Great Expectations: Interpreting China's Arrival

Interpreting China’s Arrival I t has become nearly conventionalwisdom that China is the post-Cold War world’s emerging great power that poses the most difficult questions for the future of international security. Whether scholars, pundits, and policymakers are interested in environmental impact, human rights, economic affairs, or traditional militarysecurityissues , most who think about the dynamics of the international system in the twenty-firstcentury believe it essentialto consider the rise of China and its implications.’ This article focuses mainly on the military-security dimensions of this topic, exploring the basis for claims about China’s growing power and the expectations about its significancethat are rooted in relevant strands of international relations theory. Perhaps the interest in China’s international role should not be altogether surprising, inasmuch as it has long been a country with three of the least malleable attributes required for membership in the great power club-vast territory, rich resources, and a large population. And, in the course of the past century, other key requirements for international influence have been successively added. By the mid-twentieth century, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) resolved a century-long pattern of internal political disunity and ended a series of varied foreign encroachments on China’s sovereignty . During the Cold War, the new regime’s leaders gradually enhanced Avery Goldsteinis AssociateProfessor of Political Science and Director of the ChristopherH. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics: Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949-1978 (Stanford,Calif..: Stanford University Press, 1991), and is completing a study entitled Deterrence and Security in a Changing World: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution. I would liketo thank Jean-MarcF. Blanchard, Thomas J. Christensen, and the anonymous reviewers for International Security who provided helpful comments on various drafts of this article. 1. The new wave of scholarly interest in East Asian security and China emerged in about 1993. Just two years earlier, such matters received relatively short shrii in one of the first serious comprehensive overviews of the post-Cold War world landscape. See RobertJ. Art, “A Defensible Defense: America’sGrand Strategy after the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 15,No. 3 (Spring 1991), pp. 553.Capturing the spirit of the recent “China-mania,” the February 18,1996, New York Times Magazine camed as its cover story, “The 21st Century Starts Here: China Booms. The World Holds Its Breath,” by Ian Buruma, Seth Faison, and Fareed Zakaria. The editors of International Security, sensitive to market demand, have published an edited volume of selected articles entitled East Asian Security, whose largest section is a collection of major articles under the heading, ”The Implications of the Rise of China.” Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller eds., East Asian Security (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1996). International Security, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Wmter 1997/98),pp. 36-73 0 1997by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 36 Interpreting China’sArrival 1 37 their international prestige and eventually overcame attempts at diplomatic isolation to assume their role as the sole legitimate representatives of the Chinese state i n key international bodies, most notably the United Nations Council. In addition, during the Cold War the CCP invested heavily in the rapid development of the modern era’s military badges of great power s b w n u c l e a r warheads and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. Into the last decade of the Cold War, however, China remained a ”candidate” great power because the communist regime had failed in its effortsto promote domestic development that could provide the basis for comprehensive economic and military clout at world-class levels. A vast army supplied with obsolete conventional, and crude nuclear, weaponry left China as one of a group of second-rankingpowers, and among them perhaps the least capable.’ But beginning in 1979,while the Soviet Union was retrenching internationally and then imploding, new leaders in Beijing were initiatinga seriesof sweeping reformsthat would result in high-speed growth-both quantitative expansion and qualitative improvement^.^ By the...