The Evolution of China's Nonproliferation Policy since the 1990s: Progress,problems, and prospects

This article offers an overview of China's evolving nonproliferation policy over the past decade. It documents the key developments during this period and identifies both the internal and external factors that have brought about significant change in Chinese policy. It argues that China's growing recognition of the threats posed by WMD proliferation, image concerns, its interest in maintaining stable Sino-US relations, and the US policy initiatives aimed at influencing Chinese behavior are largely accountable for Beijing's gradual acceptance of nonproliferation norms, pledges to adhere to selected multilateral export control guidelines, and the introduction of domestic export control regulations. It suggests that the future direction of China's nonproliferation policy to a large extent will depend on how Beijing and Washington manage their increasing differences over missile defenses and the Taiwan issue.     

China's Approaches toward Regional Cooperation in East Asia: motivations and calculations

This paper explores how China's strategic motivations and calculations have both motivated and constrained its participation in East Asian regional cooperation. It argues that China's participation in regional economic and security cooperation is motivated first of all by the calculation of China's domestic interests to create a peaceful peripheral environment for its economic growth and political stability, particularly its frontier security and prosperity. The realist interests to enhance China's position in power competition with other major players in the region, particularly Japan and US, also play an important part in China's strategic calculation. These interest calculations, however, also set limits on China's participation in regional cooperation. These interest calculations have also shaped China's preference for an informal approach, emphasizing voluntarism and consensus building rather than legally binding resolutions, toward regional cooperation. This soft approach is a major barrier for many regional institutions to move beyond the stage of talking shops to effectively resolve conflicts in the region.     

The Hong Kong Policy of the People's Republic of China, 1949-1997

China's policy toward Hong Kong in the period 1949-1997 was primarily driven by utilitarian calculations of national interests and the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. The Hong Kong policy of China, as an integral part of its foreign policy, was distinctive in that ideological fervor and nationalist passions had limited influence. The goals to be achieved by the Hong Kong policy remained unchanged throughout the period; the strategies adopted, however, changed in accordance with the changing international situation and the national interests as defined by the Chinese leaders. The primary goals of the Hong Kong policy were to secure a less threatening external political environment for China and to make calculated use of Hong Kong for China's economic development. By tolerating Hong Kong as a British colony, China also depended on Britain to control the potentially threatening anti-Communist Chinese population there. The 'over-dependence' on the British to control the Chinese people in Hong Kong on the eve of Hong Kong's reversion to China, however, alienated the Hong Kong people as well as impeded the formation of local political leaders in the territory. As a result, the acquisition of Hong Kong by China in 1997 has not been accompanied by political rapport between the Chinese government and the Hong Kong people, thus sowing seeds for lingering friction between them.     

Four Contradictions Constraining China's Foreign Policy Behavior

Beijing's foreign policy behavior is constantly tested by a set of conflicting variables. China views itself as a major power and wants to play a role accordingly in the world arena, while it always lacks an adequate material basis to do so. The open-door policy requires China to be fully integrated into international society, while strong concern over sovereignty makes it difficult for Beijing to embrace some of the mainstream values. China believes in a set of principles in international affairs, while consideration of its national interests causes Beijing to make a pragmatic compromise from time to time. Beijing has long been accustomed to dealing with others in bilateral settings while the post-Cold War era is witnessing a rise of mulilateralism in international politics, which is bringing more and more pressure on China's traditional diplomacy. These variables will continue to constrain China's foreign policy behavior while their influence will decline as a result of rapid change with China both materially and conceptually.     

China's Dilemma on Iran: between energy security and a responsible rising power

As international pressure on China's policy concerning its increasing investments in Iran grows, the Chinese leadership has to painfully balance its impulse toward energy and economic cooperation with Iran against other important interests, including enhancing its image as a responsible big country. After analyzing the evolution of China–Iran energy relations, this paper tries to answer the question of how China has responded to the intensification of US-led sanctions against Iran, what merits and shortcomings China's attempts to balance or reconcile its interests in Iran might create, and what options China can take to deal with a possible oil crisis.     

China in the North Korean Nuclear Crises: ‘interest’ and ‘identity’ in foreign behavior

China reacted very differently to the first and second North Korean nuclear crisis: engaging in passive and ‘behind-the-scenes’ diplomacy in the first and choosing more proactive and ‘stage-managing’ diplomacy in the second. This article has sought to explain this striking contrast in China's foreign behavior. Though most studies tend to rely on Chinese strategic and security interests in explaining China's proactive diplomacy as demonstrated in the six-party talks, those strategic and security interests do not explain directly the contrasting foreign behavior of China. China faced basically equal strategic and security concerns and equally dangerous potential military conflict between the US and North Korea through the first and the second nuclear crises. This article, then, argues that ‘same interests, but different behaviors’ should be explained not by China's external interest calculus but by internal changes within China itself. By the turn of the new millennium, China had undergone an evolutionary change of state identity from a cautious accommodator to an active constructor, or from a state of ‘taoguang yanghui’ to a state of ‘fuzeren daguo’. The contrasting foreign behaviors in the first and second nuclear crises are profoundly reflective of this identity shift of China.     

Multilateral versus Bilateral and Regional Trade Liberalization: explaining China's pursuit of free trade agreements (FTAs)

In recent years, at the same time it has pursued multilateral trade negotiations via membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), China has embraced a regional approach to trade liberalization by negotiating a number of bilateral or regional free trade agreements (FTAs) with its trading partners. This paper examines China's increasingly active FTA diplomacy and seeks to explain China's motives for pursuing expanded FTAs. Specifically, this paper argues that while China's FTA activism reflects considerations about enhancing China's influence in the Asia–Pacific region, capturing the economic gains of FTA participation, and minimizing the trade and investment diversion resulting from the competitive dynamics of regional trade liberalization, the move toward expanded FTAs is also consistent with the desire to create alternative bargaining forums over trade issues that could help to stabilize expectations as well as the need to use FTAs to control the pace of trade liberalization so as to accommodate protectionist pressure emanating from domestic interest groups. In particular, this paper highlights the impact of domestic politics on China's FTA negotiations through a detailed discussion of how pressure from protectionist seeking interests influences the scope and depth of China's FTAs.     

China's Approach to BRICS

The economic rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) inevitably leads to a redistribution of power in the international system. Chinese leaders today accord a considerable priority to this group, and there are elements of realism, liberalism/institutionalism and constructivism in their approach. This article intends to study China's policy towards BRICS and examine the above elements so as to better understand how the Chinese leadership perceives China's role in the international system, and how it seeks to articulate its interests and enhance its influence.     

Political sociology and contemporary China: State‐society images in American China studies

Images of ‘state and society’ have informed several generations of North American scholarship on China's communist polity. They express a concern for how power, authority, and influence are shaped by the interaction of party‐state efforts to control and mobilize the population with the responses, interests, and strategies of its citizens. While these images first came into focus in the 1960s, they reflect classical paradigms of political sociology and continue to focus research agendas into the 1990s. This article maps these images, highlighting some of their concerns and arguments.     

How Do Americans Evaluate China's International Responsibility? An Empirical Assessment

China in recent years has been asked by other major powers to take a greater share in international responsibility in response to the rise in China's national capability. Negative perceptions about how China is dodging its international responsibility exist not only among policy makers around the world, but have spread to worldwide mass publics, especially across the American people. In this article, we apply the dataset from the ‘Americans’ Attitudes toward China Survey' (AACS) to investigate what the American public think of China's international responsibility and which factors explain the varying evaluations from different theoretical perspectives. The results indicate that Americans' negative evaluations of China's international responsibility are associated with poor ratings regarding China's fulfillment of its domestic obligations and apprehension regarding China's potential threat, but has little to do with China's international behavior. To reduce these negative evaluations, China needs to improve its human rights conditions, give people more political rights, and convince the American public of the benevolence of its ascending power. In addition, persistent efforts toward soft-power construction are also very important since Americans who are interested in Chinese culture or knowledge tend not to think that China is dodging its international responsibility.     

The Myth of the Beijing Consensus

The widely touted concept of the ‘Beijing Consensus’ (BC) suggests that China's economic success violates conventional theories of development and offers developing countries an alternative vision to the Washington Consensus (WC). Although ambitious, the original conception of the BC is not up to the task of being a worthwhile competitor to the alternative model from which its name was coined, not because of the WC's apparent worthiness, but rather because the BC is a misguided and inaccurate summary of China's actual reform experience. It not only gets the empirical facts wrong about China, it also disregards the similarities and differences China's experience shares with other countries, and it distorts China's place in international politics. In spite of these weaknesses, the BC is nevertheless a useful touchstone to consider the evolution of developmental paradigms, compare China's experience with that of others, identify the most distinctive features of China's experience, and evaluate its significance for the development prospects of other countries and for international relations.     

Re-interpreting China's Non-intervention Policy towards Myanmar: leverage,interest and intervention

China's non-intervention policy has long been criticized for prolonging the rule of many authoritarian regimes. Myanmar has become one of the classic examples. As China is expected to become a responsible great power, her behavioral patterns have aroused many concerns. This paper aims to re-interpret China's non-intervention policy. While explaining various constraints on China's capability to intervene in the Myanmar government, it shows how China is making efforts to seek a new intervention policy in dealing with countries like Myanmar. It argues that China's insistence on a non-intervention policy does not mean that China does not want to influence other countries such as Myanmar. To assess Chinese leverage and its non-intervention policy toward Myanmar as well as to supplement the current limited academic discussion on Sino–Myanmar relations, in this paper we first examine Chinese leverage in Myanmar through Burmese local politics, such as the power struggle between the central government and local rebel governments. Second, we disaggregate the Chinese interests in Myanmar into different levels (regional, geo-strategic and international) and discuss how these interests affect China's non-intervention policy. Third, we argue that China has indeed tried to intervene in Myanmar politics, but in a softer manner that contrasts with the traditional Western hard interventions, such as economic sanctions and military interference.     

China's Rise in Southeast Asia: implications for the United States

During the past few decades, China's economic success has permitted it to pursue a greater role on the international stage. China is recognized both as a regional and aspiring global power. Nowhere is this more evident than within Southeast Asia, where China's more active diplomacy is reflected in growing trade relations, proposals for stronger security ties, and the signing of numerous cooperative agreements on issues as varied as environmental protection, drug trafficking, and public health. As a whole, the region has received China's activism with both enthusiasm and trepidation. China has expended significant effort to assuage the fears of its neighbors by adopting a foreign policy approach that is active, non-threatening, and generally aligned with the economic and security interests of the region. This positive diplomacy has clearly yielded some success, most notably in the trade realm, where China is rapidly emerging as an engine of regional economic growth and integration that may well challenge Japanese and American dominance in the next three to five years. In the security realm, China's diplomacy, while rhetorically appealing to regional actors, has yet to make significant inroads in a regional security structure dominated by the United States and its bilateral security relationships. Most significantly, however, if China is to emerge as a real leader within Southeast Asia, it will also need to assume more of the social and political burden that leadership entails. As China continues to advance itself as a regional leader, its policies on issues such as health, drugs, the environment and human rights will face additional scrutiny not only for their impact on the region but also for the more profound question they raise concerning the potential of China's moral leadership. For the United States, China's greater presence and activism suggest at the very least that it cannot remain complacent about the status quo that has governed political, economic and security relations for the past few decades. Shared leadership within Southeast Asia will likely include China in the near future, with all the potential benefits and challenges that such leadership will entail.     

China's good neighbor policy and its implications for Taiwan

Chinese leaders in recent years have been following a coherent policy toward Asia that emphasizes moderation and accommodation while preserving core PRC interests. China's prevailing ‘good neighbor’ policy approach—backed by improvement in US–China relations—provides important opportunities and challenges for Taiwan. It clearly inclines the PRC leaders to avoid more aggressive or harder‐line tactics in the mix of carrots and sticks that makes up China's recent approach toward Taiwan. To follow a more disruptive course would undermine the influence and advantage Beijing has been seeking with its ongoing moderate approach toward the United States and other Asian powers. The main challenge for Taiwan is how to deal with the current balance of carrots and sticks in China's policy. Much depends on the ability of Taiwan's leaders and populace to turn the prevailing balance in PRC policy to Taiwan's advantage. This presumably will involve reviving their economy, promoting effective governance and prudent defense, while consolidating relations with the United States and managing tensions in cross‐Strait relations to the advantage of Taiwan's future security and development. Unfortunately, there is no political consensus on Taiwan to mobilize domestic resources and opinion in a concerted effort to protect Taiwan's future as an entity independent of PRC control. Those outsiders who have followed with positive interest Taiwan's remarkable development over the past decades hope that Taiwan makes good use of the opportunities posed by China's good neighbor policy to adopt prudent and concrete measures beneficial to Taiwan's long range prospects.     

The Tenacious Tributary System

Recently, some writers on Chinese foreign relations have argued that the tributary system is a useful concept for describing imperial China's relations with its neighbors, and that it can even serve as a model for the future of international relations in East Asia. An examination of China's historical practice of foreign relations shows that there was no systematic tributary system, but instead multiple relationships of trade, military force, diplomacy and ritual. Furthermore, China's neighbors did not accept the imperial center's definition of hierarchy and subordination, but interpreted ritual relationships in their own way. Even in the 1930s, when scholars invoked Chinese history to advocate peaceful relations, they recognized the importance of military force, colonial settlement and domination in East Asian state relationships. The current myth of the tributary system ignores historical reality and misleads us about China's true position in East Asia and the world.     

China's Sovereign Wealth Funds: origins,development, and future roles

China has established two of the world's newer large sovereign wealth funds (SWFs): the official China Investment Corporation (CIC), and the non-official and less transparent State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) Investment Company (SIC). Both provide alternative investment opportunities for China's exploding foreign exchange reserves, at US$2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, the largest in world history. This paper will address how China has accumulated its huge and growing foreign exchange reserves, and what roles these reserves, until 2007 managed only by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), have played in the establishment and development of China's two new SWFs. We will look specifically at why China's foreign exchange reserves have developed, and how the new SWFs are a part of broader efforts to provide investment alternatives for China's ballooning foreign exchange surpluses, particularly in light of the inflow of ‘hot’ foreign speculative funds. We will then point out some of the difficulties for China's financial officials of SWFs as they try to pursue multiple and sometimes competing goals, set by boards of directors representing different bureaucratic and economic interests, all within the context of a general lack of transparency and a rapidly growing economy. Finally, we will present our conclusions about the future roles of the two SWFs as well as of the policies being developed to decentralize foreign exchange reserve holdings while at the same time not slowing the growth of China's foreign trade surpluses, nor its foreign direct investments, nor its overall economic growth. We will also examine the effects of US-promoted Chinese currency appreciation on the future of China's foreign exchange reserves and its sovereign wealth funds.     

Society Must Be Defended: reform,openness, and social policy in China

This paper examines China's transformation from different perspectives, including economic, social and political, and discusses how these transformations are linked to the country's open-door policy. The paper argues that the most powerful driving force behind China's rapid transformation is its openness. At the domestic level, openness creates an institutional environment in which different existing factors reorganize themselves, thus providing new dynamics for change. At the international level, openness links China and the world together, and the interplay between China and the world produces an external dynamism for China's internal changes. Openness, however, has led to social injustice. Society often becomes the weakest link in the process of globalization and opening up; therefore, it must be defended by all means and in all major policy areas.     

The Politics of Compliance with Adverse WTO Dispute Settlement Rulings in China

Starting from 2004, China's trading partners, in particular the United States, have increasingly utilized the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement system (DSS) to challenge China's trade-related measures. As a major player in world trade, how China responds to adverse rulings is not only important to its trading partners, but also for the future of the international trade regime. China has thus far held a relatively good compliance record when facing adverse panel and/or Appellate Body rulings, except for the recent delay in full compliance in China—Publications and Audiovisual Products. Through examining the factors affecting China's decision making when targeted in a WTO dispute, this article finds that, in general, China is highly motivated to comply with the WTO DSS due to the reputational costs of noncompliance. Nevertheless, the recent delay in compliance in China—Publications and Audiovisual Products also demonstrates that successful implementation could be impeded by certain politically influential interest groups, especially when the measure at dispute is politically sensitive.     

China's Diplomatic Manoeuvring on the Question of Darfur

This article assesses China's response to the violence in Darfur. Whereas the People's Republic had already been taking a constructive stance towards international interventions in various intra-state conflicts, the mayhem in Darfur compelled China to take the lead in engaging Khartoum. Beijing's engagement evolved from a rather passive posture, to taking a clear position, and finally, to active persuasion and mediation. During these negotiations, Beijing departed from the interests of the local political elite and tried to meet its concerns, not by imposing measures, but by clarifying the different options and creating trust to find a feasible consensus. From the Chinese perspective this approach was highly successful as it increased its moral influence, reassured its partners in Africa and the West, safeguarded its oil empire in Sudan and upheld its prerequisite of sovereignty and state consent.