rational choice theories of war. Here, he utilizes four mini case studies to demonstrate the logic of his argument. Taiwan's bourgeoning and highly unequal commerce with China signifies that the Taiwanese government has made a huge commitment to forgo independence by “wittingly exposing the island's economic health and stability to the severely destabilizing consequence of political turmoil” (p. 136). Japan's decisions not to pursue nuclear weapons and to cap its defence spending at one per cent of its GDP are clear reassuring signals to other East Asian countries. Similarly, the vast amount of American sovereign debt purchased by China also “signify [Beijing's] nonverbal assurance of and commitment to stable Sino-American relations” (p. 154). Finally, North Korea's bellicose foreign policy is meant to “communicate that national autonomy and regime survival are at the very top of its priorities,” even willing to risk alienating its traditional allies – Beijing and Moscow (p. 139).

Finally, Chan discusses policy choices that a rising power and a declining power can make to reassure each other; and how in East Asia, despite the lack of similar levels of multilateralism in Europe, the bourgeoning economic and financial networks and interlocking interests in East Asia are clear mechanisms of building trust and cooperation in the region.

In many ways, Chan's book is not really about China; rather it is a book on international relations theories, particularly a critique of the realist balance-of-power theories. The book closely engages existing theoretical debates in the field of international relations, and constructs its argument in a very forceful, yet logical, way. Chan's argument contradicts many gloomy predictions in the West about the meaning of China's rise to East Asian regional security; instead, he cautions that the US's pursuit of extra-regional hegemony in East Asia might be even more destabilizing. Chan's book might come across as dense in a few places, but it is full of sharp insights throughout. This is a great book for people who want to have a theoretically nuanced and non-US-centric understanding of the international relations dynamic in East Asia in the context of China's re-emergence as a great power.