Introduction
Therefore, analyze the enemy’s battle plan to understand its merits and its weaknesses; provoke him to find out the pattern of his movements; make him show himself (hsing) to discover the viability of his battle position; skirmish with him to find out where he is strong and where he is vulnerable.
Sun Tzu, The Art of Warfare
On April 1, 2001, a collision between a United States Navy EP-3 Aries II Reconnaissance plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet prompted a renewal of an old debate inside the Washington, DC Beltway and around the world concerning the intentions and direction of the rising Chinese power. That single event further polarized an already divided political community into their respective conservative and liberal beliefs about the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper strives to understand the intentions of the leadership inside of China through a theoretical prism. The epigraph from the work of Sun Tzu illustrates the motivations for exploring future relations between the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, the United States, and the Middle East. Only by analyzing Chinese military modernizations in the last decade, economic trends, human rights abuses, the behavior of the ruling Communist Party, as well as other indicators can international relations scholars predict whether China is emerging as a partner or a peer competitor to the United States.
In order to assess the ambitions of the Chinese government, the author has chosen to explain the developments in Asia by way of the realist theory of international relations. In doing so, the intent is not to prove the validity of realism in contemporary international relations, but rather takes the approach of Frank W. Wayman and Paul F. Diehl in their book, Reconstructing Realpolitik, and evaluates whether realism in its skeletal definition is applicable to the changing dynamics of the People’s Republic of China. The author acknowledges the shortcomings of realism as a way of all-inclusively explaining and predicting state interactions, but will address the deficiencies of the realist school of thought as they arise with respect to the People’s Republic of China.
Bifurcating the concept of realism allows for the evolution of an offensive and a defensive branch of realism and in doing so increases the explanatory precision of realism. These two ideas will be explained further in the next section, yet an elementary definition is needed to begin. Offensive realism implies that a state will build up its security and economic apparatuses as the basic tenets of realism prescribe. The offensive realist state will use this power maximization in order to project its influence to any theater that can be used to increase further the absolute power of the state. Such an idea connotes a quasi-imperialist state that will use its power to influence the social, political, economic, and security sectors of other states. This aggressiveness operates under the seemingly zero-sum game that if State A does not build up its forces to bring lesser states under its control, then State B will do so and use its heightened sphere of influence to force State A to acquiesce to its demands.
On the other hand, while the concept of defensive realism assumes that a state will also build up its security and economic complexes, the intention is to gain as much power as is necessary to defend the state and its interests and thus power is not merely for its own sake. This idea may perplex one into suggesting that a “reasonable defense” is a very relative term especially under the auspices of an anarchical system. Nevertheless, defensive realism assumes that a state will build up power and project it to gain as the Chinese say, “jing gho,” or safe Chinese borders. The exact definition of which borders need to be safe will be addressed in a later portion of the paper.
The subsequent portions of this work will pursue three goals: (1) to arrive at a clear and concise understanding of offensive and defensive realism; (2) to provide a thorough analysis of modern Chinese foreign policy through the lens of realism; and (3) to hypothesize about future power projections by China. In analyzing modern Chinese foreign policy, historical and social components as well as the evolution of the Chinese political system will be briefly addressed. The majority of analysis, though, rests in the economic and security aspects of foreign policy; keying the growing dependence of the Chinese economy on imported oil and the potential for projecting power in order to secure resources vis-à-vis a growing and modernizing military. Additionally, this paper will look at the security aspect of modern Chinese foreign policy and attempt to discern whether China’s military policy represents a genuine modernization of an aging system or the preparation for offensive power projection. The underlying purpose and aim of this research is to understand how the Chinese policymakers are thinking and what their intentions are. Incorporating case studies of neighboring countries, Taiwan, the Middle East, and the United States into a framework of defensive realism, one will have a model that explains past and present Chinese behavior as well as a model capable of predicting the next steps China will take.
The core argument of this paper remains that the foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China is consistent with the theory of defensive realism. Specifically, China is trying to secure its Asian sphere of influence and acquire what it sees fit as necessary to defend a developing nation. Furthermore, the idea of jing gho, and thus a defensive zone, consists of Taiwan, all portions of mainland China, and arguably many of the oil-rich islands of the South China Sea including, but not limited to, the Spratley Islands. Attacks and so-called saber-rattling against the United States are not intentionally malevolent policies, but done rather to pressure the United States not to involve itself with China’s actions and aspirations along the periphery of the South China Sea. Offensive power projections (such as towards the Middle East and/or the United States) are ineffective and hold no true threat, for the current structure of China’s security and economic apparatuses (let alone its social and political culture) retains only intermittent and limited capability to exert their forces. Although “nuisance challenges” such as the downing of the US Navy plane or Chinese assistance to Iraq’s Air Force do not pose a threat to the US survival, China’s policies in the Asian theater as well as in the Middle East are threats to the national security of the United States and cannot be ignored. Simply put, though, a state operating within a defensive realist framework, such as the People’s Republic of China, would conclude, based on a rational cost-benefit analysis, that its current social, economic, political, and military resources are not suited to challenge the hegemon in the near term.