Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Studies in Asian Security) - Softcover

Goldstein, Avery

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804752184 ISBN 13: 9780804752183

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

China’s increasing economic and military capabilities have attracted much attention in recent years. How should the world, especially the United States, respond to this emerging great power? A sensible response requires not only figuring out the speed and extent of China’s rise, but also answering a question that has received much less attention: What is China’s grand strategy?

This book describes and explains the grand strategy China’s leaders have adopted to pursue their country’s interests in the international system of the 21st century. The author argues that their strategy is designed to foster favorable conditions for continuing China’s modernization while also reducing the risk that others will decide a rising China is a threat that must be countered. Why did China’s leaders settle on this grand strategy and what are its key elements? What alternatives were available? Is the current approach yielding the results China anticipated? What does this grand strategy imply for international peace and security in the coming years―and, most critically, what are the prospects for an increasingly prominent China and a dominant United States to rise to the challenge of managing their inevitable disagreements?

About this title

About the Author

Avery Goldstein is Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author, most recently, of Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century (Stanford University Press, 2000)

From the Back Cover

"This is an important work on a topic--China's grand strategy--on which we have had little serious and detailed work. It is very well written, well researched, and well argued. It should prompt a new debate on the subject among academics, policy makers, and the public."--Michael D. Swaine, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
"This in-depth and engaging analysis of China's grand strategy is well-timed given the recent re-emergence of the 'peaceful rise' rubric."--Far Eastern Economic Review

From the Inside Flap

China's increasing economic and military capabilities have attracted much attention in recent years. How should the world, especially the United States, respond to this emerging great power? A sensible response requires not only figuring out the speed and extent of China's rise, but also answering a question that has received much less attention: What is China's grand strategy?
This book describes and explains the grand strategy China's leaders have adopted to pursue their country's interests in the international system of the 21st century. The author argues that their strategy is designed to foster favorable conditions for continuing China's modernization while also reducing the risk that others will decide a rising China is a threat that must be countered. Why did China's leaders settle on this grand strategy and what are its key elements? What alternatives were available? Is the current approach yielding the results China anticipated? What does this grand strategy imply for international peace and security in the coming years--and, most critically, what are the prospects for an increasingly prominent China and a dominant United States to rise to the challenge of managing their inevitable disagreements?

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rising to the Challenge

China's Grand Strategy and International SecurityBy Avery Goldstein

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5218-3

Contents

1 Introduction................................................12 China's Changing Strategic Landscape........................143 Growing Capabilities, Growing Problems......................494 China's Growing Power: Why the Worry?.......................815 Stimuli for a New Strategy..................................1026 China Adjusts...............................................1187 China and the Major Powers..................................1368 Will the Current Grand Strategy Endure?.....................1779 The Rising Challenge........................................204Works Cited...................................................221Index.........................................................263

Chapter One

Introduction

At the start of the twenty-first century, China and the United States teetered on the brink of a new Cold War. In early 2001 such an outcome seemed nearly inevitable as the two countries found themselves locked in a bitter dispute about the collision of an American reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet that left the Chinese pilot dead and the U.S. crew in Chinese custody. Within weeks, however, the incident that had touched raw nerves on both sides was defused, and within months Sino-American relations showed clear signs of recovery. U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick visited China and signaled continued American support for China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Secretary of State Colin Powell soon followed to lay the groundwork for a state visit by President Bush that was scheduled for October 2001, coinciding with his participation in the APEC meetings to be held in Shanghai. Although the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, led President Bush to modify his plans so that he met China's leaders only briefly during a short stay at the APEC session, the initiation of the war on terrorism also accelerated the trend toward improving Sino-American relations that had been evident since the early summer.

Yet even as the rhetoric of cooperation replaced that of conflict, both sides in this bilateral relationship clearly remained wary. Unlike the dramatic transformation in an initially cool Russo-American relationship that was begun by meetings between U.S. president Bush and Russia's president Putin during 2001, the tangible changes in Sino-American relations during 2001 were modest, tentative, and provisional. Potentially dangerous disagreements remained unresolved, and mutual suspicion about future capabilities and intentions endured. In short, the prospect of a renewed chill in relations hovered not very far in the background. Though it no longer seemed inevitable, a Sino-American Cold War remained possible.

Perhaps the tenuous nature of this bilateral relationship now seems unsurprising, yet when the current era of international politics began to emerge at the end of the 1980s, few anticipated such fragility in Sino-American relations. On the contrary, optimism about an emerging "new world order" that prevailed as the Cold War was ending, and nearly two decades of basically friendly ties between Beijing and Washington, instead seemed to bode well for the immediate future. In a sense, however, the strains that quickly emerged during the 1990s are easy to understand. They reflected changes in the international situation that accompanied the end of a Soviet-American rivalry that had dominated world affairs for four decades. The bedrock of Sino-American cooperation since 1972, after all, had been a shared interest in opposing a hostile and threatening U.S.S.R. As diplomacy eased the Soviet threat to both China and the United States during the 1980s, and especially as the U.S.S.R. itself collapsed in the early 1990s, the solid military-strategic foundation of self-interest that had encouraged Sino-American entente crumbled. When it did, areas of disagreement once obscured resurfaced. Without a common strategic purpose binding Beijing and Washington, the remaining incentives for cooperation were mainly mutual economic interests and shared perspectives on a few, less pressing, regional and international security concerns (most notably maintaining peace in Korea, fighting transnational crime, and preventing nuclear proliferation). Though these shared interests were far from trivial, after 1989 they were not sufficiently compelling in themselves to offset old differences that had been kept at a relatively low simmer during the final two decades of the Cold War while both parties focused on the need to deal with the more parlous threat from Moscow. Nor were remaining common interests sufficiently compelling to offset new differences that emerged at the end of the Cold War, differences that reflected both China's growing capabilities and the transformed international system. The combination of resurfacing old and newly emerging areas of disagreement provided the backdrop for a change in the character of the Sino-American relationship that began in the last decade of the twentieth century. The change in the Sino-American relationship also provided the most important impetus for China to embrace the grand strategy on which it settled after the mid-1990s and that is the focus of this book's subsequent chapters.

Old Sino-American Differences Reemerge

Political

In classic realpolitik fashion, during the 1970s and 1980s both Washington and Beijing had been willing to set aside deep-seated political-ideological differences as they faced a common enemy. Washington believed that the strategic benefits of cooperation with China justified overlooking the distastefulness of its authoritarian communist partner. Similarly, the Chinese regime (radically socialist during the era of Mao Zedong, economically pragmatic but politically still committed to Leninism under Deng Xiaoping) believed that the need for a military counter to Soviet capabilities it could not parry justified cooperation with the ideologically unappealing champion of capitalist democracy (intermittently lambasted as a hegemonic superpower).

After 1989, however, ideological preferences on both sides were no longer overshadowed by pressing concerns about a common enemy. As differences resurfaced, they weakened the bonds of Sino-American entente. Widespread antigovernment protests in China during April and May 1989, as well as the unfolding collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet empire, induced new fears among the leaders in Beijing. They no longer saw the United States primarily as a valuable military counterweight to a powerful and threatening superpower neighbor. Instead, in a throwback to rhetoric of the 1950s, they once again saw America as the leading advocate for a strategy of "peaceful evolution" (heping yanbian) designed to end communist rule in China as it was being ended elsewhere.

At the same time, Washington's late Cold War view of China as a helpful and hard-working strategic partner against the Soviet menace was decisively transformed when the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party decided to respond to the popular demonstrations in 1989 by declaring martial law in May and then resorting to the use of lethal force on the evening of June 3-4. Overnight, a broadly positive American perception of China-regularly bolstered by the public relations barrage surrounding successive summits between the two giants of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and American presidents from Nixon through the elder Bush-was destroyed. After June's bloody clashes in Beijing, the favorable image that had helped ensure broad bipartisan support for U.S. China policy was quickly replaced by the perception that China was an old-style authoritarian communist regime whose brutality could not be overstated. However complex the reality of China in the reform era might be, the widely replayed image of the lone Chinese citizen standing his ground in front of a tank deployed to enforce martial law in Beijing was burned into the conscience of Americans and established an unfavorable view of the PRC. In the ensuing months this new negative American perception of China hardened as it became clear that the leaders in Beijing were determined to resist the dramatic political changes sweeping most of the rest of the communist world.

Taiwan

Realpolitik concerns about threatening Soviet power during the 1970s and 1980s had also encouraged both Washington and Beijing to contain their long-standing disagreement about the future of Taiwan. The issue dated to President Truman's reversal of his decision, after the failure of the Marshall Mission, to terminate U.S. involvement in China's civil war. When the Korean War erupted in June 1950, the United States recommitted its military in support of Chiang Kai-shek's regime, still claiming to be the Republic of China (ROC) in temporary exile on Taiwan. In what was seen as a global Cold War, containment of the Soviet-led communist bloc entailed also the containment of "Red China." As the United States embraced this new grand strategy in 1950, the ROC, which Washington had recently abandoned as a hopelessly corrupt regime in its death throes, was redefined as a loyal and potentially important ally on the Far Eastern front of the international struggle against communism. The U.S. decision to forge new ties to the regime on Taiwan during the first decade of the Cold War established a commitment that became a major obstacle to improving American relations with the PRC even when Beijing and Washington both developed a strong interest in doing so during the late 1960s.

Internal deliberations in both capitals after 1969 and then a delicate and highly secretive period of bilateral negotiation did finally enable the United States and China to finesse their differences about Taiwan's status, but the issue remained one on which the parties fundamentally disagreed. Strong parallel strategic interests induced Beijing and Washington to devise artful language addressing the delicate issue in the Shanghai Communiqu that capped President Nixon's pioneering visit to China in February 1972. And over the next decade, determined efforts generated two more communiqus that served as the diplomatic keystones of Sino-American relations. By its nature, however, that artful language actually permitted each side to adhere to its own perspective on the issue. The communiqus enabled each to believe that an interest in cooperating against the Soviets had not required it to abandon its bottom line on Taiwan-for China, that unification would occur; for the United States, that China would not use force to achieve this goal.

Even so, during the period of Sino-American entente that followed Nixon's breakthrough, disagreements about Taiwan were barely contained. Beijing was willing to proclaim its preference for peaceful reunification, but consistently refused to renounce what it claimed was a sovereign right to use force to ensure the nation's territorial integrity. It also repeatedly criticized Washington's continued support for Taiwan (especially the sale of military equipment) as counterproductive interference in China's domestic affairs. And though Washington was willing to proclaim that it accepted the principle that there was only one China and to acknowledge Beijing's position that Taiwan was a part of China (but not to explicitly recognize Beijing's claim), it also regularly asserted that American policy was nevertheless based on the premise that cross-strait relations would remain peaceful. Thus, while endorsing a diplomatic resolution of tensions, U.S. policy also included varying degrees of military support for Taipei, allegedly to preserve strategic stability that would both reduce the temptation for Beijing to use force against the island and provide incentives for it to search for a negotiated solution. The American stance was formalized in the Taiwan Relations Act of April 1979, which established a basis in U.S. law for continuing arms sales to Taiwan even after Washington switched diplomatic recognition of the government of China from Taipei to Beijing on January 1, 1979.

The creative word choices used in the separate Chinese- and English-language versions of the three communiqus that guided bilateral relations during the period of Sino-American entente partially obscured the salience of continuing disagreements about Taiwan. In the end, however, it was not the creativity of communiqu writers but rather the pressing political-strategic interest in anti-Soviet cooperation that had made it possible to set aside Sino-American differences about a matter whose problematic resolution both were willing to postpone. When the political commitment rooted in shared strategic interests dimmed, the disputes about cross-strait relations reintensified, especially because the Taiwan issue became entwined with broader Chinese and American political and military disagreements in the post-Cold War world.

By the 1990s, Taiwan had been transformed. It was no longer simply the redoubt of the desperate losers in China's Civil War of the mid-twentieth century to whom the United States had once made a Cold War treaty commitment. The island had first become one of Asia's successful "newly industrialized countries" and then one of Asia's remarkable "newly democratized countries." For Beijing, the political implications of democratization on prosperous Taiwan were potentially threatening. When foreign observers touted reforms on the island as proof that democracy and Chinese culture were not incompatible, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) saw the invidious comparison with the mainland as another facet in the American post-Cold War strategy of peaceful evolution designed to subvert their regime. Beijing's political concern was compounded by military concerns as American arms sales to Taipei remained robust after the 1980s, contrary to China's expectation that they would gradually decline in quantity and quality according to the terms of the third Sino-American communiqu (August 17, 1982). During the 1990s, Beijing saw such sales as a part of an unfolding strategy to ring the PRC with a network of U.S.-backed allies, complementing the continued forward presence of American military forces in the western Pacific.

For Washington, political reforms on Taiwan during the 1990s rekindled interest in the security of the island as part of the world's enlarging community of democracies. American leaders saw this trend as desirable not merely because it validated the universality of U.S. ideals, but also because it served practical national interests in peace and stability. American leaders in the 1990s had come to embrace the proposition that democracies do not fight wars with one another; consequently, enlarging the community of democracies enlarged the "zone of peace." Perhaps more importantly, as Beijing grew nervous about the prospects for unification and the possibility of a Taiwanese lurch toward independence, it had begun to strengthen its ability to act on the military option that it had never renounced. As will be described in subsequent chapters, such military modernization focused on the Taiwan contingency after the minicrisis of 1995-96, and this in turn aggravated a larger American concern that developed in the mid-1990s about potential military problems an increasingly powerful China might pose for U.S. interests in East Asia.

Lingering disagreements about political ideology and Taiwan served as important triggers for the deterioration of Sino-American relations after the Cold War. U.S. attempts to pressure China to make domestic political changes (promoting democracy and human rights) were threats because Beijing saw them as a challenge to the internal stability the CCP insisted was necessary for the economic growth that would lead to China's modernization. American policy toward Taiwan was viewed as part of a U.S.-led effort to frustrate China's ability to ensure its vital national interest. Ultimately, however, the redefinition and renewed significance of political ideology and the Taiwan problem in Sino-American relations reflected a growing mutual suspicion about capabilities and intentions. Within just a few years after the end of the Cold War, the United States had begun to worry that a rising China might challenge the existing security order in the Asia-Pacific that rested on American preponderance and leadership. And China had begun to worry that the preponderant United States was determined to prevent it from legitimately exercising international influence commensurate with its growing capabilities to shape a new post-Cold War order in the region.

With the transformation of the old international system and emerging concerns about the nature of the new one, Sino-American cooperation increasingly gave way to Sino-American conflict at the end of the twentieth century. Although the mix of cooperation and conflict in bilateral relations clearly shifted toward the latter, U.S.-China relations were not yet driving a new Cold War. Still, it seemed increasingly likely that the real question was not whether sharp rivalry could be avoided, but rather whether it could be managed so that the United States and China could avoid becoming implacable adversaries. The answer to that question remains elusive and will ultimately depend on the choices that leaders in Washington and Beijing make. In subsequent chapters, I mainly examine China's choices-its emerging strategy for coping with the security challenges it perceives. But because Beijing views the role that a preponderant United States plays to be the single greatest international constraint it faces in pursuing its interests, before closely analyzing China's choices, I offer a few brief observations about the American side of the relationship. By the end of the 1990s, the United States loomed ever larger in China's calculations not only because of the unmatched capabilities the world's sole remaining superpower deployed, but also because of the extent to which Washington's strategic-military attention had begun to shift away from Europe and toward Asia.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rising to the Challengeby Avery Goldstein Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804752184
• ISBN 13: 9780804752183
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288