Rising Star
Reviewed by Arthur Waldron
Posted November 19, 2007
Rising Star: China's New Security Diplomacy
by Bates Gill
Brookings Institution Press, 267 pages, $28.95
The argument of this well-researched and useful volume is that since the middle of the last decade, Beijing's foreign and security policy have shifted away from previous unilateralism toward cooperation, consultation and the playing of a responsible and constructive role with respect to areas ranging from regional security to nuclear proliferation.
Bates Gill's proposition is carefully hedged. He provides much detail with respect to Chinese proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the past and other dealings that clearly went against the interests of the international community.
He is furthermore correct that in certain respects China's behavior is changing. Beijing is more dependent upon the world than it has been for 60 years, not least in terms of energy, trade and security. So much has it come to be seen as part of the club of respectable nations that when the Burmese regime began to murder protesting monks, Western governments turned to China for help.
Nevertheless, the book is best understood not as a description of a genuine change, but rather as a retelling for the 21st century of a story beloved of China diplomats and first heard in the teens of the last century.
The story line is as follows: In the past China has often been chaotic domestically and has behaved in dangerous and destabilizing ways abroad. But that has now changed. A new and more enlightened government has come to power. That new government, moreover, has recognized that Sinocentric foreign policies are obsolete. We can now work with the new China, destined to be the key to Asian and perhaps world prosperity. Indeed we must.
Such was the idea that animated the Washington Conference of 1921-22, in which Chinese diplomats worked with their European, American and Japanese colleagues to prepare the institutional basis for what promised to be a “concert of Asia” guaranteeing cooperation, consultation and peace through mutual security.
Franklin Roosevelt believed much the same thing when he informally included Chiang Kai-shek's China among the “four policemen” of the postwar world, along with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States. A belief that Mao's China was somehow different also underlay the Nixon diplomacy of the early 1970s.
Never in the past, however, has the story turned out to be true. That does not mean Bates Gill is wrong. It does mean, however, that one must consider other, perhaps less benign ways, to interpret the information he presents.
Thus the signing of the Nine-Power Treaty was followed in less than a decade by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Policeman Chiang Kai-shek, who met Roosevelt at Cairo in 1943, had fled China to Taiwan by 1949. As for the Nixon diplomacy, I always find one exchange particularly poignant. At the first meeting, on Feb. 21, 1972, the American president clearly had in mind an agenda encompassing, effectively, no less than the future of the world. Laying this out, he told his Chinese interlocutors:
“I hope to talk with the prime minister and later with the chairman about issues like Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea. I also want to talk about—and this is very sensitive—the future of Japan, the future of the subcontinent, and what India's role will be; and on the broader world scene, the future of U.S.-Soviet relations. Because only if we see the whole picture of the world and the great forces that move the world will we be able to make the right decisions about the immediate and urgent problems that always completely dominate our vision.”
To which Chairman Mao replied, crushingly: “All those troublesome problems I don't want to get into very much.”
As the meetings progressed the American delegation grew frustrated. They had assigned the Chinese a role in a diplomatic drama, effectively writing a script for them. The problem was that the Chinese would not stick to the script.
What was the solution to the problem? Then, as now, the response was to ramp up hermeneutic leniency and find what is desired and hoped for in Chinese statements and actions, no matter what. Two examples suggest that Mr. Gill risks falling into the same trap as his predecessors.
Antiterrorism is the first. No one in Beijing, I think, has thought through the question of how the godless, pork-eating, liquor-swilling Chinese are to form enduring bonds with the devout, pork-shunning, teetotal Muslims of Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran and other areas where the middle kingdom seeks energy supplies. But the dissatisfaction of the Muslims inside the borders of the P.R.C. has been recognized. Beijing has enlisted American aid against Uighur “terrorists” with some success. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, has been invited to participate in joint operations, with special agents accompanying their Chinese counterparts as, with suspicious ease, they round up Turks who possess weapons. To me these are clearly Chinese deception operations. But in Washington they are hailed as genuine cooperation.
Or consider Korea. Once again, I do not believe that the implications of having a former tributary state go nuclear have been fully thought through in China. For that reason I think China is not overly concerned about Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal. Beijing has realized, however, that the U.S. desperately wants to believe that China is playing the key role in denuclearizing North Korea. If kept alive, this belief creates an American dependence on Beijing that can be a great source of leverage. China has used this leverage very effectively.
In neither case, and the numbers could be multiplied—the Beijing-Tehran relationship, for example—is China really playing the role of responsible stakeholder. Rather Beijing is taking advantage of new circumstances to advance what it sees as China's own interests—most of which are not the interests of the country's neighbors or the rest of the world.
That fact is, as Mao might have put it, a “troublesome problem.” Who wants to hear about it or face it squarely? Far more palatable to patch together a more optimistic story, as Mr. Gill has done. Let us hope he is correct.
Mr. Waldron is the Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
