In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 170 ] asia policy Anticipating the Unexpected Peter Van Ness An academic colleague once recommended that every International Relations 101 course, no matter where in the world it was taught, should begin with the forceful injunction to “expect the unexpected.” The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic tsunami of the East Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, and even the unexpected response of President George W. Bush to September 11—each of these instances is evidence of the wisdom of this injunction. Realists have demonstrated the importance of developing worst-case scenarios for strategic analysis, but the unexpected can challenge whatever paradigm we employ in our attempt to understand the world in which we live. Reading David Kang’s China Rising prompted me to think again about this injunction. Kang has produced the most comprehensive assessment to date of China’s relations with its East Asian neighbors over the past fifteen years, analyzed in thoughtfully researched empirical detail. His book gives a clear depiction of the success to date of PRC foreign policy and a wake-up call for the United States about how the region has changed while President Bush has been preoccupied with his various interventions in the Middle East. The principal shortcoming of this impressive study, however, is the book’s strong implication that the future is likely to be a linear projection of the period he has examined. The depth and quality of Kang’s investigation lulls the reader to infer that the situation that he describes is the way things are and are likely to continue to be as far as anyone can tell. The book gives no warning about the unexpected. China Rising challenges the more typical structural analyses of the rise of China, especially realist arguments regarding the dangers of conflict between emerging powers and the established dominant power within a particular geopolitical region. Kang’s critique is built upon a constructivist interpretation of compatible national identities among the countries in the region. One way to look at the book is as a story of how successful the PRC has been in refuting charges that there is a “China threat.” Kang finds that China’s neighbors are accommodating to China’s rise in power and responding to Beijing’s peter van nessis a visiting fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University and coordinator of the Project on Historical Reconciliation and Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia. He is co-editor, with Mel Gurtov, of the book, Confronting the Bush Doctrine (2006). He can be reached at . [ 171 ] book review roundtable • china rising innovations by participating in a range of mutually beneficial economic and political arrangements. What is wrong with this picture? Nothing—at least with regard to the fifteen years that Kang has studied. Although Kang has done an excellent and important job, one weakness of relying too much on a constructivist approach is that norms and identities are often more vulnerable to sudden change than analysts might assume. This propensity is especially true with respect to crisis situations such as the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia prompted by the 1997 financial crisis. The combination of a crisis and a change in national leadership increases the likelihood of fundamental change. Who would have expected, for example, that the newly elected President Bush would react to the terrorist attacks of September 11 by invading a sovereign state unconnected with the attacks, kidnapping suspects off the streets of other countries, holding prisoners without due process, and torturing inmates as matters of official policy: all of which are violations of core American values that are consecrated in the U.S. Constitution and fundamental to American national identity. The Chinese Communist Party leadership has done an amazing job of guiding China through thirty years of unprecedented growth and economic modernization. These leaders realize that their success relies on a stable international environment conducive to increasing foreign trade, investment, and technology transfer. The Chinese leadership has studied meticulously the past history of the rise of emerging powers, particularly the history of Germany and Japan, and worked constantly to avoid falling...

pdf

Share