China: Contemporary Political, Economic, and International Affairs

3. Does China Have a Grand Strategy?

3. Does China Have a Grand Strategy? September 2000 michael d. swaine C oncern has arisen in the West and among many Asian nations over the implications of China’s steadily growing economic and military prowess. Much of this concern focuses on measuring and interpreting upward changes in the “objective” determinates of national power, such as the capabilities of China’s military and the size and rate of growth of China’s GDP. Although extremely important, these estimates convey little meaning unless they are placed in a larger context that describes how China’s leaders employ the attributes of national power and to what ends. In short, any accurate assessment of the ultimate significance of China’s growing power for the international community requires an understanding of China’s grand strategy. Some analysts of China’s approach to security argue that the Chinese state has never deliberately pursued a grand strategy. Others argue that the premodern Chinese state was primarily concerned with ensuring its cultural and ideological preeminence through proper ritual and right conduct , and that the modern Chinese nation-state similarly emphasizes status and prestige over state power. Yet although China’s grand strategy has never been explicitly articulated in a comprehensive manner by its rulers, China, like any other state, has pursued a grand strategy in the past and is pursuing a grand strategy today. China’s Grand Strategy Defined China’s grand strategy is keyed to achieving three interrelated objectives: first and foremost, the preservation of domestic order and well-being in 39 the face of social strife; second, defense against persistent external threats to national sovereignty and territory; and third, the attainment and maintenance of geopolitical influence as a major and perhaps primary state in the Asia-Pacific region and possibly beyond. For most of Chinese history, efforts to attain these objectives have produced a security strategy oriented toward maintaining internal stability and prosperity along with achieving Chinese preeminence, if not control, along a far-flung geographic periphery. To carry out this strategy, China has relied on a strong authoritarian government that has employed a monolithic, hierarchical value system, frequent and at times intense coercive force, a wide range of highly pragmatic diplomatic stratagems involving balance and maneuver, and the many advantages resulting from the preservation of a dominant cultural and economic system throughout most of Central and East Asia. During the premodern era, strong unified Chinese states sought to control their strategic periphery and assert Chinese preeminence by eliciting deference from nearby peoples, preferably through the establishment of unambiguous suzerainty relations that were backed, if possible, by superior military force. When faced with various internal and external obstacles to such methods (including domestic resistance to a prolonged, intensive use of force), strong Chinese states used a variety of noncoercive external security strategies, including appeasement, alliances, culturally based sinocentric patterns of interaction, and personal understandings among rulers, as well as a heavy reliance on static defenses. Weak or declining Chinese states depended primarily on noncoercive tactics to stave off foreign attacks or maintain stability along the periphery while avoiding the offensive use of force. When such strategies proved unsuccessful , weak regimes would sometimes resort to desperate military means, at times in response to the demands of dominant conservative domestic leadership factions. Such resistance invariably met with little success , and a regime severely weakened or completely collapsed would result in major reductions in Chinese control over the periphery and, in some instances , the loss of Chinese territory to foreigners. Strong unified Chinese regimes would eventually reemerge and seek to recoup these losses. The interaction among changing foreign and domestic capabilities and domestic elite attitudes and behavior thus created a pattern of expansion, consolidation , and contraction of Chinese control over the periphery that coincided with the rise, maintenance, and fall of Chinese regimes. 40 michael d. swaine China’s basic security objectives have remained unchanged during the modern era (roughly 1850 to the present). However, significant changes have occurred in China’s threat perceptions, its definition of the periphery , requisites for periphery control, state capacities, and internal as well as external requirements of domestic order and well-being. Together these present implications for the specific type of security strategies pursued by the Chinese state. In particular, the modern era has witnessed the emergence of a hybrid weak-strong state security strategy that combines elements of traditional...