Unifying China, Integrating the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty in the Reform Era (review)

In Unifying China, Integrating the World, Allen Carlson seeks both to describe and to explain variations in the Chinese government's approach to sovereignty issues from the late 1970s onward. He examines how the PRC government treats sovereignty in four distinct issue domains: territorial sovereignty, jurisdictional sovereignty, sovereign authority, and economic sovereignty.¹ He argues that the variations in official Chinese approaches toward sovereignty during the reform period have been the result of interactions among a number of factors, which range from the normative to the rational and material. Carlson's description of the dynamics behind the evolving Chinese position on each issue area is quite thorough, even if his explanation is sometimes insufficiently clear.

Through his research, Carlson has essentially found that the PRC continues to favor strong jurisdictional sovereignty and, to a lesser degree, territorial sovereignty. However, he also suggests that the Chinese government is increasingly flexible in the areas of sovereign authority and economic sovereignty. From these observations Carlson concludes that there is no longer a sharp division between Beijing and the rest of the world over issues of sovereignty. If anything, China is approaching agreement with global conventions on sovereignty.

According to Carlson, the shifting Chinese position on sovereignty emerges from evolving interactions among "relatively persistent and historically conditioned sovereignty-centric values, rational cost-benefit calculations, and external pressures (both material and normative)" (p. 3). He attributes shifts in these relationships to the changes brought on by opening and reform. He reaches this conclusion from his analysis on policies and "all sovereignty-related statements" in official publications such as the Beijing Review and Zhongguo waijiao gailan 中 国外交概览 as well as other semi-official journals.

Here, Carlson uses the number of boundary-reinforcing articles on each area of sovereignty in the Beijing Review over time alongside relevant policy trends to gauge Chinese positions across time. Carlson then supplements his research on Chinese official and semi-official publications with interviews with ninety-nine official, semi-official, and non-official Chinese foreign-policy experts (p. 2). He compares the motivation articulated through these publications and interviews against policy decisions with regard to the four above-mentioned domains to describe and explain patterns in Chinese behavior on sovereignty issues.

China's Uneven Take on Sovereignty

By taking sovereignty to mean boundary-reinforcing sets of policies, Carlson finds that during the reform era the PRC generally supported boundary reinforcement on issues of territorial sovereignty. However, Carlson also notices that China has been increasingly supportive of using boundary-transgressing policies to solve border disputes since the late-1980s. From his analysis of official publications and interview material, he argues that the PRC's qualified flexibility over territorial disputes-to the extent of giving up claims in some instances-comes from a desire for regional stability. According to Carlson, this goal comes from Beijing's belief that a stable regional security environment is conducive to rapid economic development as well as from its unpleasant past experience with conflicts over border issues.

In contrast, Carlson finds that Beijing consistently pursues boundary-reinforcing policies over issues of sovereign jurisdiction. Here Carlson considers Beijing's policies toward regions where its claims of right to rule are under dispute. These include Taiwan, Tibet, and, to a lesser extent, Hong Kong. He finds that the PRC has become increasingly adamant on boundary-reinforcing policies toward these regions since the late 1970s. On the international stage, therefore, Carlson sees much less tolerance for the autonomy of those representing, or claiming to represent, these regions than in the past.

Carlson accounts for this trend by looking at the dynamics of Beijing's interactions with local groups that challenge its claims of jurisdiction. As the Taiwan government, Tibetan government-in-exile, and opposition groups in Hong Kong became more vocal about local autonomy, Beijing began to take a harder stance in response to transgressions against its sovereign jurisdiction...