As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows inStrong Borders, Secure Nation, ...concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes,Strong Borders, Secure Nationcontends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.
By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources,Strong Borders, Secure Nationoffers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations.
Since 1949, China has adopted nine national military strategies, known as “strategic guidelines.” The strategies adopted in 1956, 1980, and 1993 represent major changes in China’s military strategy, ...or efforts by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to wage war in a new way. Shifts in the conduct of warfare in the international system offer one explanation for why China, a developing country for most of this period, pursued major change in its military strategy. Such shifts in the conduct of warfare should be especially powerful if a gap exists between a state’s current strategy and the requirements of future warfare. The PLA has only been able to change strategy, however, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership is united and agrees on basic policies and the structure of authority. When the party is united, it delegates substantial responsibility for military affairs to the PLA leadership, which changes or adjusts military strategy in response to changes in China’s security environment.
Since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, scholars and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about China's territorial ambitions. Yet China has also used peaceful means to manage conflicts, ...settling seventeen of its twenty-three territorial disputes, often with substantial compromises. This article develops a counterintuitive argument about the effects of domestic conflict on foreign policy to explain China's behavior. Contrary to the diversionary war hypothe- sis, this argument posits that state leaders are more likely to compromise in territorial disputes when confronting internal threats to regime security, in- cluding rebellions and legitimacy crises. Regime insecurity best explains China's pattern of compromise and delay in its territorial disputes. China's leaders have compromised when faced with internal threats to regime security, including the revolt in Tibet, the instability following the Great Leap Forward, the legitimacy crisis after the Tiananmen upheaval, and separatist violence in Xinjiang.
Fravel discusses the potential lessons that China may be learning from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the global responses to the war, specifically in relation to a conflict over Taiwan. He ...comments that it is too early to fully understand these lessons and that there are limited publicly available Chinese assessments on the matter. He examines China's current approach to Taiwan and how lessons from the war in Ukraine may impact China's decision to use force against Taiwan in terms of political and diplomatic, military and battlefield, and economic considerations. He suggests that the costs of military action against Taiwan may be greater than China initially anticipated, leading to greater caution in Beijing's approach.
Whether China will abandon its long-standing nuclear strategy of assured retaliation for a first-use posture will be a critical factor in future U.S.-China strategic stability. In the past decade, ...advances in U.S. strategic capabilities, especially missile defenses and enhanced long-range conventional strike capacity, could undermine China's nuclear retaliatory capability, which is based on a relatively small force and second-strike posture. An exhaustive review of Chinese writings on military affairs indicates, however, that China is unlikely to abandon its current nuclear strategy of assured retaliation. Instead, China will modestly expand its arsenal, increase the sophistication of its forces, and allow limited ambiguity regarding its pledge not to use nuclear weapons first. This limited ambiguity allows China to use the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter a conventional attack on its nuclear arsenal, without significantly increasing the size of its nuclear forces and triggering a costly arms race. Nevertheless, China's effort to maintain its strategy of assured retaliation while avoiding an arms race could backfire. Those efforts increase the risk that nuclear weapons could be used in a crisis between the United States and China, even though China views this possibility as much less likely than the United States does.
How strenuously, and at what risk, should the United States resist China's efforts to dominate the South China Sea? An identification of three options along a continuum—from increased resistance to ...China's assertive policies on one end to a partial South China Sea retrenchment on the other, with current U.S. policy in the middle—captures the choices facing the United States. An analysis of China's claims and behavior in the South China Sea and of the threat that China poses to U.S. interests concludes that the United States' best option is to maintain its current level of resistance to China's efforts to dominate the South China Sea. China has been cautious in pursuing its goals, which makes the risks of current policy acceptable. Because U.S. security interests are quite limited, a significantly firmer policy, which would generate an increased risk of a high-intensity war with China, is unwarranted. If future China's actions indicate its determination has significantly increased, the United State should, reluctantly, end its military resistance to Chinese pursuit of peacetime control of the South China Sea and adopt a policy of partial South China Sea retrenchment.
After exploding its first nuclear device in 1964, China did not develop sufficient forces or doctrine to overcome its vulnerability to a first strike by the United States or the Soviet Union for more ...than three decades. Two factors explain this puzzling willingness to live with nuclear vulnerability: (1) the views and beliefs of senior leaders about the utility of nuclear weapons and the requirements of deterrence, and (2) internal organizational and political constraints on doctrinal innovation. Even as China's technical expertise grew and financial resources for modernization became available after the early 1980s, leadership beliefs have continued to shape China's approach to nuclear strategy, reflecting the idea of assured retaliation (i. e., using the fewest number of weapons to threaten an opponent with a credible second strike). The enduring effect of these leadership ideas has important implications for the trajectory of China's current efforts to modernize its nuclear force.
Fravel discusses the origins and implications of China's world-class military ambitions. At the Nineteenth Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2017, Chinese leader Xi ...Jinping outlined the party's goal to "complete national defense and military modernization by 2035" and to transform the People's Liberation Army (PLA) into a "world-class military by the middle of the century". As with many terms in official Chinese discourse, however, the phrase has never been clearly defined. Authoritative Chinese government and PLA documents lack a clear and accepted definition of the term, leaving many to wonder what a "world-class military" really means. At the 2020 Munich Security Conference, for example, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper described it as capturing an ambition "to dominate Asia as the preeminent global military power" by 2049.
This article examines China's behaviour in the South China Sea disputes through the lens of its strategy for managing its claims. Since the mid-1990s, China has pursued a strategy of delaying the ...resolution of the dispute. The goal of this strategy is to consolidate China's claims, especially to maritime rights or jurisdiction over these waters, and to deter other states from strengthening their own claims at China's expense, including resource development projects that exclude China. Since the mid-2000s, the pace of China's efforts to consolidate its claims and deter others has increased through diplomatic, administrative and military means. Although China's strategy seeks to consolidate its own claims, it threatens weaker states in the dispute and is inherently destabilizing. As a result, the delaying strategy includes efforts to prevent the escalation of tensions while nevertheless seeking to consolidate China's claims.
A “China in the World” Paradigm for Scholarship Fravel, M. Taylor; Manion, Melanie; Wang, Yuhua
Studies in comparative international development,
03/2021, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this introduction to the special issue, we use the expression “China in the world” paradigm to define scholarship that purposefully migrates across the traditional borders of comparative politics ...and international relations in the study of China. We argue that such a paradigm represents a view that many issues of Chinese domestic politics are now issues of international politics; as a result, domestic politics in a globalized contemporary China often cannot be sufficiently understood without considering international consequences. More than this, the paradigm is about scholarly attentiveness to the fact that the politics in China that we study also shapes how the rest of the world views China. We describe the paradigm and its antecedents in the scholarly literature. We then illustrate, with reference to three momentous events that captured public attention around the world in 2020, the paradigm’s usefulness as a perspective to scholars reaching out to engage intellectually on contemporary affairs in an environment in which global responses to China require nuanced knowledge as all parties seek to avoid dangerous pitfalls. We conclude by summarizing the five articles included in the special issue and the broader implications of the “China in the world” paradigm.
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