China’s Policies on Its Borderlands and the International Implications ed. by Yufan Hao and Bill K. P. Chou (review)

Of all the defining principles in Chinese foreign policy, none has been more central or more fixed in Beijing’s priorities than the One China policy. Conducting any form of exchange with China—diplomatic, educational, commercial, bilateral, multilateral—requires routine compliance with the idea that there is only one China and only one government of China. Put at its essence—China does not practice polyarchy. During the socialist era, this doctrine of grand unity was more or less tenable—it was possible to see China as a single political and social space, achieving increased integrity. Today, however, the idea that China represents a single and common political and social space looks like stark contradiction of the facts—there are now many political spaces in China, and their diversity and mobility continue to increase. Of course, the social, economic, technological, and cultural modernization that is driving political differentiation across China has also made the Chinese state stronger and richer. According to World Bank estimates, the Chinese central government expenditure stood at us$791 billion in 2010, ranked third in the world after the United States and Japan. This means that the Chinese government has more resources with which to bind Chinese political spaces together and more resources to sanction those within China or internationally who might be thinking of walking away from the One China principle. This volume, edited by Yufan Hao and Bill K. P. Chou, advances into this territory of one China or many Chinas. It takes as its focus China’s borderlands—the interior and maritime frontiers (Bianjiang, Haijiang) that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) inherited from the collapsed imperial structure—and examines the dynamics between political, economic, and social differentiation in the borderlands; the international interactions in and across the borderlands; and the way the central government policy negotiates around internal and external priorities. Of course, the kinds of cases involved may seem to have limited commonalities precisely because of the variety of historical forces that have pushed and pulled at China’s frontiers in the past. However, this is one of the main reasons for studying China’s borderlands: frontier diversity is a good indicator of the incomplete and variable nature of Chinese statehood in which building statehood and building frontiers have interacted in the past and continue to do so today.

The chapter topics in this volume, therefore, tend to replicate the diverse and mobile nature of the borderlands. These include international implications of the Tibet and Xinjiang questions (Colin Mackerras); China’s diplomacy in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO; Weiqing Song); China’s relations with Central Asia (Gudrun Wacker); Hulunbier, border city of Inner Mongolia (T. J. Cheng); origins of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku dispute (Edwin Pak-wah Leung); Northeast maritime disputes between China, Japan, and Korea (Quansheng Zhao); PRC military strategy for Taiwan (You Ji); language policy in post-handover Hong Kong (Jean-Francois Dupré); Macao’s autonomy and Beijing’s borderlands policies (Bill K. P. Chou); and China’s Myanmar Policy (Zhao Hong). Rather like the borderlands themselves, these chapter topics seem to be heading off into different directions; and some strong determination might be required to hold them together. Unfortunately, the volume does not really make any attempt at an overarching perspective, such as might be achieved by setting a shared conceptual framework for the contributors or a chapter that integrates important themes or conclusions. As a result, readers are rather left to themselves to work out what points of complementarity there might be between the different cases. I will put the chapters into three categories for review purposes: Inner Asian frontiers; maritime frontiers, excluding Greater China; and Greater China.

The diversity of state construction/frontier construction in China is most apparent in Inner Asia—the 16,800-kilometer arc that runs from the Chinese-Democratic...